2013-11-28

Jean-Michel Oppert Centre de Recherche en Nutrition Humaine (CRNH), Paris, gives a talk for the UBVO seminar series

Part of the COMPAS Seminar Series Michaelmas 2013: Rebordering: reflections in relation to (post)socialism This paper moves from the usual focus on mobile people crossing borders (migrants, traders, tourists, etc.) to examine more closely the activities of the various state agencies found at the international border. It is argued, focussing on the Russian side, that these agencies need to be disaggregated and that the relations both between and within them are incoherent. The actions of state agencies are not merely reactive but dynamic and unpredictable. Their incoherence and and predictability give rise to wide ranging shifts in the patterns of activity of the mobile people crossing the border.

Against the background of the broader history of the idea of human rights, this lecture investigates when and why the contemporary field of "global justice" in philosophy and political theory was invented. Returning to the engagement of American liberals with the decolonisation process in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and even as more powerful tendencies were about to bring the welfarist ideal of the postwar era low, this lecture presents contemporary "cosmopolitanism" as a response to a forgotten revolt of the global south against the prevailing economic order of our age.