Book launch: 'Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights' by Lara Montesinos Coleman
Join the Ethics and World Politics Working Group for a discussion of Lara Montesinos Coleman’s new book: Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights.
In Struggles for the Human, Lara Montesinos Coleman blends ethnography, political philosophy, and critical theory to reorient debates on human rights through attention to understandings of legality, ethics, and humanity in anticapitalist and decolonial struggle. Drawing on her extensive involvement with grassroots social movements in Colombia, and through examining the practice of redefining human rights away from abstract universals and contextualizing them within concrete struggles for justice, Coleman reveals the transformative potential of human rights and invites readers to question and reshape dominant legal and ethical narratives. Professor Sumi Madhok (LSE) will act as discussant.
Praise for Struggles for the Human:
“Lara Montesinos Coleman’s arresting and beautiful ethnography of Colombian resistance movements doubles as an informed and sophisticated critical intervention into the controversy about the meanings of human rights in an age of neoliberalism. Bypassing the politics of struggle, the book proves, is a mistake for anyone rushing to bury—or praise—human rights today.” — Samuel Moyn, Yale University
“In Struggles for the Human, Lara Montesinos Coleman brings together a blistering critique of mainstream human rights practices and a nuanced account of neoliberalism with a defense of the continued use of human rights by radical social movements. Coleman shows how human rights retain a disruptive potential and can contribute to the dismantling of capitalist structures of impunity. Breaking new ground in our thinking about rights, capitalist power, and emancipation, this is an indispensable book for all those interested in the politics of human rights, radical social movements, and political philosophy.” — Jessica Whyte, author of The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism.
Registration will close two hours before the event begins.