Do academics have an ethical responsibility for complicity in injustices done to Palestinians? This question will be central in the lecture by Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti. Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow, Revital Madar will be the discussant.
Speaker bios:
Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender, co-founder of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award. He holds a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, NY, and is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy (ethics) at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of BDS: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights (Haymarket: 2011). His commentaries and views have appeared in The New York Times, the Guardian, among others.
Revital Madar is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the EUI Robert Schuman Centre for Advance Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar studying legitimate violence and state criminality in liberal democracies. In her work, she combines theories and methods from anthropology, critical criminology, law, gender, and political theory. Her work explores the Gordian knot of state, law, and violence to decipher its historical, cultural, societal, and political underpinnings. In recent years, she has approached these questions through the prism of trials of state security agents in Israel-Palestine. Currently, she is conducting a comparative project between Israel and France around hierarchies of state criminality. She published in Identities and Conflict and Society.
This event on academic complicity is part of the EUI’s commitment to fostering academic freedom and inclusive debate on campus, and a direct follow-up on the Task Force on Palestine’s recommendation to organise a series of events on the social responsibility of universities. Join this lecture on campus or online to explore how academia engages with difficult and sometimes divisive issues.