Crucial Talk

Online

The Borders of Democracy – Welcome to Fortress Europe!

Date and time: February 21, 3:15 pm CET (120 min)
Register: Register for the meeting on Zoom
Speaker / organizer: Prof. and human rights lawyer Itamar Mann, prof. Katja Franko and prof. Peo Hansen. Moderator: Aude Sathoud.
Type: Crucial Talk
Language: English
About: When it comes to “keeping our humanity”, the questions of ethics, human rights and democracy, which our European conceptions of humanity and humanism heavily rely on, cannot be dismissed. At a time where European borders are becoming fences, opening spaces where the rule of law vanishes, our common democratic ideal more and more reveals to be an illusion.
In this crucial talk we will tackle the normalization of violence and human rights violations towards migrants at the European borders and the material exclusion of most undocumented people, asylum-seekers and refugees from the political sphere, both realities which could be considered as belonging to a unique continuum of “bordering” or relativeness of democracy, thus challenging the very foundations of this political project we, Europeans, claim to be pursuing.

Itamar Mann is a professor of law at the University of Haifa and a human rights lawyer. He has been working to address problems of border violence and border injustices for more than a decade. He is the author of Humanity at Sea (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Since the summer of 2021, he has served as the President of Border Forensics. Itamar is also a TED Fellow.
Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo. She has researched and published extensively on migration and border control, globalization and international police co-operation. Her most recent book is The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power (2020, Routledge).

Peo Hansen is professor of political science at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. He is a former senior fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University, and visiting professor at the Max Planck Sciences Po Center in Paris. Peo Hansen is the author of several books on European integration, including, most recently, A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy (2021).

Aude Sathoud In a constant movement between theory and praxis, Aude Sathoud has been studying political humanities and working in NGO’s supporting asylum-seekers and migrants in Athens and Paris for the past few years. Dedicated to the imagining and building of those other worlds we crave for, that is in creative resistance to the current neo-liberal capitalist hegemony, which they consider to be nothing but deadly to humans as both ideas and bodies, Aude Sathoud is the founder of Tremble, an experimental space-time to attempt to live.