Launch of Costas Douzinas' STATES OF EXCEPTION

Join me for the launch of Costas Douzinas' STATES OF EXCEPTION: Human Rights, Biopolitics, Utopia

on 8 May 2024, 18.30-20.00 at LSE Lecture Theatre.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/events/2024/the-states-of-exception/the-states-of-exception-biopolitics-human-rights-utopia

It assesses and critiques the ways in which governments responded to three recent emergencies: the 2008 economic crisis, the large flows of refugees and migrants since the 2010s and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Western governments adopted extreme measures which escalated the tendency towards authoritarianism which emerged in the 1980s. This book launch discusses the theoretical and practical consequences of the state of exception. Human rights are paradoxically both tools for the biopolitical exercise of state power and strategies of resistance. The dignity immanent in natural law combined with the ‘desire called utopia’ find in daily life traces of the past and links them with the promise of the future. Human rights are the unfulfilled promise of dignity desperately seeking the u-topos of happiness.