Human Rights during, against and after Neoliberalism

This webinar hosted by Essex Human Rights Centre will look at both neoliberalism and human rights.

Both neoliberalism and the idea of human rights flourished and expanded in world politics around the same time. But, as they say, correlation and causation are two separate things. Some have lamented that, for too long, the human rights community has been largely agnostic about the effects of neoliberalism, including rising income and wealth inequalities, on the enjoyment of human rights, in particular economic and social rights. Others have expressed the view that, whatever the effects of neoliberalism, the principles, standards and tools of human rights are ill-equipped to deal with them. Some foresee that, after years of austerity-driven regressive policies, and this terrible virus, the time of retrenchment of the State is over, and that therefore we need to identify a new role for human rights for a post-neoliberal world.

Speaker Biographies

Professor Olivier De Schutter

Professor Olivier De Schutter teaches at UCLouvain and SciencesPo. He is the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Prior to that assignment, he was a member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2015-2020) and the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food (2008-2014).

Allana Kembabazi 

Allana Kembabazi is a program manager with the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights, a non-profit organisation based in Uganda that works to advance social-economic rights through research, litigation and advocacy. At ISER, Allana works on issues pertaining to the right to health and economic inclusion and fiscal policy. Allana has researched public-private partnerships and the right to health, a preliminary human rights impact assessment framework for private actors and the right to health and worked on issues of sustainable health financing and macro-economic policy. Allana is a lawyer and human rights advocate.

Dr Jessica Whyte

Dr Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She has published widely on human rights, humanitarianism, sovereignty and war. She is author of Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben, (SUNY 2013) and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019) and an editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. Find out more about her research.

Chaired by Koldo Casla, Lecturer, Human Rights Centre, University of Essex.

Register for this online webinar on Zoom.