Gaza and Decolonization: Human Rights are Not Enough

CCAS, Arabic and Islamic Studies, and Culture and Politics (CULP) at Georgetown University are pleased to present an event with renowned scholar Neve Gordon.
Responding to claims that human rights have for too long dominated the imaginative space of emancipation, including in our personal experience in Israel/Palestine, we offer an alternative political framework, one based on a politics of care. We maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically highlighted the woeful inadequacy of the so-called “subject of human rights” which has been construed in binary terms as either independent or dependent. The pandemic, even in the context of settler colonialism, has thrown into sharp relief that interdependency is constitutive of the human condition and indeed of all life on the planet, human and non-human alike. Underscoring the contribution of feminist ethics of care scholars in center staging interdependency, we then turn to Audre Lorde’s and Judith Butler’s insights in order to theorize the notion of interdependency, one that is unmoored from the liberal subject. Finally, building on this understanding of interdependency, whilst drawing on the Care Manifesto, we gesture towards an alternative emancipatory discourse and form of activism, one that can better address our current “care crisis.” We argue that precisely at a time when dystopian visions of the future are flourishing, it is vital to offer a collaborative utopian counter-narrative for the 21st century.

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