SEASON 8: Horror, Hope & Human

Welcome to Season 3 of Declarations. 

This episode introduces our brand new team of regular panelists, as well as this year’s three themes: Memory, Community, and Futures.

Is Human Rights just a fable?

To uncover this question, we venture down ‘history’ lane with Professor Samuel Moyn. What’s so special about the 1970s, and how does how we think about the emergence of human rights impact how we think of what human rights are, and what they are supposed to do? Join us and find out on this episode of Declarations.

In this episode, we talk about occupation, refugee rights, and the status of Palestine.

Are there systematic ways to remedy human rights abuses against an occupied people? How has human rights language been used to facilitate occupation? What can be done? We were joined by Dr Ruba Salih (SOAS), expert on Transnational Migration and Gender, and Odette Murray, who is a lecturer in Law.

In this episode, we discuss the weaponisation of human rights, i.e. are human rights always “good”; or are they at times used for more sinister ends?

How has the use of human rights changed from the days in which they paved the way for movements around the globe, from the civil rights movement to the struggle to end apartheid, till today? Helping us delve into these murky waters, we were joined by Journalist, retired Civil Rights Lawyer, and Author of ‘The Passion of Chelsea Manning’, Chase Madar.

This week we spoke with Mbalenhle Matandela who was an active voice in the Right to Protest and Rhodes Must Fall campaigns in South Africa and is now a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.

We discussed the various modes of protest and resistance, artificial impositions of notions of order, the politics of space and why ‘armchair activists’ have a crucial role to play.

“If you are doing political art, you can say goodbye to safety. Art is not about safety.”

Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina discusses how she’s used art to protest against authoritarianism in Russia, for which she spent nearly two years in prison. In this episode, she speaks out against the human rights abuses against LGBT citizens in Chechnya.

After Scott’s interview with Maria, former Moscow Times reporter Joanna Kozlowska and regular panelist Max Curtis explore the history of Russian feminist protests, from 1917 to today.

What does cultural heritage mean, who can claim it, and what does it have to do with rights?

With a significant number of artifacts on display in British museums having been removed from their original owners during periods of colonisation, this episode tackles the intersection between cultural artefacts, and larger issues of justice such as racial inequality, systemic injustice, and property rights.

Gweagal activist, Rodney Kelly, joined us from Australia, to speak about his fight for the return of Gweagal spears and shields held by the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, and the British Museum.

Does the state have an obligation to provide certain goods and services? Can we afford the welfare state? And does the free market even exist?

We sit down with world-renowned economist Dr Ha-Joon Chang, author of “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”, to explore economic rights, the welfare state, and neoliberalism in the age of Trump and Brexit.