Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium, 7 p.m.

The Canary in the Coal Mine: The 1951 Refugee Convention and the Collapse of the Post WW II International Order

Seyla Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University Emerita and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia Law School and the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought

The 1951 Refugee Convention is one of the most important human rights documents of the post-WW II period. Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (on which it is based) and the Genocide Convention, both of 1948, it embodied the hopes and aspirations of a new world order. Never again would those persecuted on account of their race, religion, ethnicity, political beliefs, and social group fail to find protection and refuge in countries other than those in which such persecution occurred.

The 1951 Convention, however, from the beginning was beset with some difficulties: first, it originally excluded countries of the Global South, whether by omission or by design. To this day, India is not a signatory of the Convention because the India-Pakistan War could find no place within its framework. Likewise, the categories of “protected groups,” named in the Convention, were based on Read more