We are pleased to invite you to our next GCILS webinar on Human Rights and Conspiratorial Thinking. This time we are meeting in a hybrid fashion, so you can join us on Wednesday, 16 March 2022, 3pm UK Time via Zoom. For our School of Law students and staff this event will be available to join in person- room 207, No.10 Professors’ Square, School of Law.
This GCILS event with our guest, Geoff Dancy, will address the propagation of conspiracy theories as a significant challenge to human rights promotion. Conspiratorial disinformation is a crucial tool in the authoritarian playbook, and human rights abusers shield their own culpability by charging their opponents with various conspiracies. Conspiratorialism is also an identifiable form of misinformation that spreads quickly in non-curated information ecosystems, like those present on the web, which often promote violence against well-meaning rights defenders. However, in this talk, Geoff Dancy reckons with the possibility that human rights promotion may itself be implicated in the enduring prevalence of conspiratorial thinking. More specifically, he considers the philosophical, historical, and legal connections between human rights activism and conspiracy as a theoretical form. In short, he ponders whether the popularity human rights is linked to the popularity of conspiratorial thinking.
Geoff Dancy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He studies human rights, political violence, and trends in accountability for atrocity. He is the former director of the Transitional Justice Research Collaborative (TJRC), a group focused on collecting data and developing theory about human rights prosecutions, truth commissions, and other mechanisms of justice promoted by the global community. He is now primary investigator on a new project called Transitional Justice Evaluation Tools (TJET). Dancy’s work on topics such as the deterrent effects of the ICC, the effectiveness of amnesties and truth commissions, and the sustained worldwide resonance of human rights has been published in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, American Journal of International Law, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Comparative Political Studies, among others.
To register for the event, please visit Eventbrite website here.
Zoom log-in details will be sent in your registration confirmation.