In this age of so-called ‘Fake News’, a concept promoted in Tweets from the White House, seized on by conspiracy theories, and threatening to undermine the democratic process, the trustworthiness of our journalists has never before been so important.

Alessandra Galloni is Reuters Global News Editor, based in London, appointed in January 2016. She joined Reuters in September 2013 as Editor of the Southern Europe bureau, after spending 13 years at The Wall Street Journal in various positions as correspondent, economics and business writer and editor in New York, London, Paris and Rome. She has won several awards, including an Overseas Press Club Award in the US and a UK Business Journalist of the Year Award for her coverage of the Parmalat corporate scandal. She is co-author of From the End of the Earth to Rome, an e-book on Pope Francis. An Italian national, Ms Galloni is a graduate of Harvard University (1991-1995) and has a Masters degree from the London School of Economics (2002).

UN concern to restore trust in news was expressed through a joint declaration from the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights last year, co-authored by the Freedom of Expression rapporteurs of the OHCHR, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Organisation of American States, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The report is on-line at http://www.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?sourcedoc=/Documents/Issues/Expression/JointDeclaration3March2017.doc&action=default&DefaultItemOpen=1

Ms Galloni’s talk is part of the series of lunchtime discussions held every term by the Oxford branch of the United Nations Association UK. This is a free event and members of the public are welcome to attend. Refreshments are available from 12.30pm.

The photo of Ms Galloni was taken by Mikhail Metzel for GettyImages.

A public lecture by Peter Wilson (University of Sydney). Free, all welcome, no booking required.

Carrie Gracie grew up mostly in North-East Scotland and set up a restaurant before taking a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. She spent a year teaching in two Chinese universities and then built a small film business before joining the BBC in 1987 as a trainee producer.

She went back to China as the BBC’s Beijing reporter in the early 1990s and served as China correspondent and Beijing bureau chief until 1999 when she returned to the UK to focus on presenting. For several years she anchored the morning slot on the BBC News Channel and hosted the weekly BBC World Service programme, The Interview. In April 2014, she took up a newly created post as BBC China Editor and has since covered many news stories in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She has also made documentaries about China for TV and radio, winning prizes including a Peabody and an Emmy.

In January 2018, she left her post as BBC China editor in protest at unequal pay. She published an open letter to BBC audiences on the subject and appeared before a parliamentary select committee. She has since returned to BBC HQ as a news presenter and continues to campaign for an equal, fair and transparent pay structure.

General Julius Caesar has returned from war with a disturbing new determination to rule – alone. Popular, charming and ruthless, Caesar has the love of the people and seems bent on destroying democracy itself.

Brutus and Cassius decide to act. But what happens after you’ve murdered the most powerful person in the world?

Nova Theatre transplant the action from the Roman streets to an all-female military unit in this exhilarating, gender-reversed production.

Book Launch with Author & Translator: Yan Ge (顏歌)’s The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, translated by Nicky Harman

https://www.facebook.com/events/605485149803274/

2018/May/07 Monday 5-7PM Ho Tim Seminar Room, China Centre, St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Open and free of charge for all

Supported by: Oxford Chinese Studies Society

To welcome everyone back to Oxford in this Trinity Term, we have invited one of the most important writers of China’s post-1980 generation, Yan Ge, to share with us her experiences as a young writer in China and abroad. She will bring her seminal work, The Chilli Bean Paste Clan (《我們家》in Chinese, published in 2013), and discuss issues of family, language, morality, capitalism and more, with the novel’s English translator Nicky Harman. The Chilli Bean Paste Clan the English translation will be published by Balestier Press and available on the market from the 1st of May, 2018, adding a fresh voice in the growing field of literature in translation.

Synopsis of The Chilli Bean Paste Clan:

Set in a fictional town in West China, this is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the lucrative chilli bean paste factory, and their formidable matriarch. As Gran’s eightieth birthday approaches, her middle-aged children get together to make preparations. Family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed vigour. As Shengqiang struggles unsuccessfully to juggle the demands of his mistress and his wife, the biggest surprises of all come from Gran herself……

Professor David Der-wei Wang 王德威 of Harvard University has commented on Yan Ge and her work and hinted that she might signal a generational shift in the Chinese literary scene:
“She writes about her hometown. The stories in a small Sichuanese town are greatly done. She has her own worldviews, and frankly speaking, she is of a very fortunate generation. What she may have encountered as she grew up is not as tumultuous or adventurous as the writers that came before her, and therefore the factor of imagination has gradually come to matter more than experiences in reality.
她写她的故乡，四川一个小城的故事，写得很好。她有她的世界观，但坦白地讲，他们都是有幸的一代，在她成长的过程里面，她所遭遇的不如过去那辈作家有那么多的坎坷或者冒险性，所以，想象的成分已经逐渐地凌驾了现实经验的体会。”

This event will be of interest to those of you who work on contemporary China, Chinese literature, translation studies, and publishing. The conversation between Yan Ge and Nicky Harman will last around 30 minutes and we will leave plenty of time for critical dialogues, Q & A and discussions.

Books available for purchase at a discounted rate.

Speaker biography:

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan Province, China in 1984. She is a writer as well as a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. Publishing since 1994, she is the author of eleven books in Chinese. Her works have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Hungarian. She was a visiting scholar at Duke University from 2011 to 2012 and a residency writer at the Cross Border Festival in Netherlands in November 2012. Named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China, she is now the chairperson of China Young Writers’ Association and a contract writer of Sichuan Writers’ Association. She recently started writing in English. Her English stories could be seen on Irish Times and Stand Magazine. She lives in Dublin with her husband and son.

Nicky Harman is a British translator of Chinese literature, and one of the most influential figures in the field. She is co-Chair of the Translators Association (Society of Authors) and co-founded Paper Republic 纸托邦, one of the most important online forums for Chinese literatures in translation. She taught on the MSc in Translation at Imperial College until 2011 and now translates full-time from Chinese. The authors she has translated include Jia Pingwa贾平凹，Yan Geling 严歌苓，Chan Koon-chung 陈冠中，Annibaobei 安妮宝贝，Chen Xiwo陈希我，Yan Ge颜歌，and Han Dong韩东, to name just a few. She has won several awards with her translations.

Distinguished modern historian and former Warden of St Antony’s College, Professor MacMillan recently became an Honorary Fellow of LMH. She is a Companion of the Order of Canada, and will be this summer’s BBC Reith Lecturer. Her area of particular interest is the tangled history of war and society, our feelings towards conflict, and those who engage in it.

The Oxford Guild and its Collegium Global Network in association with the Oxford PPE Society is delighted to welcome a very special guest – Tawakkol Karman, one of the most famous and most decorated Nobel Peace Prize Winners of all time (https://www.facebook.com/events/108829703317881/). 100% FREE AND OPEN TO ALL INCLUDING NON STUDENTS – Mrs Karman is keen to speak to members of the public as well! Mrs Karman will be speaking in a specially organised event at 6.30pm on Monday 7th May in prestigious and comfortable Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre in St Catherine’s College. She will be discussing ‘Terrorism – The Problems & Solutions’, sharing her insights into how to tackle this global issue in 2018 and beyond and her experiences of the Arab Spring, the Yemeni Civil War and the political landscape in the Middle East. THIS IS A TRULY UNIQUE AND UNPRECEDENTED OPPORTUNITY TO HEAR FROM SUCH A HIGH PROFILE SPEAKER. THE EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE – this will undoubtedly be one of the biggest and most fascinating events of the year – do not miss out on your seat! SIGN UP FOR THE BALLOT HERE TO SECURE YOUR PLACE: https://tinyurl.com/TawakkolKarmanOxford You may ballot for up to two seats. Names will be chosen at random from the ballot and we have several daily releases before Monday 7th May – you will only be notified by email if you have been successful in the ballot.

The will be an opportunity for questions and if you would like to ballot for the chance to meet Mrs Karman and speak to her directly in a private reception please email president@theoxfordguild.com ASAP. THIS IS ONE OF THE GREATEST NOBEL PRIZES WINNERS AND MINDS AND WE HAVE SPENT A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF TIME AND EFFORT SECURING MRS KARMAN AS A KEYNOTE GUEST.

Mrs Karman is a globally renowned Yemeni human rights activist, journalist and politician. She became the international public face of the 2011 Yemeni uprising that constituted part of the Arab Spring, and has been dubbed ‘Mother of the Revolution’, ‘Lady of the Arab Spring’ and ‘Iron Woman’. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 in recognition of her achievements in the non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work in Yemen. She became the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate at the time, at the age of 32 (she is now second youngest). She has been recognised by TIME Magazine as the Most Rebellions Woman in History, and been selected by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for many years.

A mother of three, Mrs Karman is the President and Founder of the NGO Women Journalists without Chains (WJWC), Founder of the Peaceful Youth Revolution Council and a board member of Nobel Women Initiative. Bold and outspoken, she has been imprisoned on numerous occasions for her pro-democracy and pro-human rights protests. She has vowed with other Laureates and global leaders to end child slavery. She has been widely recognised by many other awards and accolades around the world including the Courage Award granted by the US Embassy in Sana’a in 2008, the Galileo Galilei Award in Florence, Italy and was a Winner of the Freedom Award granted by the US National Civil Rights Museum. Inspired by non-violent leaders Martin Luther King, and Mahatma Gandhi, Mrs Karman is one of the pioneers promoting peaceful protest in the Middle East as a means for change.

WHEN: 6.30pm, Monday 7th May 2018
WHERE: Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre, St Catherine’s College
SIGN UP FOR THE BALLOT TO SECURE YOUR PLACE: https://tinyurl.com/TawakkolKarmanOxford
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/108829703317881/

We highly recommend you all attend this historic and invaluable occasion which will be one of the most interesting, topical, high profile and exciting events of the year from our truly fascinating and inspiring guest. SIGN UP FOR THE BALLOT HERE TO SECURE YOUR PLACE: https://tinyurl.com/TawakkolKarmanOxford

A public lecture by Ben Morgan (University of Oxford). Free, all welcome, no booking required.

How do we define a sound or a taste for which our language does not have a dedicated word?

Typically, we borrow words from another sensory modality. Wines, for example, are often described by words that belong to other sensory perceptions: a “soft flavour” borrows the adjective soft from the domain of touch, and a “round taste” borrows the adjective round from the domain of sight.

It remains an interesting open issue to what extent these cross-sensory metaphors are universal across languages, and to what extent they are language-specific.

Dr Francesca Strik Lievers will address these questions and provide an overview of the latest scientific discoveries in the field, using examples taken from different languages. Her talk will be followed by an opportunity for questions.

The event is organised and hosted by Creative Multilingualism in collaboration with TORCH. Creative Multilingualism is a research programme led by the University of Oxford and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Open World Research Initiative.

Participation is free and open to the public. We provide FREE LUNCH to all participants.

12.30-13.00 – lunch and mingling

13.00-14.00 – talk and discussion

Bill Browder, CEO and Founder of Hermitage Capital Management, Head of Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and author of “Red Notice, How I Became Putin’s Number One Enemy”

A public lecture by Nurit Yaari (Tel Aviv University). Free, all welcome, no booking required.

As part of Think Human Festival, this one-off pop-up event is a unique opportunity for visitors of all ages to interact with leading academics from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. The academics will act as ‘human books’ from a range of perspectives; historic, literary, political, legal and educational for 15 minutes per ‘book loan’ against the back drop of revolution. ‘RESIST! REMAIN!’ will provide the chance to engage with and access humanities and social science disciplines in a fun, original and inspiring way, and aims to create a lasting impression of how these subjects can help to understand what it is to be human.

Please note that this event is free, open to all ages and there is no need to book ahead. Please come to Bonn Square and start a interesting conversation around revolution!

In “This is Who I am: LGBT+ Asylum Monologues”, theatre company ice&fire will present an empowering and challenging performance with first-hand accounts of LGBT+ people seeking asylum in the UK. 7.30pm on 18 May. Tickets £3 on the door or online from Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/this-is-who-i-am-lgbt-asylum-monologues-oxford-pride-tickets-45524894184?aff=es2

Join us for live music in the John Henry Brookes Building – Forum before the panel discussion at 18:00 in the Lecture Theatre.
Most political movements are accompanied by protest songs. This Think Human Festival event aims to explore their rich tradition and assess their meaning and impact over time. Peggy Seeger, Andrew Scheps, Dr Angela McShane and Professor John Street will shed light on the historical context of protest songs, their production and sound, their political meaning and power, and their personal performance.

Our panel will examine the historical roots of protest songs, explore their impact on social and political movements, and explain what makes a song effective as protest. They’ll also discuss whether protest music is a dead or thriving art, and ask how far gender plays a role in their creation and performance.

Peggy Seeger is a celebrated singer of traditional Anglo-American songs and activist songmaker whose experience spans 60 years of performing, travel and songwriting. Dr Angela McShane leads the Research Development Team for the Wellcome Collection, an expert on early modern protest songs. Andrew Scheps is a Grammy award winning mix engineer, recording engineer, producer, and record label owner. John Street is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia and specialises in the politics of popular music.

Join us for live music in the Forum of the John Henry Brookes Building from 17:00 before the panel discussion in the John Henry Brookes Lecture Theatre at 18:00.

Most political movements are accompanied by protest songs. This Think Human Festival event aims to explore their rich tradition and assess their meaning and impact over time. Peggy Seeger, Andrew Scheps, Dr Angela McShane and Professor John Street will shed light on the historical context of protest songs, their production and sound, their political meaning and power, and their personal performance.

Our panel will examine the historical roots of protest songs, explore their impact on social and political movements, and explain what makes a song effective as protest. They’ll also discuss whether protest music is a dead or thriving art, and ask how far gender plays a role in their creation and performance.

Peggy Seeger is a celebrated singer of traditional Anglo-American songs and activist songmaker whose experience spans 60 years of performing, travel and songwriting. Dr Angela McShane leads the Research Development Team for the Wellcome Collection, an expert on early modern protest songs. Andrew Scheps is a Grammy award winning mix engineer, recording engineer, producer, and record label owner. John Street is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia and specialises in the politics of popular music.

You are a German citizen living under the Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler—do you resist or comply? Featuring dramatic monologues and explanatory interludes this event introduces the audience to two real-life historical characters: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian theologian, and Adolf Eichmann, a member of the Nazi bureaucracy.

Bonhoeffer was executed in 1945, having served time in prison for his staunch opposition to Nazism. Eichmann was executed in 1962 in Israel for helping to organise the deportation of Jews to killing centres and sites during the Holocaust. We meet both men during their time in captivity and watch as they ponder their actions and seek to make sense of the horrors unleashed by the Nazis.

Bonhoeffer is clearly a good man. But what was it that inspired his heroic resistance to the Nazis—why, when so many other Christians chose not to act, did he put his life on the line? Eichmann is clearly a villain. And yet, as he himself protested, he was only doing his job. He followed rather than made orders and he was not directly responsible for the death of anyone. Is he, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt once argued, a terrifying instance of “the banality of evil?”

Based on the writings of Bonhoeffer and the records of the police and court interrogations of Eichmann, this event offers a unique portrait of good and evil during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century.

Join Human Story Theatre for Scenes From… three new plays about young people’s mental health.

Human Story Theatre are an Oxfordshire based company who only produce new writing with a health or social care issue at heart. HST are delighted to unearth the local talent of Brookes University Creative Writing and Drama students who will perform scenes alongside professional actors. Think Human Festival is delighted to host this platform for two local playwrights, (Nick O’Dwyer and Gaye Poole writer of Connie’s Colander, Flat 73 and DRY for Human Story Theatre), and to showcase new writing from Brookes’ own students inspired by their work with Helen Mosby (Writing for Performance Tutor), Lizzy McBain (Artistic Director of Under Construction Theatre Company) and representatives from organisations that work with young people with mental health issues.

The performance will be followed by a Q&A session with members of local mental health support services.

The year is 1964 and ten defendants are on trial for their lives in South Africa in what is widely perceived as a politically motivated proceeding. The defendants include many prominent campaigners against apartheid, notably Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Across the world there is widespread condemnation, and criticism of the apartheid regime is frequently aired by states in the United Nations. Multiple resolutions are passed by the General Assembly and Security Council calling for South Africa to end the trial and to release all political prisoners.

On Friday 25 May 2018, members of the Oxford Brookes Model United Nations Society will be staging a re-enactment of a Security Council debate about the Rivonia trial in South Africa.  The Security Council delegates have agreed to meet with interested bystanders, over tea, coffee and cake, between 12 noon and 1pm in Headington Hill Hall and will be available to discuss about what their countries hope to achieve in a resolution about the Rivonia trial.

Please join us for what will be a fun event set in a fascinating time in history with the Cold War, anti-colonial movements and the rise of ideas of racial equality and human rights all playing a role in how apartheid was discussed within the United Nations.

Please register for this event on the Think Human Festival website.

Discover how propaganda images and literature during the First World War marked a change in women and their roles in society.

In 2005 Oxford Brookes Professor Tina Miller’s new book Making Sense of Motherhood inspired Sue Bevan to write Mum’s the Word a play which tells the story of Miriam who has walked back into the lives of her daughters who were just ten and twelve years old when she left them during a devastating period of postnatal depression.

We invite you to experience a special Think Human Festival staging of this moving play at Ark T an open and inclusive community centre where people, art and powerful ideas come together.

The show is followed by a question and answer session with Sue Bevan and Tina Miller and an opportunity for the audience to contribute directly to Tina’s current research on Motherhood.

Age 16+ Creche available on site during the performance
This event is free, booking is required.

This lecture explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves. It argues that, as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business – even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity.

阴道之道l 牛津·女权话剧

Our Vaginas, Ourselves l Chinese Vagina Monologues at Oxford
The play will be performed in Chinese with English subtitles.

The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler based on interviews with more than 200 women from different social-cultural backgrounds. Ensler wrote the piece to “celebrate the vagina”.

In 1996, The Vagina Monologues premiered at HERE Arts Center, Off-Off-Broadway in New York, and it was awarded the Obie Award for ‘Best New Play’ that same year. Ensler’s play has since been translated to more than 40 languages, and performed on the stages of over 140 countries.

In 2012, a drama-focused group, BCome, inspired by the Vagina Monologues, created an original episodic play, Our Vagina, Ourselves, based on interviews with Chinese women. The play is around an hour and a half in length, and the scripts .draw from interviews as well as the personal experiences and opinions that BCome members have on social issues.

In Our Vagina, Ourselves, women are not treated as victims, but as active subjects who have autonomy and agency. It therefore proposes an alternative reading of gender violence and integrates anger and grief with joy, satire and humour. It also challenges the marginalization of “the others” and brings forward the rights of LGBTs, and it cares deeply about intersectionality, especially among gender, sexuality and class.

On March 20, 2018, Our Vagina, Ourselves was performed in the lecture theatre of SOAS by a group of performers consisting mainly of oversea Chinese students.

On June 12, 2018, it will be performed again at Oxford!
See you then, when we will tell you all about Our Vaginas, Ourselves.

Organizing bodies：VaChina, OCSS (Oxford Chinese Studies Society), and BPCS (British Postgraduate Network for Chinese Studies)

Acting Crew: VaChina
VaChina, established in September 2017, is a UK-based Chinese feminist network officially registered at SOAS with members from various higher education institutions including in SOAS，LSE，Oxford，Cambridge，UCL，UAL, and Essex. VaChina aims to create a supportive and friendly environment for all gender and sexualities, advocates for justice within the field of gender, and promotes gender equality via different means, including theatre.

Scripts ：BCome
Founded in 2012, BCome is a feminist group based in Beijing. Led by the youth, the BCome group initiates campaigns for women’s rights and against gender-based violences.

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/358499304639795/
Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/our-vagina-ourselves-at-oxford-tickets-45627591354?aff=efbeventtix

Through the centuries, the craft of storytelling has been developed with the help of technology – candlelight, printing press, electricity, film and the internet have all been incorporated into the way we make theatre. But this relationship is also inverted: performance design has challenged technology to create new ways to present live drama and interact with the audience. When staging a contemporary production of The Tempest recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company asked Intel and the Imaginarium Studios to work with us, exploring technologies to render cinematic environments in real time. For the first time ever, we created an animated character live on the RSC stage, using innovative real-time performance capture.

Such collaborations bring new audiences to Shakespeare and showcase the best of British creativity globally. There is vast potential for creative collaboration between technology companies and theatre, and the research and development carried out for such productions allows both theatre and technology sectors to learn new skills, developed new tools, and explore new ways of working.

In this talk, we will explore how theatre continues to impact the future of entertainment by pushing the boundaries of technology further still while maintaining a creative focus. At the RSC we have exciting experimentation in development with digital technology companies across the world. We’re engaging in research and development across virtual, augmented and mixed reality, and are always looking for ways to bring the very best live experience to our audiences and amplify that in new and digitally ways.

‘Home Sweet Home – a Memorial’ honours the living, the women and children who support their loved ones living with the after-effects of the war experience. The project has been created to pay tribute and raise awareness of the generations of families who have vicariously experienced the impact of war trauma.

Based on their first hand experiences as election watchers and their hundreds of interviews with presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, election officials, and conspirators, Cheeseman and Klaas document instances of election rigging from Argentina to Zimbabwe, including notable examples from Brazil, Kenya, India, Nigeria, and Russia. This eye-opening study offers a sobering overview of corrupted professional politics, while providing fertile intellectual ground for the development of new solutions for protecting democracy from authoritarian subversion.

Simon Stephens is one of the UK’s most exciting playwrights. His plays include Punk Rock, A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, and the stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Most recently, he wrote the National Theatre’s adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which is being produced by students from the University of Oxford this autumn.

Ahead of the students’ production, Simon joins us to chat about his life and work.

Age guideline 12+

Duration: 1 hour with no interval

Tickets: FREE with a ticket to see The Threepenny Opera (call the Ticket Office on 01865 305305) or £5 without a ticket to The Threepenny Opera.

About the speaker:
Appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Pierre Krähenbühl became Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) on 30 March 2014. As Commissioner-General, he serves at the level of Under-Secretary-General, based in East-Jerusalem. He was confirmed for a second three-year term, from April 2017.

A Swiss national born in 1966, Mr. Krähenbühl has 27 years of experience in humanitarian, human rights and development work. He has led UNRWA and its 30,000 staff, at a time of great pressure on the Palestine refugee community resulting from unresolved conflicts and acute needs, particularly in the West Bank, Gaza and Syria: “I have discovered in UNRWA one of the most outstanding and innovative humanitarian organizations, able to deliver education, health-care, emergency and other services to millions of people in some of the most polarized environments of the Middle East,” said Mr. Krähenbühl.

Prior to joining UNRWA, he served as Director of Operations at the International Committee of the Red Cross from July 2002 to January 2014, responsible for the conduct, management and supervision of 12,000 ICRC staff working in 80 countries.

Asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented migrants often draw attention to the global colonial histories which give context to their present situation. And yet these connections are rarely made by academics. This presentation explores aspects of my recent book ‘Asylum After Empire: Postcolonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking’. The aim of the book is to begin theorising asylum policy within the context of such histories; to make sense of contemporary public policy developments on asylum within the context of histories of colonialism. The book is a historical sociology which brings together postcolonial and decolonial theories on the hierarchical ordering of human beings, troubling the supposedly universal category of ‘man’ within the epistemological framework of ‘modernity’, and naming the response of the British state (which acts as the case study) to contemporary asylum seekers as an example of the coloniality of power. It is an attempt to make sense of the dehumanisation of asylum seekers not as racism, but as enmeshed within interconnected histories -of ideas of distinct geographically located ‘races’, of human beings as hierarchy organised in relation to civilization, and of colonial power relations. In this sense, I am taking as my starting point the sophisticated analyses of forced migrants and sans-papiers and elaborating their conclusions with academic study.

This seminar describes how slavery like situations may occur in transit states. It develops Arendt’s analysis of xenophobic crystallisation to show how under conditions of rightlessness, the interests of the ‘mob’ and capital may give way to economic exploitation and slavery. Drawing upon data gathered as part of an ESRC funded project which included a study of 300 migrants who crossed from Libya to Sicily, it describes how migrants may become increasingly vulnerable to abuse over the course of the migratory process and eventually find themselves absorbed into informal situations of forced labour. It notes how in the absence of governance, opportunistic and often small scale business has exploited the presence of labour in Libya, at times in concert with the police and government authorities and at times in opposition to them. This arbitrary situation is enabled as a result of a symbiotic relationship between employers and the police, built on the circularity of bribes and a shared animosity towards non-Muslim migrants.