AGORA: The God of War, Palestine, and Emancipatory Human Rights

Koen De Feyter, Professor of Public International Law, University of Antwerp

The talk will discuss the lasting appeal of war as a means to settle disputes. War-related music is abundant as well: played by the armed forces on the battlefield and as a celebration of victory. At the same time, during wartime artists critical of the war run high risks.

In the Gaza conflict, both parties appeal to a God of War to justify the violence used.

The international community is denounced for supporting the violence or failing to stop it. The International Court of Justice has found serious, enduring breaches of international law committed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and has called for an end to the occupation. The impact on the ground of the ICJ advisory opinion remains limited. Human rights too are part and parcel of international law. They are intended as instruments to protect human dignity, but do not always provide protection in practice.

What can academic and artistic institutions do? Is an emancipatory revision of human rights possible and what would it entail?  How do Palestinian youth on the Westbank answer the question today?

This AGORA talk is given remotely, followed by a Q&A session via Zoom.

Please note the change in program. Read more here.

Koen De Feyter is Professor of Public International Law and Spokesperson of the Research Group on Law and Development at the University of Antwerp (Belgium).   He is the Dean of the Law Faculty at the University of Antwerp starting 1 September 2024.

He heads the Steering Committee of the global Law and Development Research Network (LDRn). He also chairs Belgium’s Advisory Council on Policy Coherence for Development.  

He recently served as a member of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development (2021-2023) and of the Expert Drafting Group of the UN Intergovernmental Working Group on the Right to Development (2020-2023)  . At the University of Antwerp, he was the chair the Pieter Gillis Centre on active pluralism and interdisciplinarity (2019-2023).

He initiated the Global Campus of Human Rights’ Summer School on Cinema, Human Rights and Advocacy (now in its 19^th edition) and contributed a piece on Music Censorship to the Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights (2022).