In these two articles, Christophe Golay provides insights into the deep causes and effects of the ongoing global food crisis, and outlines the contribution of the Right to Food and the emerging Rights of Peasants in addressing them.

This report presents the Human Rights Council and its mechanisms, sheds a critical light on its workings to date and explores some of the misgivings concerning its future.

Geneva is a key location in the “international architecture” of global management – the complex set of institutions, legislations, discourses and practices created to govern International relations according to "universal" principles. This three-day seminar will take advantage of this location to probe the complex politics of Human Rights and International Law, and of the institutions set to shape, monitor, enforce them, such as the Human Rights Council (which will be holding its 14th session at the time of our seminar) and UN agencies.

"The Rights of Man are the rights of the demos, conceived as the generic name of the political subjects who enact—in specific scenes of dissensus—the paradoxical qualification of this supplement. This process disappears when you assign those rights to one and the same subject. There is no man of the Rights of Man, but there is no need for such a man. The strength of those rights lies in the back-and-forth movement between the first inscription of the right and the dissensual stage on which it is put to test."

In this text Etienne Balibar claims that a politics of Human Rights in the strong sense is in the struggle for the actual making of Human Rights, rather then in their defense in face of violation.

"Over the past two centuries, intellectual currents have emerged whose goal has been to confer authority on certain symbolic elements integrated into the African collective imaginaire. Some of these trends have gained a following, while others have remained mere outlines. Very few are outstanding in richness and creativity, and fewer still are of exceptional power. [...] I propose ways out of the dead end into which they have led reflection on the African experience of self and the world.

"... interpretation is not to be conceived restrictively in terms of subjective act. Rather, interpretation takes place by virtue of the structuring constraints of genre and form on the communicability of effect - and so sometimes takes place against one's will or, indeed, in spite of oneself. Thus, it is not just that the photographer and/or the viewer actively and deliberately interpret, but that the photograph itself becomes a structuring scene of interpretation - and one that may unsettle both maker and viewer in its turn"

The witness has become a key figure of our time, whether as the survivor testifying to what he has lived through or as the third party telling what he has seen or heard. Publicly bearing witness of suffering and injustice is precisely what departs the first (International Red Cross) and second (Doctors without Borders, Doctors of the World) ages of humanitarianism. Based on an etymological inquiry of the word in Greek and

"in the sugar-cane plantations of the Cauca Valley and in the tin mines of highland Bolivia it is clear that the devil is intrinsic to the process of the proletarization of the peasant and to the commoditization of the peasant's world. (...) The neophyte proletarians and their surrounding peasant kinsman understand the world of market relations as intimately associated with the spirit of evil. Despite all possibilities of increasing their cash incomes, they still seem to view this mode of production as productive of barrenness and death as well.

"Hence, it’s the political break that is decisive, and not the economic transformation. The true revolution in man’s history is not the Neolithic, since it may very well leave the previously existing social organization intact; it is the political revolution, that mysterious emergence – irreversible, fatal to primitive societies – of the thing we know by the name of the State. And if one wants to preserve the Marxist infrastructure and superstructure, then perhaps one must acknowledge that the infrastructure is the political, and the superstructure is the economic.

Against Architecture (notes on the Amazon Frontier): By 1989, the rampant destruction of the rain forest in the Amazon basin had reached international media attention and became one of the paradigmatic questions that forced the introduction of environmental issues into the official agenda of global politics.

Law comprises a particularly important part of the social construction of territory and region. This function of the law is often obscured by an enduring emphasis on the study of legal systems that appear more or less coterminous with political jurisdictions. But legal practices crossed boundaries and helped to constitute legal cultures of unruly dimensions. In empire, law traveled with legal officials and also with merchants, sailors, soldiers, sojourners, and settlers.

This is a five week series of films that were selected due to a research on how cinematic space is constructed and with
which means the filmic space relates and correlates with the construction of social space. This selection of films wants to
draw attention to architecture‘s performative aspect and the space that is constructed in visual media. „The space that
appears in the image (…) is concrete and not abstract or purely mathematical space. And it is (…) to a certain degree,

This friday at the roundtable I will present a 15-20 min presentation on my recent project. This new body of research develops out of a two year practice based project titled the Museum of Non Participation launched in London in 2009. My research question asks 'What might a collection be for The Museum of Non participation'. I will also be screening my new film The Exception and the Rule, 37min 2009, alongside extracts of Godard's Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) 1967.

Dear All,
This Friday the roundtable will be hosting a conversation on Terrorism and Urban Space to be published in Detritos (www.revistadetritos.com)

The topic of terrorism is extremely vast, so perhaps we could focus on 3 main directions:
1) A definition of terrorism: who has the right to define what is inside or outside the scope of terrorism, and the politics behind it, etc.
2) Terrorism and the politics of exception: allowing us to connect to contemporary policy-making, population control and internal security (war on terror; war on narcotrafic; war on illegal immigration; etc).