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.

This is chapter three of Brian Larkin's "Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria", Duke University Press, 2008.

In Signal and Noise, Brian Larkin provides a history and ethnography of media in Nigeria, asking what media theory looks like when Nigeria rather than a European nation or the United States is taken as the starting point.

Céline Nieuwenhuys and Antoine Pécoud, « Human Trafficking, Information Campaigns, and Strategies of Migration Control », in American Behavioral Scientist, 50, 2007.

Franco Berardi, "The Image Dispositif", 2004.

In this text Franco Berardi reflects on the role of media today. When the Infosphere is producing narratives which move the consciousness of billions, the main political task is the creation of video-poetic strategies – dispositifs – for constructing new realities.

Tania Murray Li, "The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics", Introduction, Duke University Press, 2007.

The Will to Improve is a remarkable account of development in action. Focusing on attempts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia, Tania Murray Li carefully exposes the practices that enable experts to diagnose problems and devise interventions, and the agency of people whose conduct is targeted for reform.