On Cruelty: Global Reflections from the Age of Revolutions to the War on Citizenship

This is the second meeting of the workshop series on Civility, Cruelty, Truth. A one-day event hosted by the Stanford Humanities Center, the workshop will explore the genealogies, promises, and limits of civic virtue—at the heart of which is the city, the classical polis, itself— as a universal ideal. European in its moral contours, constituted by a deep fascination with the rule of law, borders, and security, at once coercive and oblique in whom it excludes and includes, how it punishes and protects, the city held out the promise of a humane center for ethical and sovereign life, one upon which anticolonial struggles against European empires too were first conceived and mounted. This workshop will examine the ambiguous foundations and resolutions of that vision in Asia, Europe, and the fatal waters in between; a vision that has come to be marked today by extreme violence and tragic displacements, and which now presses new questions against the very limit of modern political imagination.

 

Faculty Organizer: Aishwary Kumar (Department of History)

Student Assistant: Ahoo Najafian (Department of Religious Studies)

 

Schedule (coming soon)