Economic Justice: Building a Better Future

Date: 

Thursday, September 3, 2020, 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Location: 

Virtual Event (Registration Required)

Please join the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy for its signature weekly series this fall, The Fierce Urgency of Now, featuring Black, Indigenous, People of Color scholars, activists, and community leaders, and experts from the Global South. Hosted and facilitated by Sushma Raman and Mathias Risse, the series also aligns with a course they will co-teach this fall at the Harvard Kennedy School on Economic Justice: Theory and Practice. 

 

The opening panel for this series will provide a global perspective on economic justice concerns and ways to build a better future.

 

Panelists:

  • César Rodríguez-Garavito | Co-Director, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, New York University School of Law
  • Kumi Naidoo | former Secretary General of Amnesty International, former International Executive Director of Greenpeace International 
  • Sushma Raman | Executive Director, Carr Center 
  • Mathias Risse (Moderator) | Faculty Director, Carr Center 

CesarCésar Rodríguez-Garavito is a director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose interests focus on global governance, climate change, socioeconomic rights, business and human rights, and the human rights movement. César has been an associate professor at the University of the Andes and a visiting professor at NYU Law, Stanford, Brown, the University of Melbourne, European University Institute, University of Pretoria (South Africa), the Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), Central European University, and the Andean University of Quito. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Open Global Rights and has served as a strategy advisor to leading international and domestic human rights organizations in different parts of the world. César has been an expert witness of Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an Adjunct Judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon and a lead litigator in climate change, socioeconomic rights and indigenous rights cases. He has served as director of Dejusticia, the Global Justice and Human Rights Program and the Center for Socio-Legal Research at the University of los Andes.

Kumi NaidooKumi Naidoo is a life-long social justice campaigner hailing from South Africa. Kumi has held multiple leadership roles, but his time as Executive Director of Greenpeace International cemented his reputation as a bold activist who championed civil disobedience, most notably when he was arrested for scaling a Greenlandic oil rig to hand-deliver a petition in protest of drilling in the Arctic in 2011.  A year later he occupied a Russian oil rig in the Barents Sea in the Russian Arctic. Kumi’s most recent role has been as a co-founder and interim chair of the pan-African organization, Africans Rising for justice, peace and dignity. The group, which has forged partnerships across trade unions, religion and civil society, aims to change the fact that while the Africa as a continent has benefitted from economic growth, Africans themselves have not shared in that increasing wealth and power. The group, which has forged partnerships across trade unions, religion and civil society, aims to change the fact that while the Africa as a continent has benefitted from economic growth, Africans themselves have not shared in that increasing wealth and power.

Sushma RamanSushma Raman is the Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She brings over two decades of global experience launching, scaling, and leading social justice and philanthropic programs and collaboratives, building capabilities of grassroots human rights organizations and their leaders, and teaching graduate courses in the public policy schools at UCLA, USC, and Harvard Kennedy School. Sushma has worked at the Ford Foundation, where she helped launch and scale social justice and women’s funds around the world, and at the Open Society Foundation, where she was a Program Officer on the founding staff for US Programs. Sushma is the co-author, along with Bill Schulz (former executive director of Amnesty International USA and Carr Center Senior Fellow), of the book The Coming Good Society: Why New Realities Demand New Rights, released by Harvard University Press in June 2020. This forward-looking book examines the coming changes to the human rights landscape and argues that rights must adapt to new technological and scientific realities or risk being consigned to irrelevance.

Mathias Risse is the Faculty Director at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work primarily addresses questions of global justice ranging from human rights, inequality, taxation, trade and immigration to climate change, obligations to future generations and the future of technology. He has also worked on questions in ethics, decision theory and 19th century German philosophy, especially Nietzsche. Risse is the author of On Global Justice and Global Political Philosophy. On Global Justice is known for introducing the "grounds-of-justice" approach to global political thought. Global Political Philosophy is an introduction to political thought from a global standpoint rather than the more typical state-focused perspective. Risse is the co-author of On Trade Justice: A Philosophical Plea for a New Global Deal , published by Oxford University Press (with Gabriel Wollner). His next book is On Justice: Philosophy, History, Foundations, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. 

Virtual Event Details
This event will be livestreamed on YouTube Live. Attendees registered for this event (link below) will receive a reminder for the livestream fifteen minutes before the event along with a link to the YouTube page where you can participate in the live chat and ask questions during the event.

 

Registration Closed