Course to honour Georg Lohmann's work!

With this year’s topic, we directly address the structuring idea of our course: the place of human rights between morality, law and politics. Based on the conviction that recognition in science and philosophy shall take the form of argumentative exchange, we invite human rights scholars from different disciplines and schools of thought to contribute to this conference and to present papers on the complex relations between morality, law, and politics.

Examples of relevant questions could be: Is a naturalistic theory, according to which we have human rights simply in virtue of being human, appropriate to capture the nature of human rights? Or should we favor some political or practice-dependent conception instead? Are human rights claims hold exclusively against states of state-like political institutions, or are other agents also bound by human rights obligations? Is a state-centered approach of human rights still the prevailing opinion in International Law? Is the constitutionalization of international law still a realist utopia despite the backlash against globalization and multilateral forms of cooperation? Do human rights necessarily include a right to democratic governance? Is there a way to reconcile the universality of human rights with the particularity of rights to citizenship and of the political experiences that give rise to concrete human rights claims?

We dedicate this year’s course to our friend and colleague Georg Lohmann. He was the founding figure and director of our course and its spiritus rector for almost twenty years. Georg died in December 2021. We will miss him dearly.

The organizers invite researchers as well as human rights activists coming from all fields and disciplines, to send abstracts that deal with some of the problems and tensions indicated above. The deadline is April 15th, and abstracts can be sent to Bernd Ladwig: berndladwig@hotmail.com