Religion and Global Citizenship

Michael Barnett
University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. He is one of the world's leading authorities on humanitarianism—its history, trajectory, and relationship with religion. In 2012 he co-edited the book, Sacred Aid: Humanitarianism and Moral Imagination, which examines the dynamic relationship between the secularization and sanctification of humanitarianism. He is also the author of an extensive history of the subject: Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism. Barnett visited the faculty seminar in April 2016. In his lecture and visit with the faculty seminar, he looked at the overlaps and distinctions between human rights and humanitarianism and how these concepts relate to notions of global citizenship.

Evelyn Bush is an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, and her research focuses on religion, globalization, gender, and human rights. She is currently a core collaborator on the "Religious NGOs at the United Nations" research project, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and housed at the University of Kent. She is also currently engaged in research on religious freedom and U.S. foreign policy, and the influence of institutional classification on the gendered application of religious freedom and human rights principles.

Luis Cabrera is Associate Professor in the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He has published widely on ethical issues related to migration, poverty and economic integration between nation-states. His most recent monograph, The Practice of Global Citizenship (Cambridge University Press, 2010), was awarded the 2011 Yale H. Ferguson prize from the International Studies Association-Northeast. For it, he interviewed hundreds of unauthorized migrants, anti-immigration civilian border patrollers and migration officials in Arizona, parts of Mexico and Western Europe. His current book project is The Humble Cosmopolitan: Rights, Diversity and Trans-State Democracy. It explores ways of protecting rights and appropriately accommodating diversity within shared rule from the local to the global level. Research for the book has included street interviews with Turkish pro-democracy protesters, with anti-immigration political leaders in Britain, and with scores of dalit (former untouchables) human rights activists in India.

Mark Douglas is an ethicist and professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary, and also the director of the Master of Divinity Program. Douglas received his PhD from the University of Virginia and also holds a Master in Theology and Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. Douglas’s wide-ranging interests include: ethics in neo-orthodox theologies, medical and business ethics, the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, and the role of religion in political philosophy. He is currently researching and writing at the intersection of environmental issues and conflict studies.

Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Emeritus Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University, and also a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent books include: Palestine's Horizon: Toward a Just Peace, 2017; Power Shift: On the New Global Order, 2016; and Humanitarian Intervention and Legitimacy Wars: Seeking Peace and Justice in the 21st Century, 2015. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967." In the first year of the faculty seminar we had read Falk’s work, and it proved to be especially insightful and provocative regarding global citizenship. Falk met with the working group in April 2017. 

Anand Gopal is an award-winning journalist and assistant research professor with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict and the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, and specializes in ethnographically based data journalism. Gopal has reported extensively on Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, writing for Harpers, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science monitor, and other publications, while also producing scholarship based on his fieldwork and complex network analysis. Gopal’s book, "No Good Men Among the Living" (2014), won the 2015 Ridenhour Book Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and the 2014 National Book Award.

Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute and the author of Temptations of Power: Islamists Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East, which was named of Foreign Affairs “Best Book of 2014.” His most recent book, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping Our World, explores how Islam relates to politics and the modern nation state. In his public lecture he compared the role of religion and ideology in democracies around the world, most directly in the U.S. and in the Middle East. Hamid visited in February 2017. In his visit with the working group he elaborated on the themes of his public talk, as well as recent political developments in the United States that have challenged our collective sense of meaning and purpose, and what impact those developments have on global orientations.

Michael Ignatieff is a former politician, a scholar, and a prolific writer on political philosophy, international affairs, and conflicts caused by ethnic and religious strife. Between 2006 and 2011, Ignatieff was an elected member of the Canadian parliament and leader of the Liberal Party. He returned to academia in 2012, and in 2014, he was named Edward R. Murrow Professor of the Practice of Politics and the Press at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of seventeen books including Virtual War, winner of the Orwell Prize in 2001, and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. Ignatieff met with the group in February 2016 and discussed his role in drafting the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) document, his initial support for the Iraq war (and later regret about this decision), and his calls for US military intervention in Syria. His extensive experience in politics combined with his scholarship helped generate a rich discussion with faculty participants engaging him on the rationale, the challenges, and the dangers of military intervention for humanitarian purposes.  The conversation illuminated the different forms that global citizenship can take—particularly the roles that states are sometimes called upon to play.

Peggy Levitt, chair of the sociology department and the Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies at Wellesley College, and co-Director of Harvard University’s Transnational Studies Initiative. Her most recent book, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display, was published by the University of California Press in July 2015. Levitt was the CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the American University of Cairo in March 2015 and a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute in Summer 2015. Her books include Religion on the Edge (Oxford University Press, 2012), and God Needs No Passport (New Press 2007). Levitt visited the Center in April 2017 to take part in a workshop on religion, citizenship, and immigration. Levitt’s presentation at the April workshop was titled: “Religious Global Citizenship: Possibilities and Problems,” and she explored the potential of inclusive versions of religious global citizenship.

Pankaj Mishra is a novelist, essayist, literary critic, lecturer, and reporter who travels the world writing on a wide range of topics, including globalization, the Dalai Lama, Bollywood, and the “Talibanization” of South Asia. He regularly contributes to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Guardian, and the New Statesman, and has written for too many international magazines and newspapers to list. In his latest book, The Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017), Mishra casts his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present to explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world: from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, to a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world, to racism and misogyny on social media.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), a human rights advocacy organization in Malaysia that works to implement global justice, rooted in universal moral principles. He is also board chairmain of Yayasan 1Malaysia, a foundation promoting national unity. Prior to his work with JUST and 1Malaysia, Muzaffar founded a multiethnic reform coalition, the National Consciousness Movement (Aliran Kesedaran Negara), which served to raise awareness for issues surrounding ethnic relations in Malaysia. A political scientist, he has focused his academic work largely on the issues of civilizational dialogue and the crossroads between religion and human rights; Muzaffar served as the first director of the Centre for Civilisational Dialogue at the University of Malaysia. Muzaffer's publications include numerous books and journal articles on Malaysian politics and international relations, such as "Muslims, Dialogue, Terror" (2003) and "Religion and Governance" (2003, as editor).

Jeremy Waldron teaches legal and political philosophy at NYU School of Law. Until recently, he was also Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University (All Souls College). A prolific scholar, Waldron has written extensively on jurisprudence and political theory, including numerous books and articles on theories of rights, constitutionalism, the rule of law, democracy, property, torture, security, homelessness, and the philosophy of international law. His books include Dignity, Rank, and Rights (2012), Partly Laws Common to All Mankind: Foreign Law in American Courts (2012), The Harm of Hate Speech (2012), Torture, Terror, and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (2010), Law and Disagreement (1999), and The Dignity of Legislation (1999). Waldron was born and educated in New Zealand, where he studied for degrees in philosophy and law at the University of Otago, and was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 1978. He studied at Oxford University for his doctorate in legal philosophy and taught there as a fellow of Lincoln College from 1980 to 1982. He has since taught at the University of Edinburgh; the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University; and Columbia Law School. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and a fellow of the British Academy since 2011, Waldron has given many prestigious academic lectures, such as the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2009, the Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School in 2009, and the Hamlyn Law Lectures in England in 2011.

from Professor Waldron's Bio Page at New York University School of Law