Rediscovering Duties in the Age of Rights: Latin America’s Contributions

Date: 

Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S250, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Kathryn Sikkink, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government; Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University

Moderator: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government at Harvard University

Responsibility constitutes a thread running through a number of topical public policy subjects, including sovereignty-as-responsibility, corporate social responsibility, and common but differentiated responsibility within environmental policy. Nowhere has attention to responsibilities been more prominent, however, than in the realm of human rights protection. This talk will explore Latin American contributions to these debates, starting with the American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man of April 1948.

kathryn_sikkinkKathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Sikkink is an international relations scholar best known for her work on human rights, international norms, transnational advocacy networks and social movements, and transitional justice. Her book Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck) was awarded the Grawemeyer Award and the ISA Chadwick Alger Award). Her 2011 book, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award, and the WOLA/Duke University Award), explores the emergence and impact of individual criminal accountability of state officials for past human rights violations. Sikkink’s latest book Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2017) documents the legitimacy and effectiveness of human rights law, institutions, and movements. Sikkink has been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. Sikkink holds an MA and Ph.D. from Columbia University.