The Department of Political Science
cordially invites you to attend the lecture
"States of Emergency after 9/11"
delivered by
Kim Lane Scheppele
Discussant: Nenad Dimitrijevic, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Time and Venue: September 11, 2012 at 3:30 p.m. in the Auditorium.
RSVP by September 10, 2012 to polsci@ceu.hu.
Reception to follow.
After 9/11, the United Nations Security Council sprang into action, passing resolutions that required all member states of the United Nations to follow a common plan to fight terrorism. This lecture examines what happened next. First, an extraordinary number of states complied with the resolutions and introduced important changes in domestic law. Second, those changes put many states on the road toward the permanent use of emergency powers. Using historic states of emergency to show how emergencies work in practice, this lecture examines the reports that states submitted to the UN Security Council after 9/11 to show how those same elements were repeated routinely as state complied with the mandate to establish security law at home. The lecture develops a common template for analyzing emergencies by showing that they tend to follow a “script” that is very different from what the existing literature on states of emergency (particularly the writings of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben) would lead one to expect.
Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and the University Center for Human Values, as well as Director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2005 after nearly a decade on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where she was the John J. O’Brien Professor of Comparative Law. Before that, her primary appointment was in the political science department at the University of Michigan. From 1994-1998, Scheppele lived in Budapest, doing research at the Constitutional Court of Hungary and teaching at both ELTE and Central European University. Scheppele’s work concentrates on the intersection of constitutional and international law, particularly in constitutional systems under stress. After 1989, Scheppele studied the emergence of constitutional law in Hungary and Russia, living in both places for extended periods. Since 9/11, Scheppele has researched the effects of the international “war on terror” on constitutional protections around the world. In short, when the Berlin Wall fell, she studied the transition of countries from police states to constitutional rule-of-law states and after the Twin Towers fell, she studied the process in reverse. Her many publications on both post-1989 constitutional transitions and on post-9/11 constitutional challenges have appeared in law reviews, social science journals and in many languages (including Russian, Hungarian and French). Her new book is called The International State of Emergency: The Rise of Global Security Law. It will appear in 2013 (Harvard University Press). Her previous book, Legal Secrets, won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association, as well as the Corwin Prize from the American Political Science Association.
The video about the lecture is available now:
