On 10 October 2011 Noam Chomsky launched ISCI's new journal, State Crime at King's College London. We are grateful to Pod Academy for providing us with the audio podcast of Professor Chomsky's lecture 'Changing Contours of World Order' available here:
[Photo by John Soares]
EVENT PROGRAMME
• 18.45 Welcome: Professor Sir Rick Trainor KBE, Principal, King’s College London & Professor Penny Green, School of Law, King’s College London
• 18.55 ‘Changing Contours of World Order’ followed by a Q&A session (Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre): Noam Chomsky
The event is accompanied by a Photo Exhibition on ‘Taking Refuge in Tunisia’s Spring: African Refugees From Libya’ by Yusuf Sayman
About Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky (http://www.chomsky.info/) is a US political theorist and activist, and Institute Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Besides his work in linguistics, Chomsky is internationally recognized as one of the most critically engaged public intellectuals alive today. Chomsky continues to be an unapologetic critic of both American foreign policy and what he views as its ambitions for geopolitical hegemony and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism, which he identifies in terms of class warfare waged from above against the needs and interests of the great majority.
Over the past five decades, Chomsky has offered a searing critical indictment of US foreign policy and its many military interventions across the globe, arguing that the US continues to support for undemocratic regimes, and to be hostile to popular or democratic movements, thereby undermining its professed claim to be spreading democracy and freedom and support for tendencies aiming toward that end.
About Yusuf Sayman
Yusuf Sayman (http://www.ysayman.com/) is a New York based photojournalist concentrating on the relationship between the state and the individual. In 2008, he finished the photojournalism and documentary photography program at the International Centre of Photography where he won the John and Annamaria Philips Foundation Scholarship for Photojournalism. Currently he works as a free lance photojournalist, also as an assistant for Antonin Kratochvil. He exhibited in New York, Berlin, Amersfoort and in the PIngyao photography festival in China. His work has been published in the Fader and Fortune magazines, Time.com, and featured by the International State Crime Initiative.
About the International State Crime Initiative
The International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) is a community of scholars working to further our understanding of state crime. By state crime we mean state organisational deviance resulting in human rights violations. This includes crimes committed, instigated, or condoned by state agencies or by non-state entities that control substantial territory. The concept of state crime includes but extends beyond legal categories of human rights abuse and international crime. Our focus is on victims as key actors in defining, exposing and challenging state violence and corruption. ISCI is an interdisciplinary forum for research, reportage and debate. Through both empirical and theoretical enquiry we aim to connect rigorous research with emancipatory activism.
Professor Penny Green has, with Co-Investigator Dr Tony Ward, been awarded an ESRC grant of £830,000 to research resistance to state violence in Turkey, Colombia, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Tunisia and Papua New Guinea. The research project, ‘Resisting State Crime: A Comparative Study of Civil Society’ will run for three years from October 2011. In addition to extensive fieldwork costs the ESRC grant will fund two post-doctoral positions and an ISCI (International State Crime Initiative) administrator for 3 years.
