2025 - 2026

Please join us for the opening of the academic year 2025-2026 of the Master of Laws on Monday 22 September from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in room S.C.103, followed by a light lunch at Agora Caffee. 

Human Rights in the Time of Monsters and Their Wars
by Ahmad Atallah

Our world is a witness to a series of wars and profound social, political, and economic upheavals that are destroying humanity, human rights, and human dignity. The ongoing transformations within the international system reflect what Antonio Gramsci called a “time of monsters,” in which “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”.

This presentation critically explores the condition of human rights amid the resurgence of fascist and right-wing populist and authoritarian movements, wars, genocides, the deepening of socioeconomic inequality, and the erosion of social justice. It further explores the theoretical and practical possibilities of reimagining and questioning human rights to ensure that human rights are used exclusively for emancipatory purposes, and to examine the possibilities of protecting human rights from colonial dominance.

Ahmad Atallah is a PhD candidate in Sociology of Public and Social Policies at the Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain, and a research and teaching assistant at the Muwatin Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, Birzeit University in Palestine. His research focuses on Palestinian refugees, emancipatory human rights, and the decolonization of knowledge production, as well as neoliberalism and depoliticization. Muwatin is a partner of the Law & Development Research Group of our faculty.