News from UNDEF, 02 November 2010

Professor Seyla Benhabib of Yale University, who serves as an individual member of the UNDEF Advisory Board, spoke at a Board meeting on 29 October 2010 of the "human rights revolution largely initiated by the United Nations" and the UN's various instruments. "We have entered a phase in the evolution of global civil society which is characterized by a transition from international to cosmopolitan norms of justice," Dr. Benhabib said. "This is not merely a semantic change. While norms of international law emerge through treaty obligations to which states and their representatives are signatories, cosmopolitan norms accrue to individuals considered as moral and legal persons in a world-wide civil society." This revolution had "created a new and powerful vocabulary for public claim-making," said Professor Benhabib. "It has enabled new social actors such as women, migrants, indigenous peoples to enter the public arena as political agents, and it has created anticipations of new forms of justice in a future world."

A native of Turkey and the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University, Dr. Benhabib is a democratic theorist who has published widely on the subjects of human rights, pluralism, minorities, religion and culture. She is the author, inter alia, of The Claims of Culture, Equality and Diversity in the Global Era; The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents, which won the Ralph Bunche award of the American Political Science Association; and Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty and Democratic Iterations. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Turkish, Swedish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.

Click here to read Seyla Benhabib's remarks to the UNDEF Advisory Board