Olivier Legrand

Human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities (Arendt 1973, ix).     It is important for understand the work of Agamben to come to Arendt one. Through is impressive work Anna Arendt had questioned the base of European modern politic. She has insisted that human dignity needs a new guarantee because the old guarantee, from the nineteenth-century, the Kantian idea of peaceful cosmopolitan republics respecting the natural rights of man, had been destroyed. I will focus on her research on the refugee condition and the concept of worldlessness. For Arendt, the refugee was the archetypical figures that revealed the contraction between universal rights and national sovereignty (Blecher 2005: 731). It is the loss of rights which is the defining attribute […]

        Nicosia and Belfast are two faces of the same coin; the differences between the two cities can be easily identified. The Nicosia partition is uniform and continual; the Belfast partition is multiform and diffuse. There are two opposing principles of crisis management: abnormal problems can be solved via normal policy-making strategies (Belfast), or town planning can be a part of the peace building process (Nicosia). But in Belfast and Nicosia the most acute and perceived spatial divisions are not simply those of class or culture but of national identity. The border that divides both islands remains the key issue that is replicated within the cities.           Urban space has become the main place where the claims for sovereignty are expressed. Urban violence and segregation however are still thinking of as a conflict outcome. To overcome this approach sovereignty must be thought of not as a contracted-good but as a multi-scale transaction or relation. This approach stresses […]