Friday, March 28, 2025
12:15-1:30pm ET
Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, WCC 2004
Please join LPE@HLS as we host Professor Yazier Henry (University of Michigan) for a conversation on political, intellectual, and professional responsibility in times of democratic crisis. All are welcome, and lunch will be served!
Description
The world has experienced numerous democratic, anti-democratic, colonial, and anti-colonial waves over the past three centuries. During these times of social upheaval, the state has been repeatedly transformed–in its political, theoretical, and legal dimensions, along with its actual structural life. Such changes generally unfold in moments of acute global crises, giving rise to world-historical, epoch-defining turns. Making sense of these historically disorienting events in real-time is a complex challenge, as the analyst is simultaneously subject to the often violent experience of living within social, economic, and political rupture.
Today, understanding the centrality of law to the state’s moral basis, structural function, and systemic purpose is a crucial political task. Indeed, the very foundations of the constitutional democratic state and their expression in administrative form are fully absorbed in the convulsions of our times.
In his remarks, Professor Yazier Henry will address how legal and policy professionals can contextualize the complex nature of the state. He will draw critical attention to the state’s coercive and disciplinary power, its humanist transformations, and the manifold social and economic consequences at hand. Intellectuals, lawyers, and policy professionals caught in the eye of history-making storms can attain no objective freedom or exception from their democratic responsibilities. Rather, the only way out is through.
Speaker
Yazier Henry is a Professor of Teaching and Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. He is a transdisciplinary scholar, theorist, strategist, political analyst, professional human rights advocate, and public intellectual. He has written and published on the political economy of social voice, official violence, historical memory, identity, peace processes, transitional justice, and international humanitarian law. His current research, writing, and teaching focus on liberatory statism, developmental statism, and how structural, systemic, and administrative violence comes to be institutionalized during post-colonial and oppressive systemic transitions to constitutional democracies.
