How do politicised and instrumentalised human rights and humanitarian laws influence great power relations and other important aspects of global affairs? Optimists hope even the instrumental use of these laws will elevate human rights as prominent standards of international legitimacy and will nudge actors (including great powers) to improve their human rights behaviour. Pessimists worry that when human rights standards appear politicised, it will undermine their legitimacy, or that great power trade-offs and compromises will imperil fundamental principles of human rights and humanitarian law. In this lecture, Professor Charli Carpenter shows that human rights and humanitarian law have always been politicised by states, and therein lies their power as weapons of the weak: NGOs, weak states, and citizen movements. The weaponisation of human rights and humanitarian law by the great powers – even liberal powers – should be acknowledged and understood, but is ultimately no match for the ability of citizens reaching across borders to wield rights as pragmatic tools of political change.

The Yale-NUS Lecture on Global Affairs is sponsored by the late Professor Saw Swee Hock.

About the speaker

Professor Charli Carpenter
Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specialising in international law and human security, and Director of the Human Security Lab, an interdisciplinary initiative focused on science in the human interest. Her teaching and research interests include the protection of civilians, laws of war, humanitarian affairs, humanitarian disarmament, global advocacy networks, political violence, and the role of pop culture in global security. She has published three books and numerous journal articles, held fellowships at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt, Oakley Centre, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs. She has served as a consultant for the United Nations, State Department, Department of Defense, and human rights NGOs, is a bi-weekly columnist at World Politics Review, and regularly contributes to Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs.

About the moderator

Assistant Professor Benjamin A Schupmann
Assistant Professor of Social Sciences (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics), Yale-NUS College

Assistant Professor Benjamin A Schupmann received his PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. Besides Yale-NUS College, he has also worked at Duke Kunshan University and the National University of Singapore.

In his research, Asst Prof Schupmann examines what early twentieth century German political and legal theory has to offer to twenty-first century democratic constitutionalism. He believes that those thinkers grappled with problems similar to some of the most pressing problems facing democracies today, including democratic backsliding and the legitimacy of democracy’s self-defence. In his research, he aims to show that we can still learn much from their theories and solutions to those problems.