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50 years

Citizenship and Democratisation

Thursday 20 October 2011, 6:00pm
The Royal Institution of Great Britain, London

Citizenship in the 21st Century

We live in an insecure world where our idea of citizenship is contested daily. In this conversation we will ask how a citizen’s rights and responsibilities are evolving and how we can develop an idea of citizenship that is adaptive, resilient and responsive to threats to our security whilst protecting our liberties.

This debate will explore:

  • What do we mean by citizenship today?
  • What are implications of technological advances for individual rights?
  • What do we mean by security in an era of globalisation?

This conversation will examine how we can develop an idea of citizenship that is adaptive, resilient, and responsive to threats to our security whilst protecting our liberties and the challenge to put in place a new architecture for international organisation that will help to resolve conflict and secure human rights across the globe. 

Chair:

Thomas S. Blanton is Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington D.C. A graduate of Harvard University, he won Harvard's 1979 Newcomen Prize in history. He also received the 1996 American Library Association James Madison Award Citation for "defending the public's right to know". He is a founding editorial board member of freedominfo.org, the virtual network of international freedom of information advocates; and serves on the editorial board of H-DIPLO, the diplomatic history electronic bulletin board, among other professional activities.

Speakers:


Shami Chakrabarti CBE is Director of Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties) and has been heavily involved in its engagement with the ‘War on Terror’, and with the defence and promotion of human rights values in society.


Professor David Clary FRSis a distinguished theoretical chemist. President of Magdalen College, Oxford and Chief scientific adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.  He has degrees from the Universities of Sussex and Cambridge and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society.


Nick Witney was the first Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency and is now an international affairs analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations. Previously he served with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence, where his last job was as Director-General of International Security Policy.


Dr Jamie Shea is Deputy Assistant Secretary General, Emerging Security Challenges at NATO. He is responsible for providing NATO with a strategic analysis capability to monitor and anticipate international developments that could affect allied security. He will be speaking directly to the question: 'What do we mean by security in an era of globalisation?'

Sussex Respondents:

Dr Tarik Kochi is Senior Lecturer in Law and International Security at the Centre for Social and Political Thought. Dr Kochi's research is in legal and political theory and he is currently writing a book on international law. He is the author of The Other's War (Birkbeck Law Press, 2009), which was awarded the 2010 International Studies Association, International Ethics Book Prize.

Professor Robert Prance is Professor of Sensor Technology in the School of Engineering and Informatics. He is Head of the Centre for Physical Electronics and Quantum Technology, and his research interests include: high sensitivity, low-noise instrumentation; novel sensor technology, magnetometers, electrometers; high performance RF systems; Josephson junction devices and circuits.

Professor Craig Barker is Professor of Law at the Law, Justice and Violence Research Centre. He has worked at Sussex for seven years and is currently the Head of the Sussex Law School. He specialises in International Law, with particular focus on international criminal law, immunities from jurisdiction and the relationship between international law and international relations. He is presently working on the concept of responsibility and its application to international law.