Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine - Hedi Viterbo

The Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law presents

An Author meets Reader event 

In this author-meets-reader event, Dr Hedi Viterbo will talk about his new book – Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (CUP, 2021) – and discuss it with Prof Tobias Kelly and Dr Michelle Burgis-Kasthala.

Drawing on cross-disciplinary scholarship and hundreds of previously unexamined sources (many of which are not publicly available), the book radically challenges our picture of law, human rights, and childhood, both in and beyond the Israel/Palestine context. It reveals how Israel, rather than disregarding international law and children's rights, has used them to hone and legitimise its violence against Palestinians. Also exposed in the book is the complicity of the human rights community in this situation, due, among other reasons, to its problematic assumptions about childhood, its uncritical embrace of international legal norms, and its recurring emulation of Israel's security discourse. The book examines how, and to what effect, both the state and its critics manufacture, shape, and weaponise the categories 'child' and 'adult,' at both the local and global levels.

About the speaker
Dr Hedi Viterbo is Senior Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London. Previously, he was Lecturer in Law at the University of Essex, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at SOAS, a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, and a visiting researcher at Columbia University. His research examines legal issues concerning childhood, state violence, and sexuality from an interdisciplinary and global perspective. He is author of  Problematizing Law, Rights, and Childhood in Israel/Palestine (CUP, 2021) and co-author of The ABC of the OPT: A Legal Lexicon of the Israeli Control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory (CUP, 2018).

 

This event is free and open to all but registration is required (link below)

 

Event Link

Register on Zoom