Webinar: Can popular sovereignty help us avoid climate catastrophe?
Popular sovereignty seems inescapable in contemporary politics as virtually all states claim to derive their authority from the people they purport to represent. Yet, as racist and anti-immigrant forms of reactionary populism have made vivid in recent years, appeals to “the people” can readily become exclusionary. What’s more, the pressing global challenge of a changing climate requires cooperation on an unprecedented scale and assertions of national sovereignty thus arguably present the most important practical obstacle to avoiding devastating environmental catastrophe.
Nevertheless, popular sovereignty has been an indispensable tool for emancipation, employed as an ideal against imperialism and colonialism as well as a tool for democratizing authoritarian governments that refuse accountability to their citizens. We thus appear to be stuck in a paradoxical situation where popular sovereignty is both necessary and indefensible.
Hear US Associate Professor Benjamin McKean (PhD, MA Princeton, BA Harvard) argue that we need to reconceive both parts of popular sovereignty - both the representational logic that underwrites the claim to speak for “the people” and the nature of the sovereign power that they claim to wield. In the face of planet-altering climate change, the freedom that makes popular sovereignty normatively valuable now calls for a different institutional embodiment.
Date: Tuesday 8th April 2025.
Time: 5.30 to 7pm.
Location: Online.
Cost: FREE.
Find out more about this public lecture on using popular sovereignty to address climate change, including how to access the livestream.
This is the third lecture in the 2025 De Carle Distinguished Lecture series from the University of Otago.