Today: a 10-minute lecture during your lunch hour
“FORGET DARFUR”, Conor Foley
February 12, talk starts exactly at 1:15pm at Melville House Bookstore (145 Plymouth St.)
***Foley is a Guardian columnist and a rarity in the U.S. — so please do come if you can***
The idea that we should ‘do something’ to help those suffering in far-off places is the main impulse driving those who care about human rights. Yet from Kosovo to Iraq, military interventions have gone disastrously wrong.
Foley will explain why calls for intervention are frequently informed by myths and assumptions that rest on an ill-informed post-imperial arrogance. Movements set up to show solidarity with the powerless and dispossessed have ended up betraying them instead.
About the speaker ///
A humanitarian aid worker, Conor Foley has worked for a variety of human rights and humanitarian aid organizations, including Liberty, Amnesty International and the UNHCR, in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His new book is THE THIN BLUE LINE: HOW HUMANITARIANISM WENT TO WAR.
About the series ///
The Ten Minute Lecture series organizes lunch-time talks and presentations at the Melville House Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. The series hopes to provoke dialogue on impossibly large topics in a short period of time.
Talks start at precisely 1:15pm and a twenty-minute Q&A follows. The bookstore opens at noon, so come as early as you want ‹ but please no later than 1:15. Bring your lunch if you want. Talks end promptly at 1:45 so you can get back to work, if that’s your thing.
Melville House bookstore is located at 145 Plymouth Street, on the corner of Plymouth and Pearl in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Here’s a map. F train to York. A/C to High Street/Brooklyn Bridge. Call 718-722-9204 for more information.
