Fostering Global Solidarities

April 26, 2024

Fostering Global Solidarities

The surge of nationalism around the world has undercut efforts to forge a vibrant global civil society. Greater technological connectivity has not spawned a new era of cross-border cooperation. Efforts to address our common challenges—including climate change, global health, poverty, and war—will require new forms of transnational solidarity and action.

How did we arrive at this moment of global fragmentation? Can movements for environmental, racial, economic, and gender justice generate effective common concern and action across borders? How can our diverse cultural and spiritual traditions contribute to efforts to make global humanity and what Pope Francis has called “our common home” a shared frame of reference? Verónica Gago, Ranjit Hoskote, Kohei Saito, Peter Beinart, and Joel Hellman explored these questions in a conversation moderated by Lydia Polgreen.

This event was part of the Georgetown Global Dialogues, which featured leading intellectuals from the Global South in forward-looking conversations with U.S.-based thinkers across a range of topics. It was co-sponsored by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and the Global Human Development Program at Georgetown University.

Participants

Verónica Gago

Verónica Gago, a professor of social sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of San Martín, is a prominent political theorist and activist working on issues of feminism and the global political economy. Her most recent books include A Feminist Reading of Debt (2021, with Luci Cavallero), Feminist International (2020), and Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (2017). She is also a leader in Argentina’s #NiUnaMenos (Not One Women Less) movement as both a theorist and an activist.

Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote is an Indian poet, theorist, and curator whose influential work centers on the complex history and presence of cultural pluralism from the local to the global. He has authored eight books of poetry—including Icelight (2022), Jonahwhale (2018), and a translation of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-poet, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd (2011)—and the acclaimed book Confluences: Forgotten Histories between East and West (2012, with Ilija Trojanow). Hoskote has curated more than 50 showcases of Indian and global art over the past three decades, including India’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Kohei Saito

Kohei Saito is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo and a leading contemporary Marxist thinker. His most recent book, Capital in the Anthropocene (2020), has sold more than half a million copies in Japan and was published in English as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto in January 2024. Saito’s previous book, Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (2017), which creatively explored the ecological dimension of Marx’s thought and its contemporary relevance, won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, a New York Times contributor, and a non-resident fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. Beinart is the author of The Good Fight (2006), The Icarus Syndrome (2010), Crisis of Zionism (2012), and the Beinart Notebook newsletter. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, and other outlets. Beinart joined The New Republic in 1995, serving as managing editor, senior editor, and then as the magazine’s editor from 1999 to 2006.

Joel Hellman

Joel Hellman has served as dean of the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University since 2015. He brings to Georgetown a unique and valuable perspective from his work on issues of governance, conflict, and the political economy of development around the world. He joined the School of Foreign Service following 15 years of service at the World Bank, where he most recently served as chief institutional economist and previously led its engagement with fragile and conflict-affected states as director of the Center on Conflict, Security, and Development in Nairobi, Kenya.

Lydia Polgreen

Lydia Polgreen is an opinion columnist at The New York Times who writes about foreign affairs, politics, and culture. She spent a decade as a correspondent for The New York Times in Africa and Asia, winning Polk and Livingston Awards for her coverage of ethnic cleansing in Darfur and resource conflicts in West Africa. She also previously served as editor in chief of HuffPost and managing director of Gimlet, a podcast company at Spotify.

Image Gallery

1/1