Global social contract
Event in English
Date
Wednesday June 28th 2023 at 1pm
With
Monika Bolliger, Samia Henni, Olumide Idowu,
Scott Langdon, Aromar Revi and Martin Rueff
In partnership
with the Fondation du Domaine de Villette
Rate
Free entrance
On this day commemorating the birth of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, international leaders and changemakers debate his political thought.
By advocating the liberation of the individual through education and denouncing the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, Rousseau's thought is as relevant as ever to contemporary concerns. Today, there is an urgent need to rethink a new paradigm for tomorrow.
In January 2023, the MRL is launching an international and interdisciplinary competition to collectively imagine, today and for tomorrow, a social contract for the 21st century.
The entries received so far come from over 45 countries around the world, from Bangladesh to Malawi, via Canada, Brazil and Iraq. How do you deal with such a complexity of proposals and points of view?
Martin Rueff, chairman of the competition's jury, will introduce the audience to Rousseau's thought, pointing out the astonishing topicality of his words.
The discussion will continue from a variety of angles, with contributions from Monika Bolliger, journalist with DER SPIEGEL, Samia Henni, professor at Cornell University, Olumide Idowu, co-founder of the International Climate Change Development Initiative Africa, Scott Langdon, Executive Director of Our Common Home and Aromar Revi, Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS).
Participants
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Monika Bolliger is a journalist specialising in the Middle East. She holds a master's degree in history, Arabic language and international law from the University of Zurich. From 2012 to 2018, she worked as Middle East correspondent for the Swiss daily NZZ. In March 2021, she joined the foreign affairs desk of DER SPIEGEL, Germany's leading news magazine. Also in 2021, her book "Tripoli - The Middle East Mirrored in a City" was published by Rotpunkt Verlag.
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Samia Henni is a historian of built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is a professor at Cornell University. She is the author of the award-winning The Architecture of Counter-Revolution, The French Army in Northern Algeria (L’architecture de la contre-révolution, L’armée française dans le nord de l’Algérie, gta Verlag, 2017, EN; Éditions B42, 2019, FR), the editor of War Zones (gta papers no. 2, gta Verlag, 2018), and Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022), and the curator of the exhibitions Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, 2017-21).
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Olumide Idowu is a Nigerian champion of climate change. He advocates environmental awareness and a balanced approach to development and environmental conservation. Olumide Idowu is the co-founder of the International Climate Change Development Initiative, a non-governmental institution that seeks to build climate-smart generations in Africa while bridging the development gap. He is also Nigeria's youth focal point for the UNDP small grants programme, the lead youth author of the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO6) and the executive coordinator of the African Youth Climate Change Initiative.
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Scott Langdon is Chief Executive of Our Common Home, an international association based in Geneva. Our Common Home promotes the civic participation of all members of society in developing solutions to climate change, particularly people with more traditional values who feel a deep attachment to place, tradition, family and nation and who have, until now, been left out of the climate debate. Before launching Our Common Home, Scott ran the Purpose Climate Lab in New York. He led strategic communications and public campaigns to highlight energy security, air pollution and conservation issues in the US, Brazil, India and Kenya.
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Aromar Revi is the founding director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), a national interdisciplinary university. He is one of the world's leading experts on environmental change, particularly climate change. He is the lead author of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report and a member of the lead writing team for the IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report. He was previously a member of the lead writing team for the 2014 IPCC assessment report on urban areas, which established the role of cities and regions in tackling climate risks.
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French poet, translator and philosopher Martin Rueff, born in Canada in 1968, is the author of several books and essays on Rousseau, Italian poetry and contemporary poetics. After teaching in the United States, France and Italy, he is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. He is president of the Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau de Genève, director of the Terra d'Altri literature collection and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Po&sie.
More information
Website of the international contest A social contract for the 21st century