Public Lecture: Achille Mbembe - On Substantive Democracy

Achille Mbembe joins us via livestream for this public lecture as he discusses his latest work, exploring how our current crisis results from a failure to grasp that technological progress often comes with devastating consequences, ‘to the point where we no longer hesitate to say that humanity is at war with nature, environments, and territories.’ 

Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian political theorist, historian and public intellectual who has written extensively on African history and politics and the legacies of colonialism. He has held appointments at Columbia, Yale, and Duke Universities in the USA, and at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Dakar, Senegal. Achille has just been awarded the 2024 Holberg Prize, the world’s most prestigious international prize in the social sciences. He is based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and his many publications include On the Postcolony (2000), Necropolitics (2019), and The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia (2022).