Athens, Ga. – Karima Bennoune, international human rights expert and University of California, Davis, School of Law professor, will discuss Muslim fundamentalism at the University of Georgia Chapel on Nov. 14 at 4 p.m. The event is part of UGA’s Spotlight on the Arts Festival and is free and open to the public.
Bennoune’s talk will be based on her recently published book “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories From the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.” The book addresses resistance to fundamentalism through accounts of interviews of more than 280 people of Muslim heritage, many of which have channeled their resistance through various forms of artistic expression. Bennoune conducted the interviews in Algeria, where she was born, and many other countries throughout the world.
Her scholarship, which examines international law, international human rights, terrorism, counterterrorism, religious extremism and women’s rights, has appeared in journals such as the American Journal of International Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, the European Journal of International Law and the Michigan Journal of International Law. In 2008, Oxford University Press named Bennoune’s piece “Terror/Torture” one of the year’s top 10 global security law review articles.
Bennoune has served as a member of the executive council of the American Society of International Law and on the board of directors of Amnesty International USA. She is currently on the board of the Women Living Under Muslim Laws network.
Before coming to UC Davis, Bennoune was a law professor and a Dickson Scholar at the Rutgers School of Law-Newark, where she taught international law and human rights for 10 years. She also served as a legal adviser at Amnesty International in London and as a Center for Women’s Global Leadership delegate to the Nongovernmental Organization Forum at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where she provided legal advice to the Tribunal for Global Accountability for Violations of Women’s Human Rights.
Bennoune earned her law degree and master’s degree, as well as a graduate certificate in women’s studies, from the University of Michigan.
This event is presented as part of the Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts’ Global Georgia Initiative. It is co-sponsored by the UGA School of Law’s Dean Rusk Center, the Institute for African Studies and the law school’s Georgia Society for International and Comparative Law.
The goal of the Global Georgia Initiative is to present global problems in local context by addressing pressing contemporary questions-including the economy, society and the environment-with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene. For more information on the Global Georgia Initiative, see http://willson.uga.edu/programs/public-programs/global-georgia-initiative/.
The Spotlight on the Arts festival is presented by the UGA Arts Council, of which the Willson Center is a participating unit. More than 60 events are scheduled during the nine-day festival in November. More details can be found at arts.uga.edu.
UGA School of Law
Consistently regarded as one of the nation’s top public law schools, the School of Law at the University of Georgia was established in 1859. With an accomplished faculty, which includes authors of some of the country’s leading legal scholarship, Georgia Law offers two degrees-the Juris Doctor and Master of Laws in U.S. Law-and is home to the renowned Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy. The school counts six U.S. Supreme Court judicial clerks in the last nine years among its distinguished alumni body of more than 9,700. For more information, see www.law.uga.edu.
