Luis Cabrera

Background

About Luis Cabrera

I should have been paying attention. In 2013, at the height of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, I was circulating among street protesters, asking them about their resistance to an increasingly authoritarian Turkish government - and increasingly distant hopes for European Union membership. Suddenly, the hundreds of protesters began running down the street. I turned to see a massive armored truck rolling toward me, and then the water cannon mounted on its roof gushed. It pinned me face first against a brick wall, the water pounding my head and back. After a few fraught moments, I managed to squirm to the corner of the building and run after the protesters. That incident reinforced a lesson I have been trying to teach myself for more than two decades: Learn from people in their lived contexts! That is, I am a grounded normative theorist. I do field research for arguments about individual rights. This work has involved not only speaking to staff at potentially rights-advancing international organizations, but walking miles of migrant trails with humanitarian patrollers and speaking to those who’ve made brutal desert crossings in the US Southwest and Sahara. I have also engaged enforcement officers and the ‘civilian border patrollers’ seeking to aid them. On more than a dozen trips to India, I spoke with members of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights about their appeals to UN human rights bodies on caste discrimination, and to their chief critics. I interviewed the Istanbul activists and members of the UK Independence Party who cited possible Turkish accession as perhaps the chief reason to support a ‘Brexit’ from the European Union. My current book project, exploring prospects for deeper institutional integration, has taken me to regional organizations on four continents. These include the African Union, ASEAN, South America’s Mercosur, the European Union, and some United Nations sites. The work has deeply influenced my arguments for more democratically accountable and rights-enhancing regional and global integration - up to some form of democratic world government in the long term. Grounded work also has enabled me to share the insights of those at the global front lines with students at several universities and audiences around the world. I am happy to be contacted about speaking to seminars, on podcasts, etc, and I am keen to connect with internationally oriented activists and global citizens. Publications: https://experts.griffith.edu.au/7088-luis-cabrera/publications