IHRC Work-in-Progress Workshop

Join us for an IHRC Work-In-Progress workshop, featuring Francis Kwame Nyamekeh (PhD student, Philosophy Department) with a talk titled " Sovereignty, Economic Migration and the Limits of Justice" and Daniel Cueto-Villalobos (PhD candidate, Sociology Department) with a talk titled "The Long Reckoning: Progressive Religion, Reparations, and the Paradox of Racial Progress in “the State That Works.” 

Sovereignty, Economic Migration and the Limits of Justice. My presentation explores a central question within international law, namely, whether economic migrants from so-called Third World states have a presumptive right to inclusion in First World states. It argues that if we seek to defend these presumptive rights on the basis of the history and legacy of the European colonialism, the resulting theory will bear little to no resemblance to liberal political theory. More precisely, arguments in favour these presumptive rights that rest on the sovereignty doctrine central to liberal political theory are neither necessary nor sufficient for explaining why economic migrants do, in fact, have those presumptive rights. They are specifically not necessary because these arguments wrongly assume that it is only when we realise a global sovereign state that we can intelligibly justify such presumptive rights. They are insufficient because in depending on the sovereignty doctrine, they dissolve an important distinction central to liberal political theory, namely, the distinction between the autonomous state and global political community.

The Long Reckoning: Progressive Religion, Reparations, and the Paradox of Racial Progress in “the State That Works.” Minnesota has been celebrated as “the state that works,” a portrait of good government, civic moderation, and inclusion. The 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis exposed the limits of this narrative, revealing some of the nation’s starkest racial disparities beneath its progressive image. This dissertation asks how White progressives reckoned with that contradiction and what their reckoning reveals about the paradox of racial progress in liberal institutions. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation in three White-majority Twin Cities congregations from 2021 to 2024, I examine how progressive Christians interpreted historic injustice and their own racial advantage after Floyd’s murder. I show that these communities drew on elements of Minnesota’s political culture, including traditions of heartland populism, civil rights liberalism, and communalism rooted partly in the churches of earlier European immigrant communities, as resources for antiracist commitment. Yet that commitment often channeled reckoning toward symbolic rather than material change, lending race-conscious Whiteness a moral authority that resisted accountability and turning reading and self-scrutiny into marks of moral distinction. In this way, racial awareness can itself contribute to the disparities it seeks to redress. Treating the reckoning as a protracted and contested process that extends well beyond 2020, the project shows how progressive religion shapes debates over civic membership, diversity, and belonging in an era of polarization and resurgent nativism. In this presentation, I focus on an empirical chapter on religious reparations initiatives in the Twin Cities. I examine how the region’s progressive religious field raises awareness of racial harms committed by religious organizations, and how congregations draw on faith commitments to pursue reparations alongside faith communities of color across the metro. These initiatives illustrate how awareness can move beyond symbolic repair toward material redress and lasting reconciliation.