Feb. 24 - 28 | Brad Samuels Speaks at RightsCon Taipei
February 28th 2025Military occupation of lands and territories presents unique challenges for human rights documentation, transparency, and advocacy. When militaries occupy, they frequently cause devastating or irreparable environmental and health harms through the buildup of their bases, toxic harms from munition testing, training, and other means. Yet, the population can do little about these actions.
This session will explore the ways in which military presence, whether during times of peace or war, can harm the health and environment of local populations, and how human rights defenders and local activists document and resist these violations. Focusing on case studies of US military bases around the world, as well as the US presence in its colonies of Guåhan (Guam) and Puerto Rico, we will have a conversation about the lasting and damaging effects of contemporary examples of empire, especially on Indigenous populations. We will share case studies and ways in which different technologies such as remote sensing and multi-spectral analysis have been used as a tool to pierce the veil of opacity that exists in many of these spaces. Particular attention will be given to anticipating what happens when militaries leave as empires decline–a process we are arguably beginning to see the frontier of with U.S. military presence around the world. Finally, we will reflect upon what it means for this discussion to be rooted in Taipei, with its own history of colonial rule and precarious geography–a land mass situated at the nexus of great geopolitical forces.
The speakers for this session have done extensive research in Guåhan, Israel/Palestine, and on US military presence and bases in the East, the Horn of Africa, and Japan.
Learn more about the program here.
Participants:
Anjli Parrin (Kenyan lawyer, Director, Global Human Rights Clinic, University of Chicago Law School)
Bradley Samuels (Director, SITU Research)
Dr. Nicholas Bequelin (Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at Yale Law School)