On April 13, the Clark Forum co-hosted a lecture with Penn State Dickinson Law and several other Dickinson departments that featured renowned human rights scholar Seyla Benhabib and was titled, “The Canary in the Coal Mine: the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Collapse of the Post WWII International Order.”

Isa Mester ’26, a member of the Clarke Forum team, led the organization of the event. 

Mester said she was inspired to propose this lecture by a course she took during her study abroad experience in Copenhagen, “Fleeing Across Borders: International Refugee Law.” Included in her course was a trip to Palermo, Italy, which Mester described as a “really meaningful experience.” She added that both the course and the trip gave her “a deeper understanding of the realities of European migration politics, an issue that [she] was already familiar with growing up in Germany, but was able to engage with in a much more concrete way. [She] wanted to bring these perspectives and conversations to campus, and Benhabib’s lecture was perfect for that.”

Benhabib, a professor at Yale University and a research fellow at Columbia Law School, spoke about her work focusing on refugees and human rights. This topic resonated with the audience and the wider Dickinson and Carlisle communities because immigration and refugee status have come under extreme scrutiny during the second Trump administration.

The recent actions of the Trump administration have caused both tensions and fears to rise in Carlisle, as it is home to many Afghani refugees, who were forced to flee during the Taliban takeover in 2021.

Benhabib began her talk by detailing the tragic events of the Holocaust that led to the need for the 1951 Refugee Convention. However, she explained that the concept of the “refugee” did not begin during WWII, but can be traced back to the Bible and is older than the concept of being a citizen. She called upon this ancient history to provide context for what she termed “the refugee question” and how the discussion began long before modern warfare.

This theme of ancient history appeared throughout her lecture, as she explained the global experience of statelessness, alienation and displacement, both internal and external and how these issues are not restrained to the “modern era” but transcend time.  

At the end of her talk, she posed an important question to the audience:  “Why is immigration ​​such an insolvable problem? Because it truly isn’t.”