About this Event
It suffuses pictures and videos, speaks through bodies as well as words, and is expressed by those with too much power as well as by those with too little. In Driven to Their Knees, Roxanne Euben takes readers from conflicts in the Arabic-speaking world to America’s divided public square, advancing a theory of humiliation rooted in the ways people articulate and enact it. Euben analyzes some of the most conspicuous yet least studied Arabic expressions of humiliation, drawing on sources ranging from Qurʾānic commentary by Islamists to videos, poetry, songs, and tweets from the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Driven to Their Knees reveals what the language of humiliation says―and also how it works. This groundbreaking book shows how humiliation expresses the imposition of impotence by those with undeserved power, and the way it converts relations of power into crises of virility. Humiliation rhetoric defines both the humiliated and the humiliator and issues an urgent call for a remedy in the viscerally charged language of emasculation. For Donald Trump and Usama bin Laden alike, this means driving their enemy to his knees for all to see, and then boasting about it to compound the degradation. But for others, humiliation galvanizes their struggle to “stand erect,” uniting them in a refusal to be bowed low. Humiliation is not just about power but is itself a powerful language that does far more than reflect contemporary politics. The language of humiliation remakes the very world in which we live.
Professor Roxanne Euben (University of Pennsylvania) will be in conversation with Professor Paul Apostolidis (LSE), Dr Udit Bhatia (KCL) and Professor Humeira Iqtidar (KCL) to discuss her new book Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton University Press, 2025)
SPEAKER
Roxanne L. Euben is a political theorist whose research has helped pioneer a new area of inquiry often referred to as “comparative political theory.” This is an understanding of political theory not as coextensive with Euro-American canonical texts ‘from Plato to NATO,’ but rather as inclusive of intellectual traditions and practices usually taken to belong to other fields such as history, anthropology or religious studies. Euben’s special area of expertise and research is Islamic and Euro-American political thought, and her scholarship has addressed such topics as humiliation and masculinity; Muslim cosmopolitanism; jihad; martyrdom and political action; travel and translation; the nature and limits of rationalism; rhetoric and emotion; visual culture and digital circulation. She is the author of Driven to Their Knees: Humiliation in Contemporary Politics (Princeton, 2025); Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, 2006); Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999); and Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from Al-Banna to Bin Laden (Princeton, 2009), written and edited in collaboration with Muhammad Qasim Zaman. She has been published across a wide spectrum of scholarly journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Political Theory, The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, Political Theology, Common Knowledge, International Studies Review, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and Political Psychology.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bush House Lecture Theatre 2 (BH(S)4.04), 30 Aldwych, London, United Kingdom
USD 0.00
