Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights 

This lecture, by Lindsey Kingston, took place at Boston University's Center for the Study of Europe on Monday, November 14, 2022. The topic of discussion was Kingston's book, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner the International Studies Association’s 2020 Human Rights Best Book Award.
As Kingston describes it, citizenship within our current international system signifies being fully human, or being worthy of fundamental human rights. Yet for some vulnerable groups, this form of political membership is limited or missing entirely. These “protection gaps” are central to the creation of hierarchies of personhood, or inequalities that render some people more “worthy” than others for protections and belonging.
Lindsey Kingston is an Associate Professor of International Human Rights at Webster University in Saint Louis, Missouri. She directs Webster’s Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and recently co-edited Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press, 2021).