To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Hannah Arendt, the 18th Walter Benjamin International Colloquium will take place in Portbou from 25 to 27 September 2026 under the title The Right to Have Rights: Hannah Arendt in Today’s World. Bringing together leading international scholars, the event will revisit Arendt’s thought as a vital framework for understanding some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including forced displacement, citizenship, democracy, public space, and fundamental rights.
The colloquium is held in a place deeply connected to European memory. In 1941, Arendt crossed the border through Portbou while fleeing Nazi persecution on her journey into exile. Only a few months earlier, Walter Benjamin had died in the same town while attempting to escape occupied Europe. This shared history makes Portbou a powerful site from which to reflect on exile, asylum, statelessness, and the enduring relevance of Arendt’s concept of the “right to have rights”.
The opening lecture will be delivered by Judith Butler, whose keynote, Threads of Hope in Authoritarian Times, will set the tone for three days of debate and reflection. The programme will also feature contributions by Thomas Meyer, Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán, Agustín Serrano de Haro and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, among other speakers, addressing topics such as Arendt’s exile, truth and political power, the contemporary relevance of totalitarianism, and current debates on migration and the right not to migrate.
Alongside its academic programme, the colloquium will include a series of cultural and commemorative activities that strengthen the dialogue between thought, memory, and place. These include the annual tribute to Walter Benjamin at the Portbou cemetery, a performance of Caure / To Fall by playwright Helena Tornero and the Ad Hoc theatre company, developed within the European WIRE (Women in Resistance) project, and the traditional Walter Benjamin Route linking Banyuls-sur-Mer and Portbou, featuring a site-specific artistic intervention by the Nau Côclea.
Download the full programme
Over nearly two decades, the Walter Benjamin International Colloquium has become an important meeting point for critical thought, democratic memory, and cross-border dialogue. This year’s edition brings together a wide network of European partners, including the European Observatory on Memories of the Fundació Solidaritat Universitat de Barcelona, reaffirming a shared commitment to promoting democratic values, historical reflection, and the defence of human rights in Europe.
Simultaneous interpretation will be available in Catalan, Spanish, English, and French, ensuring broad accessibility and fostering dialogue across linguistic and national boundaries.
This annual gathering, inspired by Walter Benjamin, is conceived both as a platform for discussion on topics and authors aligned with Walter Benjamin’s theoretical production and as a framework to consider issues related that affect the present which can be analysed and treated with the tools inherited from Walter Benjamin and other intellectual figures who knew him, had a relationship with him or who were his contemporaries. This was the case of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
December 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of this Jewish-German intellectual. Through the colloquium, half a century later, we take her memory back to Portbou, the place where, in 1941, she managed to cross the border from France to Spain in order to continue her journey of exile to the United States. Portbou is, therefore, a physical cross-border intersection and at the same time a key symbolic location for critically mapping our present.
Taking advantage of this unique symbolic framework, we plan to revisit the thoughts and career of Hannah Arendt, as well as their validity in contemporary critical theory and political practice. In a world like the one we see today, within the framework of a profound crisis of discourses linked to democracy, humanism and critical political cultures, in which having ‘the right to have rights’, as Hannah Arendt put it, is questioned, we believe it is necessary to revisit and debate certain aspects of her legacy. The status of refugees, totalitarianism, power, violence, freedom, public space and the meaning of political action are just a few of these themes in her body of thought, often in dialogue with Walter Benjamin
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- Reference of the Project: 101236354
- Type of activity: Awareness Raising
- Title: Networking
- Date: September 25, 2026
- 3 Days
- Physical event
- Portbou, Catalonia (Spain)