REINVENTING/RECONSTRUCTING COSMOPOLITANISM IN CONTESTED SPACES AND POST-CONFLICT ZONES

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 2022 – FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2022

The purpose of this international conference is to encourage a multi and transdisciplinary discussion on the challenge of cultivating inclusive civic and social spaces at a moment when the difference is ubiquitously threatened by exclusionary ethno-nationalisms, the construction of material and symbolic walls of separation, spaces of conflict, and violence-laden representations of the essential alienness of cultural, political, and religious others.
The conference will critically examine this problem in various socio-spatial and temporal contexts and broaden the scope to reflect on the necessary rethinking/reinvention/reconstitution of cosmopolitan space(s) challenged by social conflicts, war, and/or mass violence.

You can find the program here – PROGRAM

This conference is organized in partnership with The Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory (University of Belgrade), The American University of Paris, the Centre de relations Internationales (SciencesPo-CERI), and The Faculty of Media and Communications (Belgrade).

FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2022 – SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2022

This summer course, held in Paris and Cres, explores various dimensions of what the historian of ideas Itzvan Hont calls “The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind”: the enduring tension/contradiction between our mixed belongings: our cosmopolitan belonging as natural and moral beings to humanity, on the one hand, and our segmented and conflicted socially constructed belongings (the nation and ethnicity, most notably), on the other. It explores this problem through philosophical investigation (moral philosophy, thick and thin cosmopolitan theory); theoretical and historical studies of nationalism, mass violence, and inter-group conflicts; and the role of collective memories in the perpetuation or transcendence of conflict. Ex-Yugoslavia will be the core empirical focus of the course, which will be held alongside the international conference Re-inventing/reconstructing cosmopolitanism in contested spaces and post-conflict zones in Cres, Croatia. Students will participate in the conference and have the unique opportunity to hear from and dialogue with leading ex-Yugoslav psychologists, historians, and social scientists.