Component Leaders: Professors Akeel Bilgrami and Mark Mazower
 

We at CDTR believe that the current crisis in the area of international relations, tolerance, and religious conflict has been exacerbated by a “misreading” of Western Europe’s actual historical experience with religious conflicts, and the broad range of domestic and international policy patterns used, in Western Europe and elsewhere, to moderate—or at times to intensify—these conflicts. CDTR therefore attempts to expand our imaginations concerning possible new approaches to managing religious conflict in the modern world by two ambitious projects.

A. Public Lectures and Seminars on “The Theory and History of Tolerance: Political, Legal and Philosophical Issues”

Leader: Professor Akeel Bilgrami, in collaboration with the Heyman Center for the Humanities

This project component involves a three year series on “The Theory and History of Tolerance: Political, Legal and Philosophical Issues” open to the entire university. During the spring of 2007, six public lectures engage in an analysis of the Western European tradition of intolerance and tolerance in religion and politics. In the sixteenth century, different Christian groups were generally intolerant towards each other, and in most countries, the dominant political groups were intolerant towards minority religions. A useful comparative question then is: Given a religious, social, and political context in which intolerance is the dominant discourse and practice how—if ever—does tolerance emerge as the dominant discourse and practice?

In 2007/2008, we will then use this background to help us explore these issues in a comparative perspective, inviting scholars from South Asia, Iran, Indonesia, and Egypt for an international conference on “Domestic and International Factors in the Evolution of Practices of Intolerance and Tolerance”.

In 2008/2009, we will return to the format of public lectures and invite six speakers to examine the “Effects of Globalization on Issues of Toleration and the Secular”. Invited speakers will be asked to broadly discuss the strains on liberal doctrine and practice and the state by looking at phenomena such as: minority issues in France, Germany, the UK and Scandinavia; problems of multiculturalism exacerbated by international demographic changes and migrations of peoples as well as ideas; the travel of human rights ideals, resistance to such ideals as they travel to the southern hemisphere; their failure to be made conceptually vernacular for the southern countries; as well as resistance to human rights ideals by minorities in Europe.

B. Conferences and Creation of an International Faculty/Student Network on the National and International Management of Religious Minorities in the Ottoman and Czarist Empires and Their Legacies.

Leader: Mark Mazower, in collaboration with the Harriman Institute.

Mazower’s most recent book Salonica: Relations of Tolerance among Muslims, Jews, and Christians from 1450-1950 won wide academic and popular acclaim. Mazower will create an international network of people and institutions concerned with the above topic by hosting international conferences on the “National and International Management of Religious Minorities in the Ottoman and Czarist Empires” in the fall of 2007 and on “Out of Empire: Trajectories of Secular Rule, 1920-2005” in the fall of 2008.