Divided Societies XXVI

About

Autocracy is on the rise globally according to reports on regime types. Currently, more than two thirds of the world’s population live in autocracies while less than one third live in democracies. Existing autocratic regimes seek to expand their control over most institutions including family, religion, education as well as social and economic relations, thus becoming increasingly totalitarian. The use of new communication technologies including AI in different aspects of political and social life has become an important tool in the quest for a wide societal transformation. Ideology in autocratic and totalitarian regimes sill plays a principal role and is used to define goals of this transformation. This year’s ‘Divided Societies’ course will therefore concentrate on the causes and consequences of the rise of autocracies in different parts of the world, particularly (former) democratic countries as well as totalitarian tendencies in existing autocracies, and ideological movements fighting to take control of political and other institutions. Participants in the course will also explore the outcomes of the current autocratic and totalitarian trends and try to envisage facilitating and impeding factors associated with these trends.

We encourage the participation of students and scholars in the social sciences, law and humanities and other fields and disciplines studying social phenomena such as divisions, cleavages, conflicts, borders, migration, ethnicity and diversity.

This post/graduate course will be organised as a rigorous academic interdisciplinary programme structured around lectures, workshops and conference-oriented presentations of scholarly research. Course participants will engage in active discussions on the theoretical, methodological and practical issues of research in divided societies. Graduate and postgraduate students’ presentations are also welcome. In addition, the course offers personal inter-cultural experiences of students and faculty from other contexts in an unforgettable setting of a city that was itself the target of a destructive conflict.

Course leader

Saša Božić, University of Zadar, Croatia Emilio Cocco, University of Teramo, Italy Simona Kuti, Institute for Migration Research, Zagreb, Croatia Thomas Leahy, Cardiff University, UK Amy Liu, University of Texas, Austin, USA Siniša Malešević, University College Dublin, Ireland Mojca Pajnik, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Nikola Petrović, Institute for Social Research, Zagreb, Croatia Brad Roth, Wayne State University, Detroit, USA Marko Valenta, Norwegian University of Technology, Trondheim Michal Vašečka, Bratislava Policy Institute, Slovakia Srđan Vučetić, University of Ottawa, Canada Jeremy Walton, University of Rijeka, Croatia Daphne Winland, York University, Toronto, Canada Mitja Žagar, Institute of Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Target group

We encourage the participation of students and scholars in the social sciences, law and humanities and other fields and disciplines studying social phenomena such as divisions, cleavages, conflicts, borders, migration, ethnicity and diversity.

Course aim

This post/graduate course will be organised as a rigorous academic interdisciplinary programme structured around lectures, workshops and conference-oriented presentations of scholarly research. Course participants will engage in active discussions on the theoretical, methodological and practical issues of research in divided societies. Graduate and postgraduate students’ presentations are also welcome. In addition, the course offers personal inter-cultural experiences of students and faculty from other contexts in an unforgettable setting of a city that was itself the target of a destructive conflict.

Fee info