Bahá’í Chair Conference on Civilizations
The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace will present “Civilizations in Embrace: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Ideas, Peace, and World Order,” a conference to be held from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Monday, March 21, in the Juan Ramon Jiménez Room (#2208) at the University of Maryland Adele Stamp Student Union.
Samuel Huntington’s 1993 “Clash of Civilizations” essay, which provided considerable intellectual justification for the war on terror and blinded many people to its excesses, has received much attention and created considerable controversy. However, the history of civilizations has many positive effects, and may thus be told not in terms of blood, treasure, and conflict, but of convergence of ideas, identity, and mutual benefit. Even today, civilizations continue to learn from each other.
On March 21, 2016, the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace will hold an all-day conference looking precisely at this issue. The list of speakers so far includes:
Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies in the School of International Service at American University, Washington, DC
Professor Amitav Acharya, UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance in the School of International Service at American University, Washington DC; Former President of the International Studies Association (2014–2015)
Professor Paul-Henri Bischoff, Professor and Head of Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa
Professor Navnita Chadha Behera, Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Delhi in New Delhi, India
More speakers to be announced on the Bahá’í Chair’s website.
This conference will explore the variety of ways, including pacific ways, in which civilizations have borrowed and exchanged ideas and engaged in mutual learning both through history and in modern times. Some of the more important historical examples include the borrowings by classical Greece from the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Persian civilizations, by China and Southeast Asia from the Indian civilization, and above all, by the West, from the Islamic, Chinese, and Indian civilizations.
Dr. Hoda Mahmoudi, the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace, commented on the conference saying, “No civilization is entirely distinct from the influence of others. This conference explores the many ways in which civilizations in our contemporary world continue to learn from each other, as is evident in the development and diffusion of ideas such as human development, human security, and responsible sovereignty. Such concepts were developed by non-Western intellectuals and actors in collaboration with their Western counterparts.”
This conference is jointly organized by the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland and the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at American University in Washington, DC.
The Bahá’í Chair for World Peaceis a renowned academic program within the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. It uses interdisciplinary discourse to examine the way actors and institutions effect social change and transform society.
For more information on the Bahá’í Chair and to read about the conference, please visit the Bahá’í Chair website, or connect on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Published on Wed, Mar 2, 2016 - 3:19PM