This Global Policy webinar will explore complex processes of secularization in religiously dominated societies.
The ongoing protests in Iran have sparked debates across the world on a range of socio-political issues, including processes of secularisation, within states and also globally. At stake are questions of authority, legitimacy, pluralism, freedom, and power. Also at stake are the political fates of silenced and dissenting voices. This Global Policy webinar will explore some of the complex interactions between religious and secular ideals and political practices in Iran, Turkey, North Africa, and Israel. These case studies on changing state-society relations will take stock of the ‘states’ of secularism and secularisation, challenging the idea of a neat geographical and ideological divide between a secular West and religiously dominated non-Western societies.
Panellists:
• Professor Bettina Koch (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University): Challenging Islamist Narratives: Secularism in Twentieth-Century Arab Discourses.
• Dr Ali Fathollah-Nejad (American University of Beirut and McCloy Fellow on Global Trends of the American Council of Germany): Secularism, Counter-hegemony and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
• Dr Volkan Ertit (Adana Alparslan Turkes Science and Technological University): Is God Dying in Turkey as well?
• Dr Rory McCarthy (Durham University): Patterns of Secularism in North Africa.
• Professor Clive Jones (Durham University): Missing in Action? Secularism and the Reframing of the Israeli State.
Please see here to reserve a spot.
Image: Photo by tyler hendy