Background

The International Centre for Human Sciences at Byblos, jointly with partner researchers and institutions in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa, has conducted a series of representative empirical surveys in countries ridden by ethnic, religious and linguistic conflicts: Congo, Georgia, Indonesia, Jordan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Malaysia, Namibia, Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories & Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Rwanda, South Africa, and Zimbabwe; a study on Sri Lanka is under way, using largely identical interview instruments and the same methodology, allowing for exact comparisons.

The foci of the surveys are:

• attitudes of militancy versus conviviality

• attitudes towards democracy

These target variables are compared with psycho-social attitudes (distrust, fear, conservatism, powerlessness and their contrary), perception of economy and society (economic ethics, views of social cleavages, relative deprivation, views of opportunity structures), religious attitudes (belief and practice, opinions on relations between religion and state), self-definition of cultural identities and societal affiliations, and political orientations.

Each case study permits to draw a social map of people inclined to violent conflict, compared to others who believe in and practise coexistence, and of non-democrats and democrats – a map that facilitates a more precise targeting of civic education. Some of the case studies have already served for reshaping programmes of democracy training run by NGO.
 

Objectives

What can be – beyond the horizon of each case – the “added value” of comparison? Can there be “lessons to be learned” of general validity?

The seminar aims at identifying research strategies that may help to answer these questions. It should explore venues of rigorous comparison leading to some (almost) universally valid in­sights on factors producing or reducing conflict-mindedness on the one hand, on the making of non-democrats and democrats on the other.

To reach this goal, the seminar should deal (a) with interpretations on the nature of the con­flicts under study, (b) with case-by-case identification of factors conducive to coexistence and democracy, and (c) with suggestions for selecting areas deserving further in-depth compara­tive analysis.

The expected outcome of the seminar for the purposes of further research is the identification of promising approaches. Should some of these approaches prove to be successful; the “added value” of the whole exercise can be a more solid analysis of factors of conflict as well as of factors of democracy – that is of insights that can be eminently useful for future efforts of democratic conflict regulation.
 

Participants

Participants for the seminar are drawn from the following groups:

• Members of teams which have conducted the above mentioned surveys in various parts of the world and specialists for the surveyed conflict areas, notably Africa, the Middle East and South Asia;

• Specialists in comparative research;

• Specialists in the fields of conflict regulation and promotion of democracy.
  

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