Seminars
Since the 1960s, the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation has organised more than 250 seminars, workshops and conferences. These meetings are small and generally last a few days, allowing for in-depth discussion. Participants, who come from government, academia, business, media, civil society organisations and social movements, are invited in their personal capacity, thereby stimulating an open and creative exchange of views.
The seminars are intended to achieve concrete results. Some are conducted in an exploratory manner with the aim to examine new areas, while others are specifically focused on the formulation of detailed policy recommendations.
Here is a list of recent seminars.
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Alexpaglumotan
Faith in Civil Society – Religious Actors as Drivers of Change
Missionskyrkan, S:t Olofsgatan 40, Uppsala, Sweden
Religious associations and communities are increasingly recognized as important social actors across the world. This belies common European assumptions of a universal development path of modernisation and secularisation, wherein religion becomes a privatised matter separate from the realms of politics and public civic culture. Instead, religious faith continues to be a force by which people mobilise around shared identities with spiritual as well as political objectives, sometimes creating vast networks that extend beyond and contest nation-state borders.
The relations between religious organisations and states are complex and varied, from close alliances to open antagonism, where religious actors have different claims to political influence and governance. Sometimes, religious affiliations merge with counter-hegemonic movements for radical social change, whether among marginalised and poor liberation theological Catholics in Latin America, Buddhist monks as the vanguards of the social movement in Burma, or among urban middle-class Muslims during the Arab Spring. In other cases, religious faith motivates fundamentalist projects to re-establish or strengthen conservative social orders.more+/-
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organized by Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development at Uppsala University, in cooperation with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
States have also taken on an increased interest in religious associations, whether as a means to enforce shared values and objectives, to counter terrorism, or to shoulder the task as service providers. This interest is reflected as well in renewed attention within international development cooperation for religious associations, particularly visible in for example Norway, Holland and the UK.
In this conference, we will discuss how to understand these diverse faith-inspired actors, who not always fit neatly within liberal notions of civil society. When are they promoters of social change, democratisation and development, and how do their adherents envision such changes? We invite researchers, actors in international development cooperation, activists, and others with interest in the issues to participate and make presentations during the conference.
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