Welcome to the MoroccanCulture Blog

http://newmeaningsofpeaceconference2008.blogspot.com/2008/02/reserach-group-on-culture-and.html
Research Group on Culture and Globalisation (RGCG)
Abdelmalek Essaadi University
Tetuan, Morocco
Organises a conference on:

The New Meanings of Peace after 9/11, 2001
Call for Papers
The idea of peace cannot be adequately formulated in the absence of clearly identified territories of conflict, war, and violence. Peace is not applicable where it does not qualify as imperative and decisive. Different ideas of peace can be negotiated or devised for different zones of trouble. At the end of World War II, peace emerged as a follow-up to the military victory of the Allies against totalitarian regimes that advocated Nazism and dictatorship and exercised genocides and holocausts. With his extreme ideologies and unobstructed territorial ambitions, Adolf Hitler posed a serious threat for Europe and for humanity at large, and as such the restoration of peace in Europe was conditioned by a sweeping military victory of Western democracies and the complete destruction of Hitler’s apparatuses of power. During the Cold War era, peace was both sustained and endangered by the nuclear armament in which both the US and the Soviet Union ferociously and boastfully engaged for most of the second half of the twentieth century. In a context of heightened military and technological rivalry between Western and Eastern blocks, peace depended upon the imminent possibility of a planetary war, and as such was often defined and negotiated in such terms as reciprocal deterrence and parallel power. The supremacy of one side over another represented a fatal threat to the idea of peace in a world that continued to be bi-polar up to 1991, the date that marks the dramatic and unexpected disintegration of the USSR .
On September 11th, 2001, New York and Washington DC were subjected to a surprise terrorist attack that resulted in the death of three thousand civilians and the collapse of two majestic towers in the World Trade Centre, which were claimed by Al-Qaeda Jihadists as the miraculous success of a “divine” conquest at the heart of the West’s most emblematic and thriving of all metropoles. The West bemoaned the horrors of these terrorist attacks, and the Muslim world had to face the glaring reality that Islam had been hijacked by extremists and terrorists to be re-engineered into a tool of mass murder. The events of 9/11, 2001 supplied an alternative arena for the war of ideologies and ideas and hastened the transition from a fading conflict between the democratic camp and the socialist camp to a new and bloody clash between liberalism and Islamism. The most defining markers of the reality of such a new conflict of ideologies was the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the immediate overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Husein as well as the series of terrorist explosions that shook some of the world’s major capitals such as Casablanca, Madrid, London, and Istanbul. However, despite the fact that the conflict between Islamism and liberalism can be best denominated as ideological, the wars on the ground, the casualties, deaths, and serious threats looming on the horizon make the conflict a much more serious threat. The “global war on terror” is not a metaphorical expression even if the armies engaging one another in this war are not conventionally deployed on a neatly bounded battlefield.
The restoration of peace in a world made increasingly volatile by the exercises of terror and the excesses of military power is, however, not dependent this time on a neat military victory of one party over another as was the case in World War II. World peace depends primarily on the spread of a culture of tolerance and the reform of educational, social, and economic policies particularly in non-Western countries and most crucially in the Arabo-Islamic world. World peace is a global pact that cannot be envisaged and achieved with the will-to-power of the world’s most advanced states and in total disregard of the interests and future of poorer countries. The negotiation of world peace today must take place at the most fundamental level of social debate in view of narrowing the gaps between Western and non-Western countries, richer and poorer societies. Peace can only be a shared legacy and a common destiny for humanity. The world can no longer sustain more wars and regional conflicts.
The organisers of this conference invite papers on these proposed topics:
· The culture of peace in the post-9/11 world;
· Peace and democracy;
· Peace and public policy;
· Peace and globalisation;
· Peace and cultural discourse;
· Peace and religion.

Conference Director:

Dr. Jamal Eddine Benhayoun,
jamaleddinebenhayoun@yahoo.co.uk

Date and venue: 19-21 June, 2008 at the Faculty of Humanities, AEU, Tetuan
Abstracts deadline: 24th March, 2008