38 | DIVIDED SOCIETIES XXV

Recent decades have seen a marked polarisation of opinion in many democracies as voters become more firmly attached to opposing camps that are moving further apart. Polarisation is associated in part with the emergence of new social cleavages between the winners and losers of globalisation and the mobilisation of opposition to immigration and to economic and cultural globalisation. A new generation of right-wing populists has gained ground and support has increased for authoritarian figures who base much of their appeal on chauvinistic nationalism. Much of the blame for the increasing spread of ill-informed and xenophobic ideas is laid at the door of social media and other new information and communication technologies.

These trends are felt especially keenly in deeply divided societies where recent histories of violent conflict and special arrangements for governance amplify the effect of increased polarisation: in Northern Ireland, for example, where the UK’s exit from the EU stoked tensions around the Irish border and unsettled the 1998 peace agreement; or in Bosnia where resurgent nationalism threatens to undo the settlement of the 1990s.

In this year’s Divided Societies course we examine the growth of political polarisation with a special focus on the impact on deeply divided societies. Among the themes of interest are changing attitudes to immigration; relations between ethnonational groups; the role of social networks and other new technologies; electoral politics; the state; new social cleavages; and the dynamics of political violence in democracies. We will also consider the factors that inhibit polarisation and the possibility of slowing or reversing these trends.

We encourage the participation of students and scholars in the social sciences, law and humanities and other fields and disciplines studying social phenomena such as divisions, cleavages, conflicts, borders, migration, ethnicity and diversity.

This post/graduate course will be organised as a rigorous academic interdisciplinary programme structured around lectures, workshops and conference-oriented presentations of scholarly research. Course participants will engage in active discussions on the theoretical, methodological and practical issues of research in divided societies. Graduate and postgraduate students’ presentations are also welcome. In addition, the course offers personal inter-cultural experiences of students and faculty from other contexts in an unforgettable setting of a city that was itself the target of a destructive conflict.

 

Lecturers:

Thomas Blanchet, Nexus Institute, Berlin, Germany

Saša Božić, University of Zadar, Croatia

Emilio Cocco, University of Teramo, Italy

Angela Jain, Senate Chancellery of Berlin, Germany

Hans Liudger Dienel, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

Margareta Gregurović, Institute for Migration Research, Zagreb, Croatia

Mostafa Khalili, Kyoto University, Japan

Simona Kuti, Institute for Migration Research, Zagreb, Croatia

Srđan Vučetić, University of Ottawa, Canada

Niall Ó Dochartaigh, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Mojca Pajnik, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Nikola Petrović, Institute for Social Research, Zagreb, Croatia

Brad Roth, Wayne State University, Detroit, USA

Reynolds Scott-Childress, State University of New York, New Paltz, USA

Marco Wedel, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

Daphne Winland, York University, Toronto, Canada

Mitja Žagar, Institute for Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia

The course offers ECTS credits for PhD, MA and graduate students (3-5 ECTS; 3 ECTS for participation, 5 ECTS for participation with presentation).