Conference organizers: Academics Stand Against Poverty and Juris North

This conference will bring together academics, non-governmental organizations and activists to present, explore, and discuss ways in which we may address worldwide current issues by means of global justice. The conference takes place at a key moment for global justice. Contemporary events such as the rise of Islamic State and state failure/potential dismemberment from the caucus regions to the Middle East, the ongoing Israel-Palestine difference, the Ukrainian Crisis and Russia’s foray into Crimea, the socio-political crisis in Venezuela, the European Union facing Brexit are a few examples of domestic, regional and international multi-layered crisis .

The aim of the conference is to provide a forum for debate over some key issues (poverty, access, dispute resolution and terrorism) ranging between particular case studies to their  global impact, and including analysis of political, sociological, legal, policy, and everyday conceptualizations. The conference will provide a forum to analyze developments, and seek to discern underlying social, legal and political processes to address them.

The conference papers will have the following objectives:

1. To produce a lexical, syntactic, and semantic description of the language being used by different disciplines when using the terms such as “poverty”, “access”, “dispute”, “conflict”, “sovereignty”, “terrorism” and variation between speakers and groups of speakers—i.e. that of politicians, academics, and public in general.
2. To evaluate whether we need to redefine “conflict” to reflect the complexity of current conflicts and the difficulty of fitting them into existing categorizations (inter-state, intra-state, domestic, regional, global).
3. Conflict is usually viewed entirely in negative terms. To reflect on how conflict may be a positive mechanism for social change and what can be learnt/taken from situations of conflict to be applied in other contexts.

The conference papers will have test the following hypotheses:

1. Politicians, academics, and public in general will display different linguistic features when referring to “poverty”, “access”, “dispute”, “conflict”, “sovereignty”, “terrorism” depending on country of origin and historical involvement in the conflict as well as personal and/or national agenda.
2. Conflicts are defined by legal science, political science, international relations and many other sciences but also by non-rational factors such as emotion and passion.
3. By neutralizing non-rational factors that cause bias in assessing conflicts, these conflicts may be resolved through a joint approach.

Key areas of discussion include:

• Poverty
• Access (to health, education, justice)
• Dispute resolution
• Terrorism

It is intended that papers from the conference will be collected for publication.

CALL for PAPERS

We look for contributions that will deepen and broaden understanding of how conflict may me a positive force for change (key areas: poverty, access, dispute resolution and terrorism).

We hope to attract contributions from different disciplinary approaches and backgrounds, including those outside of the mainstream of theories of global justice.

If you would like to participate, please send an abstract (no more than 500 words long and written in English). If email your abstract to Dr Jorge E. Núñez j.nunez@mmu.ac.uk.

Deadline for submission: Friday 31^st August 2018

General Enquiries: Dr Jorge E. Núñez j.nunez@mmu.ac.uk