Proposals Call for Fourth Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey in Sweden 2018

Stockholm University was founded in 1878 with the ambition to reinvent higher education in Sweden, and is today characterized by its openness, innovation and collaboration. From the beginning, close contact with the wider world as well as the active exchange of knowledge and experience have been integral to this vision. With a global perspective and through partnerships with others, the university contributes to the development of knowledge through education and research.

The Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS) invites proposals for the Fourth Annual European Symposia on Turkey to discuss the theme “Societal Conflict and Cohabitation in Turkey and Beyond”. The Symposium will be held in Stockholm from November 29 to December 1, 2018, and will help people better understand the processes and mechanisms that underlie societal conflict in Turkey. Like most diverse societies, Turkey has seen peaceful co-existence as well as communal tension in some instances that has escalated into collective violence. The risk of societal strife in Turkey in the years to come appears high, and fallout from such conflict can be expected in European countries with large diaspora groups from Turkey. Many towns and cities in Turkey are ethnically and religiously diverse and everyday interactions are predominantly peaceful. Thus, we need to understand why in some cases societal conflicts escalate into collective violence while in other cases, the tensions exist but societal disputes are contained by formal or informal institutional mechanisms.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

[1] Case studies (historical and contemporary) of inter-group relations and conflicts

[2] Examinations of peace processes, mediation, and/or conflict transformation attempts

[3] The dynamics of conflict and inter-group relations and the dynamics of peace and cooperation

[4] Societal violence and the state

[5] Societal conflict in a regional and global setting (Syrian civil war, migration, and global nationalist-populist-authoritarian trends)

[6] Comparative studies, including comparing cases where large-scale societal violence broke out with those where it did not

[7] The psychology of mass violence

[8] The (political) economy of societal conflict and cooperation/cohabitation

Contributions from all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities (both quantitative and qualitative) and interdisciplinary and comparative work in collaborative form are encouraged.

Funding is available for intra-European airfare and local public transportation and accommodation in Sweden. For co-authored papers, funding will be available for one of the authors.