Building on a long intellectual tradition going back to the late Ottoman period, debates in present-day Turkey on the role of culture and civilisation in world politics, and the relationship between modernity and Islam, are vibrant and ongoing. These debates are inevitably linked to power but the lecture, drawing on the findings of a research project funded by the British Academy, will attempt to move beyond the political maelstrom and focus on the ideas of individual thinkers and intellectual trends in relative isolation.
It will discuss whether there exist, within this body of thought, new possibilities of going beyond the familiar categories of East and West, secularism and Islam. It will ask whether alternative universalist understandings of culture and civilisation in world politics are on offer, or a chimera.
The twin aims of the lecture, and the project, will be to enrich the theoretical study of culture in the discipline of International Relations and contribute to the current public debate on the role of culture in world politics.
Event Details
Speaker: Dr Katerina Dalacoura, LSE
Chair: Dr Zeynep Kaya, LSE
Date: Wednesday 2 March 2016
Time: 18:00-19:30
Event Hashtag: #LSETurkey
Location: Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, LSE
Attendance: Registration for this event is now closed.
Admission is on a first-come-first-served basis even after registration. Not everyone who registers attends our events, so to ensure a full house, we allow more registrations than there are places. Our events are very well attended, so please make sure you arrive early. We cannot guarantee entry.
Speaker
Katerina Dalacoura is Associate Professor in International Relations at LSE. Her research interests include international democracy and human rights norms and Islamism in the Middle East, with special reference to Turkey and Egypt, as well as the international politics of culture and religion, with particular reference to Islam.