Links
Organizations
The Sant’Egidio Community, Georg Soros’ Open Society, the Goethe Institut. Each in its own way, is a model of NGOs that made of peace, dialogues and understanding among cultures one of their goals. They fund projects, sponsor events or are even directly committed in peace processes, as in the case of the Sant’Egidio Community. Their websites.
Institutions
What do big institutions do in order to promote dialogue among civilizations? Conferences, symposia, and workshops organized every year by Unesco, the UN agency. The projects of the Arab League and of the European Union, that in the constitutional Treaty states its willingness to contribute to “peace, security, sustainable development of the earth, solidarity and mutual respect among the peoples.”
Think Tanks
It is an English expression that literaly means “tank of ideas”. During the Second World War it stood for secret locations where military chiefs met in order to take crucial decisions. Today it refers to those groups of research, that are committed to specific scientific researches. The think-tank that deal with dialogue among civilizations.
Authors
There are internationally known authors that devote their life to interculture. They represent a crucial point of reference in order to find an orientaton in very complicated issues. There are some websites dedicated to these authors, in several cases they are run directly by them and they are rich of hints, ideas, and audio and video material of great value.
News
Globalization has speeded up the rhythms of migrations, but in the global village the speed of information has increased even more rapidly. The old journals dedicate specific sections to the issues of integration and migration, and new e-magazines open in the internet to provide for intercultural news.
Magazines and Newspapers
The integration of citizens who belong to different cultures within the same community gives rise to more and more intense debates. But also the relationships among States are more and more dominated by cultural issues, as Samuel Huntigton already noticed in 1993. Magazines and newspapers of the world discuss about it. A selection of those papers that are more attentive to dialogue among civilizations.
Islam World
The events that involve countries of the Islamic world are increasingly attracting the attention of the world media, the migration of Muslim citizens gives rise to new challenges for the West that often doesn’t understand or ignores the Islamic world. Some websites in English, French and German can help in better orientating oneself through Muslim traditions and thought.
Arts and Literature
Frequently what politics cannot reach, it has been already reached by art. In the works of artists, as always, one can find traces of problems (and future solutions). Contemporary art experiments with more freedom and audacity. The cinema, that addresses the great audience, is a mirror that is useful to analyze. Artists and writers that deal with the issue of interculture.
Religions
Many believed that the improvements of science and tecnique, the spread of wealth and globalizations would have settled their death. Instead in the last decades, religions come back in the centre of the public scene, answering to a diffuse need of spirituality and/or collective identity, but raising new problems as well. How do religions evolve? Which is their contribution to dialogue among civilizations?
Europe
Europe is in the front-line in the dialogue among civilizations. According to some prominent intellectuals, it is exactly in the Old Continent that the integration between Islam and the West can pruduce its best results. Besides, the reflections and solutions that will come out of the European lab could positevely influence also Arab societies, by helping them in freeing themselves from the chains of the past. In this section, the websites of Euro-Islam.
Memory
Past is often divisive, the still burning wounds of old conflicts may be a burden to the present time. However the discourse of memory cannot be evaded. Its calm and true understanding is an ecceptional challenge for the coexistence of communities. There are projects whose aim is to fulfil the cohabitation through the research of a shared memory. And there are websites about them.
Science and Tecnique
Scientific inventions and the development of technique are fields where the civilizations have always found a great interest in cooperating, as shown by the history of the relationships between the West and the Islamic world. Even if today the latter is not in the van, there was a time when it was there that the new frontiers of technique run. In recent years, several websites were opened in order to remind the richness of intercultural exchanges in the field of scienze and technique.
Blogs
In the Internet jargon a blog is an on-line diary. The term is a contraction of web-log, that is “trace on web”. Since 1997, when the first blogs were opened in America, they have rapidly spread all over the world, and become a real trend. Many intellectuals opened their blogs, where they offer a day by day comment on the events affecting their fields of expertise. A selection of the most interesting blogs from an intercultural perspective.
Multimedia
Internet is a mine of ideas and innovation. Compared to traditional media has a considerable advantage: multimediality, that is the possibility to avail itself of several media of communication, such as images, videos, music, and texts. Some webzines exploite this new potential exactly to better deal with intercultural issues.