Publisher's Synopsis
In a world of social instability, cultural conflicts and global mobility, dialogue between peoples offers us our greatest challenge - and our greatest hope for a peaceful, sustainable future.
The latest volume in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's conference series explores the risks we must take, and the possibilities we must have the imagination to create, if we are to build a framework for peaceful co-existence. In the thirteen papers in this collection, scholars and thinkers from disciplines at the forefront of cultural debate bring global perspectives to bear on an issue that is central to all our lives. 'This is an era that will cause us all to cease to be either citizens or barbarians and turn us into citizens of the world,' writes Antonio Pinto Ribeiro in his introduction. The test of a great civilisation, notes Arjun Appadurai in his opening address, lies in its capacity to encompass difference and debate both within itself and between itself and the 'Other'.Can There Be Life Without the Other? challenges each of us to engage with the 'politics of hope'.
