Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion
Organization
- Alfred Stepan, Director
- Ahmet Kuru, Deputy Director
Overview
The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) conducts research and training on the interfaces of, and tensions between religion, toleration, and democracy in the world. Directed by Alfred Stepan, Wallace Sayre Professor of Government, it opened in July 2006, with initial funding from the Henry Luce Foundation.
The Center addresses five inter-related themes critical to training the next generation of global leaders and researchers. These themes include: 1) new approaches to religion and international affairs; 2) democracy and religion in research and practice; 3) tolerance, conflict, and religious difference: historical and contemporary issues; 4) religion, human rights and public policy; and 5) experiments in track-two diplomacy: international religious conflict and toleration in sacred sites. The center runs graduate courses, supports student-faculty research initiatives, provides scholarships for students from democratizing Muslim-majority countries, and develops new research networks.
Five projects have thus far been conceived under this umbrella. The first is a project on tolerance, conflict, and religious difference: Akeel Bilgrami, Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities, will convene a lecture series on the political, legal, and philosophical issues surrounding the theory and history of tolerance, and Mark Mazower, Director of the Center for International History, will hold two conferences on the management of religious minorities in the Ottoman and Czarist empires and their legacies. Second, Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, and Jack Snyder, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Relations, will conduct a faculty seminar on new approaches to religion and international affairs. A three-year project on Track Two-Diplomacy and Holy Sites will be developed by Elazar Barkan, Professor of International and Public Affairs and Co-Director of the Human Rights Concentration at SIPA. Fourth, Paul Martin, Executive Director of SIPA's Center for the Study of Human Rights, will lead new faculty/student research projects and develop a new course on Human Rights, Religion, and Public Policy that explore how the implementation of human rights is shaped by political and religious interests at the domestic and international levels. Fifth, Alfred Stepan himself, in addition to working closely with all of these units, will lead a project on democracy and religion with special attention to Islam.
