Reykjavik, Iceland 28–30 November 2016
The topic of this three-day history conference was Nordic Labour, broadly defined, including the history of work, history of workers and the history of labour movements. The aim was to bring together scholars and students who specialize in different areas of Nordic labour history to discuss findings from a Nordic comparative perspective, as well as to add a global perspective. EDDA and the Faculty of History and Philosophy at University of Iceland hosted the conference which was held at the universities main building. The organization of the conference was a collaboration between few institutes but the main organization was with EDDA Research Center, the Faculty of History and Philosophy, University of Iceland and ARAB, Swedish Labour Movement Archive and History.
The conference programme is available here.
Anne Flaspöler, Postdoctoral Researcher at the EDDA Center of Excellence, has recently published the article “Adding Peacekeepers to the Debates of Critical Liberal Peacebuilding: New Insights from the Perspective of Peacekeeping Training in Africa” in the academic journal Peacebuilding. The article explores the implication of peacekeeping training for the current debates of the critical liberal peacebuilding scholarship, more specifically the concepts of “hybrid peace” and “recourse to localism”. In so doing, it looks at the training realities presented by two case studies, the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center (Ghana) and the African Center for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (South Africa). This shows the training centers’ struggle to accommodate the demands posed by the complexities of today’s peace support operations while creating an active learning environment. Based on these findings, the article discusses what they reveal for the operationalisation of the concepts of “hybrid peace” and “recourse to localism”, identifying the challenges of their non-prescriptive nature and dismissal of standardisation for the peacekeeping training context.
The EDDA Research Center hosts an international conference entitled Future of Democracy, which will be held May 20–21 2016 at the lecture hall of the National Museum of Iceland (Þjóðminjasafn). The two-day conference, which is part of a research project funded by The Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS), will be followed by a citizens meeting at the Reykjavík City Theatre (Borgarleikhúsið). The conference will deal with various perspectives of participatory and deliberative approaches, asking how and in what respect they can improve democracy and democratic choices. In addition, practitioners, activists and researchers will present actual democratic experiments for discussion, both focused on Icelandic cases and on experiments from around the world. The aim is to have a useful critical discussion of innovative projects and exercises.
Together with the Berlin-based Institute of Cultural Diplomacy (ICD), EDDA hosts the “Reykjavik Roundtable on Human Rights: Democratic Accountability, State Sovereignty, and International Governance” that will be held on 28 April 2016 at the National Heritage Building in Reykjavík. The purpose of the conference is to gather academics, judges and defense lawyers at the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, politicians, and human rights representatives at the Council of Europe and other institutions to discuss the tension between human rights regimes and Great Power politics. Panel themes include human rights violations and state sovereignty; democratic accountability, transnational rights, and international obligations; the mediation of human rights protection in the United Nations; human rights conventions: international governance, state prerogatives, and non-state involvement.
EDDA, in collaboration with the United Nations University Gender Equality Studies and Training Programme (UNU-GEST) and the Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs is organizing an international conference entitled “Inclusive Peace: Women, Peace and Security Post 2015”. The conference will take place on 14 – 15 April 2016 at the National Museum of Iceland, Lecture Hall, in Reykjavík.
