Contributors:

Antonio Pinto Ribeiro
Arjun Appadurai
Emilio Rui Vilar
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Eunice De Souza
Filip de Boeck
Jorge Sampaio
Jorge Vala
Karen Armstrong
Katerina Brezinova
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches
Ming Tiampo
Mustapha Tlili
Ruy Duarte de Carvalho
Sherifa Zuhur

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'.

Foreword by Emílio Rui Vilar    

Introduction by António Pinto Ribeiro    

Notes on Contributors    

Dialogue, Risk and Conviviality by Arjun Appadurai    

Identity and Violence: Towards a Critique of Amartya Sen by Dipesh Chakrabarty    

Literature and Intercultural Dialogue by Eunice de Souza

Death Matters: Intimacy, Violence and the Production of Social Knowledge by Urban Youth in the Democratic Republic of Congo by Filip De Boeck    

Difference and Similarity: The Burden of Identity by Jorge Vala    

Can We Live Without the Other? by Karen Armstrong

A Quarrel about Diversity? The Post-Communist Czech Republic vis-à-vis the New Realities of Difference by Katerina Brezinova

Vulnerability, Spaces and the Building of Borders by Manuela Ribeiro Sanches

Distance and Mobility: Towards a New Understanding of Modernism by Ming Tiampo    

Europe and Islam: Shared History, Shared Identity,Shared Destiny by Mustapha Tlili    

Time to Listen to the ‘Other’ while the “Other” still Exists, before All That’s Left is the Other… Or A Neo-animist Pre-manifesto byRuy Duarte de Carvalho    

An Intercultural Approach to the Issue of Islamic Extremism by Sherifa Zuhur    

Closing Session by Jorge Sampaio