Under the High Patronage of His Excellency the President of the Republic General Michel Aoun, and within the framework of the Month of Francophonie, the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK) organized a colloquium entitled: “Living Together and State Neutrality: The test of radicalization, identity withdrawal and global upheavals”.

This event, hosted by the Research Center on Minorities in the Middle East (RCMME), in collaboration with the Centre de recherche Société, Droit et Religions de l'Université de Sherbrooke (SoDRUS), took place on March 14, 15 and 16, 2018 in Jean El Hawa Auditorium.

This colloquium deals with the issue of living together as a notion, concept, socio-cultural phenomenon and political arrangement. In these three dimensions, living together is recognized as one of the main global issues affecting secular states, clerical and religious regimes, and pluralistic, ethno-cultural societies in the age of globalization, the opening up of markets, the decline of the territorial state, secularization and accelerated urbanization.

Accordingly, humanity is acquiring a more diversified profile and now resembles a global village wherein ethnic and religious loyalties as well as places of encounter and mixed backgrounds all over the world are increasingly pluralized. As a result, the concept of living together becomes a space where the scales of values, customs and ways of life clash. These clashes occur either between the dominant features in urban and rural areas respectively, or between the various interests of the social classes affected by the ongoing industrialization in its various phases.

The self-defined mandate of this colloquium is to focus on the political and civic commitment of powers and authorities towards the various universal and national human rights declarations and to the 2015 Montréal Declaration on Living Together. This applies especially to those powers and authorities in the fields of education on citizenship, integration and inclusion.