The new western plurality and citizen co-existence
A two year project between the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and CURA has resulted in a series of blog post articles on topics of “Global Migration and the New Cosmopolitanisms: Religion, Public Ethics, and Citizenship in Plural Societies”.
Find Director Bob Hefner’s article on “The new western plurality and citizen co-existence” on the University of Notre Dame’s blog Contending Modernities.
An excerpt from the article:
“Two developments over the past generation have presented serious challenges to the ideals and practice of Western citizenship. The first has been an unprecedented expansion of migration to Western countries, including that from Muslim societies and the broader global south. It goes without saying that the migratory vectors of our age pass not just from south to north, but across countries of the developing world. But the late-modern march of humanity to Western lands is of such a scale and complexity that it has raised questions about existing models of pluralist citizenship—a challenge which has been exacerbated by its cultural timing. In the aftermath of the great secularist surges of the 1960s and 1970s, most Western European and North American countries had reached a new consensus on the place of religion in public life. But many new immigrants brought with them, or discovered in their new homelands, different ideas as to how and where to be religiously observant.”