India-United States Scholarly Dialogue on Affirmative Action

On September 29-30th, 2007, the Institute of Social Sciences held a conference titled “India-United States Scholarly Dialogue on Affirmative Action” in collaboration with the Ash Institute and the African American Policy Forum (AAPF).

Drawing from the experience of the Bellagio preparatory consultation (=>), which was followed by the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance 2001), the AAPF proposed to discuss together how every discipline (political science, sociology, anthropology, law, etc.) can provide input on better defining, drawing the contours of discrimination in India and the United States, and define common research areas that would help better understand discrimination and affirmative action.

The introductory statement of Gower Rizvi (Director of the Ash Institute) highlighted how important an issue discrimination and affirmative action was among democracies, which are hosting increasingly plural societies. Kimberle Crenshaw (Executive Director of the AAPF and Professor of Law, UCLA and Columbia University) then introduced the agenda of the conference and noted that civil society in every country faces organized antagonistic reactions from the governments when requesting affirmative action. This thus creates a need for the international civil society to organize and share knowledge, to better anticipate and fight those governments and secure affirmative action remedies to discrimination.

Very interesting! The outcome of this conference is yet to be seen. Surely, all participants leaned a lot from each other’s experience.

~ par bheroux le 3.octobre.2007.