Migration - Integration - Diversity: Immigration and Security

In the post-9/11 world, every democracy faces the conundrum of how to reconcile the interests of open society and of security. All of the world’s major democracies are multicultural societies which struggle to manage tensions between minority and majority populations and to address the challenges involved in integrating immigrant or domestic minority populations into the majority society. In recent decades, the visibility of multiple national identities and of transnational religious identities have posed a new set of challenges and opportunities. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States and later attacks on targets in London, Spain, Morocco, Indonesia, India and Turkey, carried out by radical Islamist networks operating against and within liberal democracies, bring fresh urgency to these questions.

The Citizenship and Security Program intends to bring together people working on policy in the fields of immigration/minority issues and national security, particularly counter-terrorism, and to share experience across four countries: US, India, France and Germany .

As a significant part of the Program’s work, we plan to hold four major conferences, one in each of the four countries we are examining. Each of the conferences will focus primarily on the aspect of citizenship and security that is most pertinent to the host country, though each will also include panels that draw on the experiences of the other regions. Our (very tentative) themes for our four conferences are:

Berlin – “Immigration and Security - European Challenges and International Perspectives” (March 2006)
New York - Citizenship & Security: America's Confrontation with Terror (September 2006)
New Delhi - Communal Conflicts and Cross-border Incursions: India's Search for Harmony and Security (partnership: Centre for Policy Research) (March 2007)
Paris - Citizenship & Security: Learning from Each Other (partnership: Center for the Study of Conflicts and the Center for International Studies and Research, CERI) (September 2007)