Organised by Dr Maruška Svašek and Prof John Connelly in collaboration with the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, and the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.

This digital conference seeks to investigate the nature of troubling and persistent divisions in human societies, divisions that perpetuate internal strife and often keep societies from cohering as politics that might produce stable governance. Examples are contemporary Bosnia, Kashmir and Northern Ireland, or historical Bohemia, Transylvania and Lebanon. In these places, a special kind of ‘affective relatedness’ (Jan Slaby) connects people on one side of these divides, while dramatically separating them from those on the outside.