PROGRAMM

In his recent book, the French political scientist and major authority on secularism and political Islam, OLIVIER ROY, investigates the effects of globalization on the erosion of Western culture. Identity politics, for him, marks the end of culture, understood as the complex yet understandable codes that we breathe in while growing up in a community. He does not criticize identity politics for betraying universalism but for trading complexity for fluidity, for replacing existing compound cultural identities with “box identities.” In conversation with IWM Permanent Fellow IVAN KRASTEV, Olivier Roy will explain why he believes that deculturation inevitably ends with dehumanization.

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OLIVIER ROY is a professor at the RSCAS and an adjunct professor at the School of Transnational Governance (European University Institute, Florence). He received an “Agrégation de Philosophie” (1972), a Ph.D. in political sciences (1996), and a habilitation to supervise theses (2000, Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris). His most recent book is The Crisis of Culture (Hurst/ Oxford University Press, 2024).