Sonia M Barek-Rais: Sustainable development and cultural policies in the Arab world

On The June 8, 2020

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Video-conference seminar.

The region is currently undergoing major changes at the political, economic, social and cultural-technological levels. The question we will try to answer is the following: To what extent, and in what ways, could culture, as a cross-cutting tool for sustainable development, be a driving force in the reshaping of cultural policies in the region?

The adoption of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in September 2001, followed by the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in 2005, symbolically represents the international recognition of the centrality of culture as a pillar of sustainable development.
In this respect, the review of the Millennium Development Goals in 2010, as well as the UN Agenda 2030, explicitly formulate how essential it is to feed cultural strategies and policies at the national level, in order to go beyond the sectoral interests of the world of arts and culture, and to broaden them to include urban, rural, global and sustainable development issues. It is within this framework that we focus our research on cultural policies in the Arab world and sustainable development.

Sonia M Barek-Rais holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Faculty of Law and Political Science of Tunis -el Manar (2017); she is Master Assistant at the University of Tunis (ISMT) since 2004 and Associate Researcher at IRMC (2018). She is a 2019-2020 fellow of the Collegium de Lyon.