The Institute will focus on a more ideational approach to understanding human activity in this centre. Whereas the Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Sciences can, in this sense, be seen as examining the social, political and economic macro-structural dynamic of interconnected local and global crises, the Centre for Philosophical and Ideological Studies will aim to unearth the micro-agential conglomerate of philosophies, ideologies, belief-systems and value-systems pertaining to different peoples, governments and institutions worldwide. The following key disciplines are therefore considered integral to the Centre’s work: philosophy and scientific philosophy; anthropology; systematic ideology; cultural studies; and religious studies. Methods, theories and data from all these five fields will be drawn in order to integratively analyze the fundamental components and architecture of influential philosophies, ideologies, cultural spheres and religious beliefs within the global system, and their specific relationship to the generation of different categories of crisis.

A central motive for this research is to consistently connect this ideational dimension of human activity to the systematic generation of local and global crises. The Centre’s subsidiary objective, then, is to inject critical analysis in the social sciences with a firm and sophisticated understanding of the ideational core of social structural motion. Moreover, the Centre’s overarching objective is to contrast the latter with a more accurate and harmonious understanding of human affairs in relation to the natural world. By moving towards a clearer grasp of this relationship through critical scientific, philosophical and ideological inquiry, a more realistic conception of the optimum modes of human activity capable of sustaining a healthy socio-psychological lifestyle in tandem with a natural and sustainable social structural organization can be discerned.

Proposed Research Programme:

Exploring the ideological assumptions and value system that underlies the way western institutions of power govern the international system, and their linkage to policies that are destructive of social life.

Subject areas:

Collateral damage and western security policies: torture, interventions and the contempt for human rights
Globalization and the free market: The hidden values of capital accumulation
Trends in the expansion of state social control policies: anti-terrorism, mental health, social inequalities, and juvenile crime and delinquency - the failure of the western liberal welfare state?
Just or unjust wars? The (non?) ethics of terrorism and counterrorism: toward an alternative ethical paradigm of security
The clash of barbarisms and the ethics of violent extremism: The West, Islam and the legitimization of political violence
Another world is possible: towards new values and ethics for an alternative system of grassroots participation, human rights and social justice.