Anja Fahlenkamp gives Impacters Talk at University of Cambridge

Faiths In Tune's Director Anja Fahlenkamp gave an Impacters Talk at the University of Cambridge in August 2014 in the context of the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship.

Her talk "On Conflicts and Identity" highlights the multifaceted nature of conflicts, in which identities play an important role to mobilize confrontation. Anja stresses the importance of looking beyond oppositional identities which are at the surface of conflicts in order to address the root causes of conflicts, and at the same time advocates for us to converge under our common human identity and not accept differences of identity as an unavoidable cause of confrontation.

"I wouldn't take the media approach and say that every conflict is about nothing but identity... Irreconcilable differences between Muslims and Jews... It just had to end in confrontation... - I wouldn't take that approach. We have to ADRESS THE CAUSES, that interest of conflict, that inequality, that injustice that makes people feel that urgency in the first place! But I wouldn't bet all my money on it, because there are always going to be people who have more than others. WHAT WE CAN DO is converge and prove those wrong, that try to convince us that our identities can't change and that our identities inherently make us different and at put us at the mercy of someone else because they are so different from us... We can PROVE THEM WRONG and show them that we actually have one identity that we share - our identity as HUMANS."