Welcome
The IDIU Network aims to promote dialogue among different religions, spiritual and humanistic traditions in a world where conflicts are increasingly associated with religious belonging.
Dear colleagues and friends,
As the current convenor of the UNITWIN Network for Inter-Religious Dialogue and Intercultural Understanding (IDIU), it gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to our website.
Our Network is a collaborative forum comprised of UNESCO Chairs working in the broad area of inter-religious dialogue and intercultural understanding. The Network currently includes 31 Chairs spread over 27 countries.
Our collective objective is to construct, implement, and disseminate research around intercultural and interreligious relations that is at once of the highest calibre and of immediate relevance to the communities we serve. We hope that not only UNESCO and other UN agencies, but also other stakeholders from academe, NGOs, government, philanthropy, media and industry will engage with our Network especially when the issues discussed pertain to cultural and religious diversity as well as the situation of vulnerable minorities in plural societies.
As individual UNESCO Chair-holders collaborating within this Network, our research endeavours and public engagements are guided not only by UNESCO’s overall mission of engendering social peace and intercultural understanding, but also our professional ethics of rigor, objectivity and critical analysis.
This website is intended to reflect those same guiding principles and will be used by members of the Network to disseminate relevant activities of their Chairs and to announce significant developments in research, policy and practice. It is also aimed that the website will function as a repository for showcasing best-practice models and resources for ethical engagement with diversity in all its manifestations.
I hope you will engage with this website by accessing resources, providing information about relevant activities and publications and above all by giving us your honest feedback on how we can improve this virtual space for the benefit of all us.
With Kind Regards,
Prof Fethi Mansouri, Deakin University-Australia
UNESCO Chair, Cultural Diversity and Social Justice
UNTWIN (IDIU) Convenor