The Cairo Papers in Social Science and the newly established Department of Law at AUC invite you to participate in the Law & Development Today Conference scheduled for May 27 th and 28 th in the Oriental Hall at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
This is Cairo Papers 15th annual symposium and comes a little more than twenty years after its publication of the first edition of the “Law and Social Change in Contemporary Egypt.” The volume represents one of the few attempts existing to date to bring together research and insights occurring across the boundaries of different disciplines (sociology, anthropology, and political science) relating to the questions of the role of law in development generally, and in the Egyptian context more specifically. Much has happened in the development field since then.
The purpose of the conference this year is to bring together some of the best authorities in the field of law and development to share with the AUC community their recent work and insights about the role of law in development, and to trigger an inter-disciplinary conversation among professors and students on questions relating to law and development in Egypt.
The participants will revisit old questions, while exploring new themes. For example, despite the long history of engagement of lawyers in development projects and of development institutions in legal reform, can we say that there is a consensus today around a plausible legal theoretical framework to describe the role of law in development? How can we imagine development policy today in the context of shifting boundaries and multiple possible intersections between legal technology and political ideology? What are the conceptual, political, and historical tensions and complementarities between development and transition? What is the space of development? How does violence constitute the field of development? How do development policy makers negotiate the dialectics of destruction and construction, normal and exception, war and peace? How does development constitute and transform the subject? Why is the subject of development woman?
These are just a few of the questions to be explored in this conference, which is the first in a series of conferences organized by the Law Department designed to stimulate and focus debate and reflection on contemporary legal and human rights issues pertinent to Egypt and the region. Bringing law and development experts from the developed and developing worlds together is part of the Law Department’s effort to locate contemporary transformations in Egyptian law, economy, and society in global and comparative contexts.