Session 4 – IEMed

“Governing Diversity in Polarized Times: Mediterranean Cities and the Ideological Turn”

Wednesday, 25 March 2026 | 12:00-14:00 | Institut d´Estudis Catalans (IEC) Barcelona 

Invited Speakers:

• Sari Hanafi (Professor, Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Media Studies; Director, Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, American University of Beirut)
• Luisa Faustini (Associate Professor, GRITIM-UPF; EuroMedMig Project Officer)
• Amel Boubekeur (Associate Professor, LEST – Laboratoire d’Économie et de Sociologie du Travail, CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université)

Chair: Ricard Zapata-Barrero (Professor, Department of Political and Social Sciences; Director, GRITIM-UPF; Coordinator, EuroMedMig. Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Synopsis

Mediterranean cities and regions have historically served as laboratories for pragmatic and relational diversity governance, relying on coexistence, civil-society engagement and informal practices. In recent years, local and regional diversity policies have undergone an ideological turn, where inclusionary and/or diversity frameworks increasingly intersect with securitization, conditionality, and nativist political narratives. Some contend that certain forms of immigration pose challenges to liberal democratic principles, while others argue that immigrant conservatism can be consistent with the conception of justice and compatible with a pluralistic conception of the good, and is therefore not inherently illiberal. This transformation reflects broader dynamics linked to migration crises, border externalization, and political polarization.
The roundtable examines this phenomenon through three complementary perspectives:
1. Conceptual Perspective: Explores the ideological turn itself, analyzing how local policies actively shape political imaginaries of belonging, social mixing, and urban coexistence.
2. Policy and Governance Perspective: Focuses on concrete instruments such as reception systems, housing allocation, integration programs, and regional inclusion frameworks, highlighting how policy design and implementation can reinforce or mitigate nativist narratives.
3. Critical and Comparative Perspective: Investigates how policies are contested, reframed, or instrumentalized in public discourse, emphasizing the interaction between governance practices and populist or mixophobic mobilization.
By integrating these perspectives, the roundtable provides a holistic understanding of the complex relationship between Mediterranean diversity governance and the ideological pressures shaping local and regional policy environments.

Bios

Sari Hanafi is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He served as President of the International Sociological Association (2018–23) and Vice President of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (2015–16). An International Fellow of the British Academy, he was also the Editor of Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology (2007–22). His contributions to the field have been recognized with some of the Arab world’s most prestigious academic awards, including the Abdelhamid Shouman Award (2014) and the Kuwait Award for Social Science (2015). In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of San Marcos, Peru.

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Luisa Faustini Torres holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Prior to that, she completed a Master in Immigration Management at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2015) and a Master in International Relations at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (2012), where she specialized in global governance and foreign policy. She also holds a B.A. in International Relations from the IBMEC University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her PhD research focused on the nexus between EU external migration policies and the democratization of countries in the Southern Mediterranean neighbourhood (with a focus in Morocco as a case study). Her main research interests are international politics, immigration policies and migration diplomacy. She is particularly interested in policy analysis and qualitative research methods (content and text analysis with CAQDAS). Starting from March 2025, she has also become  EuroMedMig project coordinator.

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Amel Boubekeur is a tenure-track Associate Professor of political sociology at Aix-Marseille University, where she holds the Research Chair “Geopolitical Turmoil and Social Transformations in the Mediterranean.” Her research employs comparative political analysis to examine political economy, governance, and religious transformations across the EuroMed region, the Maghreb, and European Muslim communities.