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The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies will host the sixth Annual Conference on the Social Sciences and Humanities during the period from March 18 to March 20, 2017. This year’s meeting will be held at the new campus of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Continuing an annual tradition with the ACRPS, this year’s conference will be devoted to two themes: “Ethics in Arab-Islamic Civilization” and “Arab Youth: Migration and the Future”. Previous conferences in this series have been devoted to “Liberty in Contemporary Arab Philosophy” and “The Arab City: the Challenges of Urbanization in a Transforming Society” (2016); “The Role of Intellectuals in Historical Transformations” and “Universities and Academic Research in the Arab World” (2015); “The Stages of Historical Transition: the Trajectory of the Arab Revolutions” and "Development Policies and the Challenges Posed by the Revolution to Arab Countries" (2014); “Current Definitions of Justice in the Arab World” and “The Dialectics of Social Integration and Nation-building in the Arab Countries” (2013); “Language and Identity in the Arab Homeland” and “From Hampered Growth to Sustainable Development: Which Economic and Social Policies for the Arab Countries?” (2012).

The first theme of the 2017 meeting will be presented through a series of panels and take a broad approach to studying a number of present-day societies which are rooted in Arab-Islamic civilization. The conference organizers have welcomed a wide range of approaches to this broad theme, recognizing that the values and morals of previous eras have been shaken, and that their importance goes beyond academic interest to take in entire societies. The Annual Conference allows scholars the opportunity to explore ethical questions encompassing this fifteen century-old civilization from the broadest possible vantage point, taking in also the interrelationship with the Persian, Hellenic and Indian worlds and their own value systems. Additionally, researchers taking part in the meeting will be invited to explore how contemporary Western societies impact the ethical values of the Arab world, going beyond the merely academic and technical. Specific topics covered in the 2016 Annual Conference include: Islamic morality and questions of modernity; the ethics of genomics and biomedicine; and Islamic ethics within the canon of Sufi and Islamic theological texts.

The second set of parallel sessions will explore how the fragility of Arab social protections, as well as the cost to both individual and collective psychological wellbeing due to internal turbulence in Arab countries and a lack of opportunities, have all incentivized outward migration for the Arab youth. Migration, even if it means risking their lives in perilous sea voyages, has become a ready solution to life’s difficult problems for hundreds of thousands of young Arabs. Papers in this second parallel theme examine the phenomenon of the migration of Arab youth as an ongoing crisis, taking in closely questions such as the brain drain, return migration, academic migration and the labor migration of women. Papers discussed here also take in legislative/legal aspects of migration and its economic and developmental aspects.