We define ‘minority’ as individuals or groups who, because of their non-dominant status, are particularly vulnerable to overreach of authority or threats to their legal protection. Minorities and other vulnerable people can be disadvantaged because of structural social, economic and political inequalities. Too often, such disadvantage translates in various forms of discrimination, sometimes even violence.

At the Alfred Landecker Programme, we facilitate cross-disciplinary conversation and research on how the protection of such minorities can be strengthened through legal and democratic mechanisms. We combine scholarship in the disciplines of law, philosophy, political science, religious studies and history.

The Programme is generously supported by the Alfred Landecker Foundation which funds research programmes focusing on the ethics of leadership and the protection of minorities. This mission emerges from the experience of the Holocaust and the collapse of European civilisation in the 1930s. The Programme is named after Alfred Landecker, who, like so many Jewish people, was murdered as a result of Nazi anti-Semitism.

The Programme participates in the network ‘Religion, ethnicity, and politics in German, Dutch and Anglo-American contexts: nationalism and the future of democracy’.

This network, including partners from Cambridge, Yale, Utrecht, Göttingen, Helsinki, and Prague, aims to generate in-depth cross-disciplinary study of religion, ethnicity, race and politics. This collaboration seeks to recover a careful contextualisation of the appeal of populism in various European nations as well as the United States of America. For more information, email marietta.vandertol@bsg.ox.ac.uk.

The Programme regularly collaborates with the Oxford Programme on International Peace and Security, Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the Blavatnik School of Government. For more information, email federica.dalessandra@bsg.ox.ac.uk.