An international group of academics, researchers and practitioners working in the various areas of social sciences, justice and philosophy

To bring together academics, intellectuals and practitioners from all parts of the world;

To engage in the fundamental discussion about the relevance of social communication theory and practice, risk and ethics for major problems of our times;

To provide continuity to and to develop excellence in interdisciplinary research by means of an institutional and administrative setting;

To build a center at the crossroad among law and justice, social and political sciences and ethics.

Social Communication holds for communicative interaction. As far as inter-subjectivity is involved in communication, each of the participants acts / behaves in reaction to the other. In communicative interaction people do not find reality; rather they create reality.
Social Problems are to be considered as social facts that are perceived or interpreted as problems by people who live together and inter-act.
If communicative interaction is the place of reality creation, and if social facts, to be perceived and interpreted as problems, presuppose inter-subjectivity and communicative interaction, communicative interaction is then necessarily also the place for problem solution and/or regulation.

Many of our major social problems develop because communicating people misunderstand each other or because they have difficulty to communicate or because they won't or cannot communicate either. This phenomenon is observable at all levels of the social life - between governors and governed, between justice actors and the users of justice, between educators and users of education, between teachers and schoolboys/ girls, between parents and children, between people who share different religious beliefs and belong to different religious and or ethnic communities, between scientific producers of knowledge and the profiteers and consumers of knowledge, between the major actors of the public institutions ( justice, police, health, education).

Through partial or total lack of communication people increasingly behave in unsocial or anti social manner. Either they isolate themselves one from each other or they communicate by means of deviance and crime or they use physical violence as means of communication, which is a contradiction.

A new psychic reality of interaction between the participants is raised in the sphere of interpersonal communication, in which each of the actors raises, takes part in or "sustains" the risk.
This is the beginnings of Communicative Risk Theory. Communicative Risk Theory's basic aim is to determine those inherent and external elements of communicative situation that are susceptible to regulate communication's risk potential by influencing on the elements of the communicative situation regulate its risk potential. By risk potential we understand communicative situations' risk to culminate into unsocial or anti -social behavior: isolation, self -destruction and crime.

Like Aristotle and Kant before him, Habermas seeks to ground the moral validity of an act - its morally just nature - by means of its universalization. This assumes that the moral validity of human action is rooted in reason and depends upon its objectivity and universality, not upon cultural diversity and difference.

"All affected can accept the consequences and side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternatives possibilities of regulation)"

Habermas p.65

This principle of universalization is associated to the principle of discussion according to which only those norms that have been accepted (or are susceptible to be accepted) by all participants in a practical discourse can pretend to be valid.

Risk is involved in the principle of universalization in this that the acceptance of the consequences and side effects of the norm's hypothetical observation is rooted in the evaluation and rational discussion of good and bad risks that might result from the norm's general observation.

Obviously not all communicative action involes inter-subjectivity ( in Habermas' sense of the term) and it can not asserted with certainty that communicative action, in practice, fits within the ideal of moral validity.

On the other hand there is hardly need to tell that the organization of such inter-subjective communication, if it could be successfully applied, to communicative situations which present a very high potential of escalation, would be a powerful means of communicative risk regulation ( inter-ethnic, inter-religious, inter-institutional and private-public).

1. To which degree Habermas' discourse ethics can be applied as a means to realize Communicative Risk Theory's major aims? Can it be applied?

2. Does communicative risk regulation necessarily require for inter-subjective communication and couldn't it be that other schemes that do not require for inter-subjectivity -e.g. Kant's categorical imperative- might be more appropriate means of regulation (accordingly to the ethical project). When and in which circumstances?

3. Can ethical maxims of (communicative) action that are rooted in reason and presuppose rational decision-making be considered independently from religious and other value systems?

4. Why should communicative risk regulation, to be effective and efficacious, be realized by means of the test of universalization? Is it relevant and ethically desirable in ethnic, cultural and religious diversity?

5. Couldn't it be that the test of universalization, through lack of an external observer, is not a guarantee for universal validity and objectivity (Rawls)?

6. How do norms and value interact and how inter-act the external level of communication and risk with the internal one?

7. Do communicative risk regulation and regulation by means of legal norms interact? Should they interact and to which degree?

8. Is mutual trust relevant for social control?

To establish a tri-annual research program that defines the general frame and the principal targets of the research that is initiated and undertaken by SCRAE.

To issue an annual research report.

To provide the public with permanent online information about our activities.

To undertake research for academic and non -academic, governmental and non -governmental institutions and settings.

To act as scientific advisor for the major actors of political, social and religious life.

To provide for permanent dialogue with all these actors, at communautarian, national and international level, to stimulate inter-communication.

To develop knowledge exchange, transfer and synergy.

To build a bridge between the various scientific communities and cultures of the Western and the Eastern World.

- Co-Directory (philosophical and religious department / sociology/ social psychology); General Secretary; International Honorary Expert Committee

- Senior scientific advisor

- Research organizer

- Logistic organizer

- Translator

For SCRAE's various research activities, several teams and groups of research are to be created, each of which is committed to specialize in a major field (law, philosophy, religion, social-psychology, psychology, semiotics, communication, social and political sciences).

We recruit full and half time scholars with demonstrated specialization.

SCRAE will be established in a city that: