Here we want to give a short overview of the concept of the International Animal Rights Conference. This will hopefully help you to decide whether you should participate at the conference and hopefully also helps understand why we have made certain decisions in the planning process.
The organizers of the conference are active in the animal rights movement in Luxembourg and other countries in Europe and have participated at various others conferences in Europe and the United States and also organized the international conferences in 2011 to 2019. The goal of the International Animal Rights Conference 2020 is to provide a truly international platform for people active in the animal rights movement and those interested in learning more about animal rights. The conference should function as a networking platform for animal rights activists, but should also present current animal rights views. One main aspect is also the practical animal rights work. Therefore we have decided to provide/organize the following:
The global animal rights movement has many different facets. There are numerous strategies on how to get to a society free of animal exploitation: abolitionist, reformist, vegan outreach, direct action, institutional, grass roots, single issue, total liberation, and many more slogans are used to describe the different approaches.
The International Animal Rights Conference wants to be a platform, where representatives of all these different approaches can get together and exchange their ideas. It is the goal to get many different ideas represented, because only a critical discourse will allow the animal rights movement to move forward and develop strategies that will get us closer to the goal of animal liberation.
The organization team of the conference will not exclude any approaches from the conference, as long as these have animal liberation as the goal and do not involve domination, exploitation or discrimination against humans based on arbitrary distinctions such as gender, ethnicity, skin color, sexual orientation or religious belief.
Since the content of the conference lives from the people that want to offer their ideas, it might happen in some years, that a certain approach might be represented more than others. It is the goal to provide a balance between these various approaches, but this of course depends on the amount of offered contributions – so please contact us, if you want to offer an aspect that was not well represented in the previous years: call for contribution.
The answere is very easy: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is absolutely unclear how the infection rates, treatment possibilities, travel restrictions and more aspects will evolve during the next months until September 2020. Because of the international nature of the conference even regional improvements in and around Luxembourg, would not be sufficient to execute a live conference in September in Luxembourg. Therefore the only reasonable alternative to canceling the IARC2020, was to create the Digital Conference concept for 2020. In 2021 we hope to again be able to organize a live conference in Luxembourg.