SSA Conference 2026 - Communities and Societies in Movement
The 2026 Congress of the Swiss Sociological Association will focus on current social developments that affect and are perpetuated by communities and individuals, revisiting a classical sociological perspective: how to understand the opposition between communities and societies defined by Tönnies (1887) and revisited by Max Weber (1921) more than one century ago. What are the theories, methodologies and tools we have developed to categorize social relations today?
As a basis for debating, the congress centers on the heavily discussed terms of society and community. Providing some definitory ideas as a starting point: While society often refers to an aggregate of individuals who live on a certain territory or belong to a certain large group (such as an ethnicity), the term community is mainly used to describe a sub-group of people who live together and are characterized by more frequent interindividual and intragroup interactions. Defining community may require a broad definition that includes place-based, interest-based and other forms of new and emerging communities, for example groups that traverse physical boundaries and relate with unknown people in diverse locations, but share a sense of belonging.
Beyond the debates about the relevance of the original conception of the concepts the different forms of social relations remain at the heart of the issues at stake in modern societies. The definition and, above all, the justification of what constitutes a social group, an entity, a community or a society (and who can belong to them) is at the heart of conflicts over boundaries (material or symbolic), determines legal rights and (in)equal access to economic, social and political resources.
All kinds of social organizations (within the spectrum between societies and communities) can be characterized by social cohesion and solidarity and – perhaps as a result – provide people with (subjective) well-being or, on the contrary, generate conflicts, come under threat and even dissolve, they may change their structures and characteristics over time, modifying the ways in which people identify with them.
During the last decades, contemporary societies are perceived to have become more diversified – although from a historical perspective migration and diversity are no new phenomena – but at the same time more polarized. The diverse sub-units or social groups have become more homogenized and cultivating stronger solidarities within the group, at the same time in terms of goals and world views, bearing more and more conflict and less solidarity between sub-groups within societies. At the center of these developments are new populist movements – often of the new right – that counter long-standing movements, such as feminist, environmentalist or anti-racist movements, that have been perceived as progressive for decades. Catalysts of this process of fragmentation are social media – and to some extent even mass media – which are becoming more polarized and, paradoxically, more democratized. These tensions between diversification and homogenization may at the same time threaten societal cohesion and solidarity, increase exclusion, inequalities and stratification or strengthen communities and groups fitting for their legal rights.
At the heart of the tension is the sense of belonging, the recognition of the right to free expression and participation of those who are excluded. To belong also means to maintain a certain boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Hence formation of attachment to a community to which a sense of belonging is developed can be both inclusive and exclusive. An inclusive sense of belonging occurs through the performative free expression and participation of those who belong and a recognition and acceptance by the community of those previously excluded.