When it was formed by the United Nations in 2005, the Alliance of Civilizations was an unprecedented organization. The U.N. had previously been a club of nation-states but with now it was allowing non-state institutions, mostly religious, into the fold of international deliberation.

The Alliance hasn’t been researched very much until now. Jeffrey Haynes, associate dean of faculty and director of the Research Centre at the London Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Social Sciences, was recently in town as a visiting scholar with the University of Chicago’s Enhancing Life Project. Worldview sat down with Haynes to discuss the Alliance’s effectiveness and utility within the U.N.’s mission.