In the eighties and nineties several faculty members of the University of Utrecht were involved as directors and/or resourcepersons in the BI-annual course 'Social Change and Macro Planning' of which the last one took place in april 1991, just two months before the war between Serbia and Croatia broke out.
During that war the activities of the IUC had tot be postponed, because the beautiful city of Dubrovnik as well as the building of the IUC were heavily damaged. Luckily, soon after the war the city and building could be restored and already in 1995 the IUC reopened its gates and in the academic year 1997/1998 the IUC could celebrate its 25th anniversary with more than fifty new courses. On of them was a cooperation between the Free University of Amsterdam, the University of Utrecht and the IUC. A theme had to be found which reflected the burning issues of European societies in the nineties. 'Inclusion and Exclusion in modern Societies' it was, and with its 54 participants the biggest post war IUC-course was born.
The empirical dimensions of the concepts came forward in a number of contributions on different but nevertheless related topics like the position of the elderly, discrimination of women on the job market, exclusion of illegal immigrants and of ethnic minorities, emerging nationalist movements and the exclusion of underclass youth.
At the end of the 1998 edition one of the participants called this a 'once in a lifetime experience'...