Stories Archive | Page 59 of 72

Analyses

After surpassing 90 percent approval in the first round of the presidential elections on October 6, incumbent Tunisian leader Kais Saied faces his new term in a political, social, and economic climate vastly different from that of 2019. We discussed this shift with writer and essayist Hatem Nafty, whose latest work, Notre ami Kaïs Saïed. Essai sur la démocrature tunisienne (Our Friend Kais Saied: An Essay on the Tunisian Dictatorship), was presented in late September.

Political Theory
The Country of First Boys: Amartya Sen Again on Identity and Violence Ten Years Later
Mattia Baglieri 15 September 2016

Two years after the publication of An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen of Harvard University returns to focus on the relationship between identity and violence. The Country of First Boys appeared a few months ago in bookstores as a collection of Sen’s essays made available with the contribution of Antara Dev Sen and Pratik Kanjilal. In it, the Bangladeshi-born economist updates his earlier reflections on ‘identity politics’ and its relationship with extremism and violence, both at the inter-ethnic as well as at the international level.
Gender
Banning clothes, from bikinis to burkinis
When ideology becomes law
Silvio Ferrari, Milan University 24 August 2016

Once upon a time, not that long ago, it was a crime to go to the beach wearing skimpy clothes. Nowadays, at least in France, it is crime to appear on a beach if excessively overdressed. Bikinis and topless swimsuits were forbidden in the name of rules governing public morals and behaviour that forbade women from showing off too much of their bodies. According to Prime Minister Manuel Valls, burkinis are not compatible with new French public morals established by the republic’s values and women’s emancipation. An excessively covered-up woman is not sufficiently secular and independent.
Media and Communication
Volume trumps reality: on grievous distortions of reality
Jim Sleeper 29 July 2016

We publish the review that Jim Sleeper wrote in 2013 for the Columbia Journalism Review on Zev Chafets’s book Roger Ailes Off Camera. When I published Liberal Racism in 1997 (with a chapter on how The New York Times was misrepresenting racial politics under editorial-page editor Howell Raines), I was interviewed on Fox News, which I’d barely heard of, by Bill O’Reilly, whom I hadn’t heard of at all. The encounter was anodyne, but before long I noticed that the network was not. Under its president Roger Ailes, who had pitched his vision of Fox to a receptive Rupert Murdoch only a year before I met O’Reilly, it was rapidly becoming what Zev Chafets calls “transformational” in American media and political culture. By treating journalism as if it’s all about ratings and show, Fox actually makes a profoundly political statement by eviscerating what democratic politics really stands for.
Academics to Obama and Mogherini: say no to Erdogan’s authoritarianism
25 July 2016

Reset-Doc is pleased to publish and support the letters concerning recent events in Turkey that hundreds of academics, intellectuals and politicians, from around the world, have sent both to the US Government Officials, Barack Obama, John Kerry and Ashton Carter, and to the Highest Officers of the European Union, Federica Mogherini and Thorbjørn Jagland. While they disapprove the attempt to subvert the democratic process in Turkey through the military coup, these letters have been written to strongly condemn actions taken by the Turkish government in violation of human rights and rule of law. The undersigned, therefore, are calling to action the US government and the European Union to strongly criticize these violations, to closely monitor the situation and refuse to accept anything but the reversal of these authoritarian policies.
International Affairs
Turkey: Will the Failed Coup d’Etat
Be a Coup de Grace for Freedom?
Lea Nocera 16 July 2016

Military coups and Turkey. For years this seemed to be an indissoluble dyad. Even in 2007, when a general election was held, the foreign press, including Italy’s, poured into the country fearing a coup d’état. Nothing of the sort. Erdogan’s AKP’s continuous victories seemed to be a sign of stability and of a democratic process that appeared to have quashed the danger of military intervention that until just a few years ago had characterised Turkish history.
Religion
The Quest for Legitimacy in Muslim Contexts:
A Four-Act Tragedy?
Abdou Filali-Ansary 15 July 2016

According to many recent studies, Muslims’ political history reveals certain particular processes and ideas, which is obvious since all historical processes differ, but at the end of the day result in one and the same universe encompassing them all and one that has ended up creating the practices, schools of thought and symbols adopted by Muslims. While, for example, this concerns Islam’s political language, or kingdom of God, or oriental despotism, etc., it appears to evoke a universe that is totally extraneous to everything that Europe has practiced and believed. As one will see, in observing the events rocking the Muslim world, a contemporary researcher has even suggested that there has been a fall and resurrection of the Islamic State (overturning the words of the famous book, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).
Religion
Political Legitimacy and Islam in the Ottoman Empire: Lessons Learned
Karen Barkey 14 July 2016

This article explores the role of religion in Ottoman political legitimation. It shows that the Ottoman rulers were interested in a much more expansive, diverse form of political legitimation that included Islamic religious legitimation, but also used toleration and sultanic law to construct a more capacious form of political legitimation that included Muslim and non-Muslim populations of the empire.
Political Theory
The Dhaka attack: if IS now recruits among ‘wealthy’ youth
Mattia Baglieri 12 July 2016

There is no country in the “Old Continent” left immune by the terrorist attacks carried out or at least inspired by the Islamic State, although the largest number of victims of this unusual violence is reported in Middle Eastern countries (especially in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey) as the control of those territories conquered in the name of Jihad’s ideology in Syria and Iraq is becoming harder.
Political Theory
Bangladesh’s Deep Crisis and its Origins
Marina Forti 7 July 2016

Only twice has Bangladesh made headline news in recent years: three years ago, when a complex of clothes factories collapsed in the suburbs of Dhaka killing over 1,200 people, and again last Friday when a group of armed men attacked a place patronised by Westerners killing 20 people, eighteen of them Westeners. The attack on the Holey Artisan Bakery, a café-restaurant in Dhaka’s most exclusive district, was not totally unexpected. There had been many signs indicating that Bangladesh, one of the poorest and most unstable countries in south Asia with 150 million inhabitants, of which the majority are Muslims, had sunk into a political crisis in which Islamist extremism is a destabilising force.
International Affairs
Turkey’s Geopolitical Scenario after the Istanbul Terrorist Attack
Giuseppe Didonna 4 July 2016

There have been 17 terrorist attacks in 12 months, in which 300 people died and about 1,000 were wounded. The suicide bombers who attacked Ankara’s airport carried out the sixth attack of 2016, a trail of blood and death that decreed the profoundly comatose state of Turkey’s tourism. The words spoken by the Minister for Tourism, guaranteeing that “all security measures to prevent further attacks have been implemented”, will not be enough to bring tourists back to Turkey. Among the elements that President Erdogan will not be able to underestimate anymore when drafting a “list of priorities” that Ankara intends to pursue to ensure a future without terrorism and relaunch Turkey’s image there is the resumption of negotiations with the Kurds and a zero tolerance policy as far as jihadists are concerned. This would mark a change of direction essential for the pacification of a country that, over the past years, has all too often found itself counting the victims of massacres that could (maybe) have been avoided.