democracy
  • Roberta Sala, University of Milan San Raffaele 26 June 2014
    In her paper entitled The changing face of toleration Susan Mendus critiques the idea of toleration as acknowledgement, which she calls “new toleration”, in opposition to the more classical notion of toleration as not interfering in what we consider an object of disapproval (be these decisions, actions or forms of behaviour). In particular “new toleration” is not, in her opinion, able to answer new questions posed by religious toleration. These are in truth ‘surprisingly’ new issues, when considering that until a decade ago they seemed definitively resolved
  • Susan Mendus, University of York 26 June 2014
    The topic of toleration has interested, indeed fascinated, me for nearly 30 years. Twenty-eight years ago, in 1985, I was appointed Morrell Fellow in Toleration at the University of York, and I have continued to work within the Morrell Centre ever since – first as a Research Fellow, then as Director of the Programme, and now as Morrell Professor Emerita. In short, the problem of toleration has occupied much of my working life. However, looking back on the past 30 years, it is interesting to note that the problem of toleration is not at all the same now as it was when I began studying it all those years ago, and my main focus this evening will be on ways in which the problem of toleration has changed and with the new challenges which toleration faces in the modern world. Let me begin, though, by saying something about the way in which the problem of toleration was understood when I first began studying it all those years ago.
  • Federica Zoja 12 February 2014
    The weekly magazine The Economist reported on the current repression in Egypt, a country addressing the effects of a second lethal revolutionary euphoria, saying, “the re-emboldened security services have increasingly been hammering the whole gamut of opposition, from secular reformers to every type of Islamist.” The enthusiasm, with decisive support provided by the army, that had resulted in the overthrow of the Islamist President Mohammed Morsi on July 30 2013, must now deal with an abrupt awakening.
  • Mohammed Hashas 9 September 2013
    Thomas Friedman wrote on New York Times on 07 September 2013 a piece entitled “Same War, Different Country”, in which he justifies the US (coming) intervention in Syria after the Assad army has been accused of using chemical weapons against civilians on 21 August 2013. While Assad’s brutal force has clearly caused terrible damage to the country and its people since 2011, I seize the occasion to make few notes about Friedman’s reasoning for going into a war for that matter. Some earlier solution could have been found, any time before August 2013. A military intervention does not seem the right solution, and the reasoning that fuels it seems the most inadequate and unreasonable.
  • Emanuela Pergolizzi 5 June 2013
    On March 18 a symbolic funeral march was staged in front of Turkey’s historic left-wing newspaper, the Milliyet, for the silent “death” of one of its most honorable authors. Hasan Cemal, 69 years, “dies” as a provocative columnist after having defended the disclosure of the minutes from a meeting between the representatives of the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) and PKK’s leader Abdullah Öcalan. The leaked record helped the nationalist front to criticize the government’s negotiation with the Kurdish leader. “If this is journalism, down with it!” cried Prime Minister Erdoğan, and the writer was suddenly suspended.
  • Nicoletta Fagiolo 30 May 2013
    Let us imagine for a moment that at the November 1945 Nuremburg trials, which were held so as to condemn those responsible for instigating World War II and the Holocaust, a Prosecutor decided, by distorting the historical account of the wars’ events, to press charges for crimes against humanity during WWII against Franklin Delano Roosevelt[1]. There were surely crimes committed by American soldiers fighting the Nazi regime, yet would this make Roosevelt a just target for crimes committed during World War II? A similar historical and thus juridical incoherence is currently being played out at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague in the case the Prosecutor vs Laurent Gbagbo.
  • Ilaria Romano 22 February 2013
    It will be necessary to wait until March to know the names of those accountable for the atrocities committed in Syria over the past two years, but information already published by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry for Syria is very clear. War crimes, torture, individual and mass murder, the involvement of minors in the conflict, should all result in the Security Council deferring Damascus to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
  • Andrew Arato, The New School 15 February 2013
    In order to create a new democratic political order the initial transformation process needs even more participation and a democratic constituent power, argues political scientist Andrew Arato at Reset-Dialogues’ Istanbul Seminars. Democracy making is a consensual process with an active input from civil society groups, and not just from elites. In Egypt this constituent democratic form never really emerged yet, also because the Brotherhood allowed the military to impose its own rules, asking for quick elections in return. Andrew Arato is the Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory in the department of sociology at The New School University, New York City.
  • Nicoletta Fagiolo 30 January 2013
    Since November 2011 Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Côte d’Ivoire, has been detained at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, accused of being an “indirect co-author” of serious crimes against humanity during the post-election crisis in his country. But many people ask why and doubt the legitimacy of these charges. For many it is his political opponent of the 2010 presidential elections, Alassane Ouattara, that should be in his place detained at the Hague, along with Guillaume Soro, the current President of the National Assembly, who headed the 2002 rebellion that divided the country in two.
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