Ramin Jahanbegloo 25 May 2017
The recent presidential election and the second landslide victory of Hassan Rouhani is more than ever a true exemplification of such a complexity, which is often missed by foreign analysts of Iran.
democracy
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- Marina Forti 22 May 2017In spite of everything, the popular vote matters in Iran. Acknowledging this is inevitable when faced with the outcome of Friday’s elections.
- Andrea Graziosi 24 April 2017The world is experiencing an overt, cumulative and transversal illiberal trend, linked to appeals to the people, to identities, often to the past, and to demands for closed-door policies and order.
- Viola Siepelunga 24 April 2017How did many Egyptian liberals – who, two years earlier stood side by side with Islamists against Hosni Mubarak in Tahrir square, and one year earlier voted for Mohammed Morsi – come to side with a return to military dictatorship?
- Gianni Del Panta 6 April 2017In the mid-1970s democracy seemed to have fallen to an all-time low. In Latin America, two of the most successful democratic stories, Uruguay and Chile, were violently overthrown by military coups in 1973,
- 24 February 2017In Egypt liberal and left elites had missed out to organize and compete with right wing groups during and after the revolution. Amr Hamzawy, former Egyptian parliamentarian and human right activist explains that human rights abuse and economic and social crisis are threatening today’s Egypt and corroding the trust of the citizens. The illusion that an autocratic regime would guarantee stability is constantly disintegrating.
- 16 January 2017Cultures need to learn from each other and so does democratic theory. We need new tools, democratic tools to tame violence, says Ramin Jahanbegloo from York University, Toronto and it is Gandhi who can inspire us once again. And we need democratic passion, civic education and cross cultural, non-violent ideas.
- 10 November 2016The expansion and consolidation of the Hindu Right’s political power has raised legitimate concerns about the future of India’s secularism. While criticism of secularism could be found in the public debate during the anti-colonial struggle, the sustained assault on it became particularly apparent during the Ayodhya movement. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the public campaign led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) advocated that the practice of secularism has led to the appeasement of Muslims. The BJP further argued that it has been quite harmful to India’s democratic polity because it has been institutionalising vote-bank politics, and that what is needed is in fact an attempt for a ‘positive’ secularism as opposed to ‘negative’ secularism. While these distinctions were widely used during those days, surprisingly it has vanished from the political lexicon of the Hindu Right in recent years.
- 25 July 2016Reset-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.
- 14 July 2016This 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.
