Dossiers
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The Sad Arc of Indian Democracy
April/April 2024
India’s general elections kick off today and will be held in phases through June 1, with results to be announced on June 4. Despite a decade-long erosion of rights and the hollowing out of democratic institutions, most polls predict a victory for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party for a third consecutive five-year term. What does an India heading to the polls look like in 2024? How has ten years of BJP rule shaped the world’s largest democracy?
  • Tunisia’s Transition
    Six years after the 2010-2011 uprising, the so-called Arab Spring, that started in Tunisia and spread across the Arab region, the country is actually going through a difficult phase of transition to democracy. In our dossier we focus on three aspects: the political one with an analysis of Al-Nahda’s political evolution (Longo), the economical recovery (EL Houssi) and the lasting social tensions (Mbarek).
  • Islam in Europe
    Islam is no longer a transitory phenomenon but European societies seem to consider Islam, in recent years, more a threat than an advantage. Our dossier presents some reflections which consider Islam as an element of European society and as a propagator of Europeanization. An analysis is also given of the implications of the role of Islamic organizations working in Europe but connected to governments of other countries, such as the Turkish Islamic organizations active in Germany. Lastly, we propose two essays on two recent films concerning a rapidly increasing phenomenon, the radicalization of younger generations in Europe and a book review on the Burkini debate.
  • 2017 Iranian Presidential Elections
    On Friday May 19th Iranians lined up at polling stations in such numbers that elections officials had to extend the voting until midnight, confirming that the abstention risk was only a spectre. President Hassan Rouhani has been re-elected for a second term with a massive turnout both in rural areas and in large cities. Our dossier analyses different aspects and motivations of its result, from women and workers point of view to more geopolitical and economic aspects.  
  • The narrative voice of the liquid society disappears with Bauman’s death
    Zygmunt Bauman died yesterday at the age of 91. His death marks the loss of one of the most distinguished European intellectuals. Bauman gained widespread acclaim for his capacity to give a voice and language to contemporary social configurations. The end of Fordism – the main theme of Bauman’s work in the last few decades – as well as the transition to a “liquid society” have dominated his reflections and, due to his work, now appear to us as common sense.  His last essay for Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations was about Trump: “The strongmen and the anxious class”.
  • Al-Azm: the awakening of critique from within Muslim theology
    Sadiq Jalal al-Azm was born in Damasus in 1934 and died in Berlin on December 11th 2016 following a battle will illness. He was one of the most prominent and influential Muslim philosophers and thinkers of the last century. His books, articles and essays inspired a whole generation of liberal scholars, “good liberals”, as defined by Mohammed Hashas, that are not blind to external hegemony and internal state oppression. He has lived in changing societies and he continued to critically analyse them till the end, Reset Doc have had the honor to publish some of his thoughts and to host him as a speaker at the Istanbul Seminars in 2010. In this dossier we present both new analysis and testimonies from our archive of his work.
  • Turkey: after a failed coup a new authoritarian grip, what comes next?
    After the coup, the two principal actors in Turkey have been the current President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the multi-billionaire and Islamic ideologue, Fetullah Gülen, who has been in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1998. Much of what one has to know about Gülen’s media empire is in this monograph from 2015. Reset DoC’s articles try to analyze this ongoing process and its actors: Erdogan with his new authoritarian tendencies and Gülen with his global media network. The international academic, intellectual community ask the US government and the European Union to stop Erdogan’s authoritarian and violent grip on the country.
  • State, Religion and Political Legitimacy in the Muslim World
    The uprisings that led to the downfall of regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in 2011 initially seemed to herald the end of a state system introduced into the MENA region by imperialist powers after WWI. Characterized by an authoritarian model of modernization and secularization from above, the fall of these XX Century regimes opened the door to the rise of political Islam. But when Islamist parties that have come to power in Egypt and Tunisia, although with remarkable differences, they have proven unsuccessful in stabilizing governments and writing new constitutions. Are democracy and a religious revival compatible? What will replace the spent legitimacy of these regimes across the region? What kind of state could now take shape in Muslim contexts overturned by revolts and civil war? And what place will religion have in these states?
  • Defining Family and Citizenship An Old Story or a New Phenomenon?
    Family is one of the most “natural” and fluid social constructs of human history and can be easily affected in different ways by social, cultural and religious changes. So why does the pluralisation of ways of forming a family seem to be a new phenomenon, and such a radical one, that to some it appears to be a risk as far as social cohesion is concerned? This question inspired the conference organized by Reset-DoC on “Family regulations in a society with fluid borders”, from which the following papers were drawn. Here, we are trying to understand new ways of conceiving and creating family in our globalized world, as well as the transformations occurred in the definition of citizenship and the legal framework behind new “types” of families.   
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