Stories Archive | Page 65 of 87

Analyses

For decades, Latin America’s authoritarian regimes were seen as a right-wing phenomenon, with Cuba as the lone exception — a dictatorship born not from a betrayal of democracy, but of revolution. As Washington’s embargo returns to the headlines, this piece asks what that framing has long obscured: that Cuba has never had just one embargo, but two.

International Affairs
Egypt’s failed revolution and its long-lasting legacies
Gianni Del Panta 20 December 2017

Anniversaries are always good occasions to critically evaluate the trajectory of extraordinary social and political happenings.
Human Rights
Turkey, the difficult journey of human rights
18 December 2017

When in 1990 Turkish sculptor Metin Yurdanur was asked to design and carve a monument in honour of Human Rights to be placed in central Ankara, it was probably impossible to predict that the bronze statue of a girl sitting on a chair reading the declaration of Human Rights, sculpted by the Turkish artist, would have been one day “imprisoned”
Religion
Restoration of religious plurality in modern Albania
Matteo Tacconi 14 December 2017

Today, Albania is once again a country where one can freely profess one’s creed but religion, unlike many former Communist countries, has not since become a key factor is civil or political life. It certainly has been such as to deeply influence society. For the most part it discretely remains within the private sphere.
Religion, Society
The Rise of Communal Violence and the Reemergence of Radical Islamism During Political Transition
Muhammad Najib Azca 14 December 2017

Indonesia has witnessed the mushrooming of communal violence during the early stages of its transition towards electoral democracy after the fall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime in 1998.
Religion
Indonesia: Nusantara Islam and social justice
Paolo Affatato 5 December 2017

The future of Indonesian Islam, and with it that of the entire nation, involves the issue of addressing social justice. The 82-year-old Muslim leader Ahmad Syafii Maarif, is convinced of this.
Religion
Religious pluralism and the failure of political Islam
Paolo Affatato 5 December 2017

Are Indonesian democracy and pluralism being endangered by the revitalization of radicalism and the increasingly invasive presence of extremist Islamic groups?
International Affairs
A Country that has stopped waiting
Emanuele Giordana 5 December 2017

In persistently developing a model for coexistence able to peacefully contain social unrest and radical Islamism, Indonesia has been able to emerge headstrong from years of difficult dictatorship and positively react to the late-nineties financial crisis. Although Indonesia has painted a bright and prosperous image of itself, it carries behind it a thick and oppressive shadow.
Society
Tunisia’s fledgling democracy is evolving in inspiring ways
Hussein Ibish 5 December 2017

In a coalition government, Ennahda is demonstrating what acceptable religious conservatism might look like
Religion
Khosrokhavar: where the girls’ Jihadism is coming from
Anna Tito 1 December 2017

Although, in many ways, the reasons for which many recently converted young men decide or have so far decided to go and fight with “God’s fanatics” in Syria and Iraq remain mysterious, those same choices made by girls born and raised in a ‘western’ environment in Europe “totally bewilders us”, admits the sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar in his interview with Reset.
Religion
Germany: conversions to radical Salafism. How to stop them?
Luca Steinmann 28 November 2017

Germany is not immune to the phenomenon of religious radicalism. Over the past six years, about one thousand foreign fighters have left Merkel’s country for Syria and Iraq to join ISIS and other terrorist groups.