Stories Archive | Page 71 of 84

Analyses

The history of the Islamic Republic of Iran—established in 1979 following the revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—is marked by a dense sequence of developments that have progressively altered its political and institutional configuration. These changes, however, have only sporadically been recognized by Western analyses, which have instead tended to perpetuate a more functional and instrumental stereotype based on the image of a monolithic, highly verticalized religious autocracy. While such a characterization was broadly accurate during the first decade of the Islamic Republic, it has undergone a profound transformation since 1989.

International Affairs
Some saw early what Trump’s rise meant.
Others denied it (and us)
Jim Sleeper 9 November 2016

Long before the final results, many Americans knew that our body politic was suffering a seizure after being injected with a poison that nothing in Hillary Clinton’s politics was potent enough to expel. The impotence of that politics — its inability to draw from wellsprings deeper than bromides about breaking glass ceilings, “fighting” for families and children, and slashing college tuition — has little to do with Clinton’s character or alleged corruption or even with the undoubted wave of misogyny in this election.
Religion
Ashis Nandy: Why Nationalism and Secularism Failed Together
Ananya Vajpeyi 18 October 2016

October 2016, New Delhi – Milan Ashis Nandy sees vendors of nationalism inflicting damage all over the world, including in his own country, India. In India, the modern ideologies dominant during the liberation struggle against British rule were anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. These then gave way to secular nationalism after Independence in 1947, under the first Prime Minister of free India, Jawaharlal Nehru (d. 1964). But less than seven decades later, what dominates Indian politics today is Hindu nationalism or “Hindutva”, and this is now being aggressively promoted by the ‘strongman’ currently leading the government in Delhi, Narendra Modi. Nandy, 79, a clinical psychologist by training, an analyst of culture and society, an astute political commentator and today India’s most significant living public intellectual, has embraced the view of one of India’s founding fathers, Rabindranath Tagore, who thought that the idea of Indian nationalism was as absurd as Switzerland having a navy. In this interview below, Nandy will explain why.
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.