Analyses
Ramin Jahanbegloo: “The Iranian People Are Tired of Dying Because of the Ayatollahs”
Giancarlo Bosetti 21 June 2025
Ramin Jahanbegloo, one of Iran’s preeminent intellectual figures, attends the conference ‘Peace, Democracy and Human Rights in Asia’ held under the auspices of former Czech president Vaclav Havel on September 11, 2009, in Prague. Other guests of this conference are Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, former President of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Frederik Willem de Klerk, Rabiya Kadeer, head of the World Uighur Congress, Robert Menard of France, former Secretary-General of Reporters Without Bord and others philosophers and disidents.AFP PHOTO MICHAL CIZEK (Photo by MICHAL CIZEK / AFP)
  • India’s 2014 General Election:
    Time to Rediscover Secularism
    Ananya Vajpeyi 26 May 2014
    Ever since Partition and Independence, Indian political life has privileged the concepts of diversity, pluralism, tolerance and inter-religious harmony. The way to realise these values, according to the ideology dominant thus far, was to have a state that expressed equal ‘love’ for all communities, that is, a state taking it upon itself to safeguard the peculiarities, rights and interests of groups defined along the axes of religion or caste, or as a majority and multiple minorities. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta has explained recently, in the vision of its founders and the architecture of the Constitution, India was conceived of as a ‘federation of communities’ with a paternalistic, secular state presiding over and managing a mosaic of identities. But, the outcome of India’s 2014 general elections, which puts the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in power under the leadership of Narendra Modi – sworn in as the new prime minister on Monday 26 May – calls for a widespread debate on the meaning, purpose and definition of secularism in this country.
  • Can European Islam Be Inspiring to the Arab World?
    Mohammed Hashas, Luiss University 16 April 2014
    The question “can European Islam be inspiring to the Arab world?” may smell of pejorative Orientalism: Europe thinks for the Arab world even when it comes to religion! Yet, the intent (anniya in Arabic) is not that. The question aims at questioning the established dichotomy of “Islam vs. the West.” Comparing two geographies or two versions of religion in two different political entities is the aim here, though the title seems to compare a religious interpretation in a political geography “European Islam” with a another political geography “the Arab world.” By the Arab world here is meant “Arab Islam” – to avoid repeating “Islam” twice. Both Western Europe and the Arab world are heterogeneous and have different histories with religion and politics, and it is not acceptable to put them all in one basket through entities as the title above suggests. However, it is the links between these two geographies, polities, and histories that have encouraged posing the question for further reflections.
  • India: Spectacular Lies Should Help Digesting Narendra Modi’s campaign?
    Ananya Vajpeyi 9 April 2014
    As India enters its 2014 general election to constitute the 16th Lok Sabha, the spectacle of prominent commentators adjusting their views towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi unfolds before our eyes with escalating frequency and vivid clarity. These adjustments — to use a term that is more descriptive than judgmental, at least for starters — take a variety of forms, and come from a range of observers, analysts and experts.
  • Egypt, Repression of Dissent and Free Speech Continues
    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.
  • No to Thomas Friedman’s “Same War, Different Country”
    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.
  • Presidential Elections in Iran. All Set to Choose Ahmadinejad’s Successor
    Antonella Vicini 14 June 2013
    After the final frantic hours of election campaigning, Tehran and the rest of the country now await voting results. Since 8 a.m. over 50 million people have been called upon to choose between six candidates, Said Jalili, Baqer Qalibaf, Ali Akbar Velayati, Hassan Rouhani, Mohsen Rezaei and Mohammad Gharazi. Of these, according to Interior Ministry data published on Sunday, 1.5 million will be voting for the very first time, meaning they turned eighteen after June 2009. There are 60,000 polling station and in Tehran, which has 14 million inhabitants in its constituency, there are 6,000 polling stations set up in mosques, schools, banks and even mobile ones with 12,000 booths.
  • Safe to speak? The challenges of democracy and press freedom in Turkey
    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.
  • Orientalism in Africa? The ICC and the case of Laurent Gbagbo
    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.
  • The Global Great Game and Dialogue through Nongovernmental Actors
    Raffaele Marchetti, Luiss University 22 May 2013
    In the world there are four and only four great powers. They are China, the EU, Russia, and the USA. Beyond the traditional economic and military capabilities, what makes an important power a great power is, arguably, its ability to project a world vision. A precondition for this is the ability to formulate a master frame of world order. I claim that, as of today, only four great powers have developed a fairly sophisticated model of world order and have attempted, with a certain degree of success, to spread its content worldwide so to make their national normative projection global.
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