Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, French public opinion is firmly in favour of giving greater surveillance powers to the state. Measures focus on online radicalization, including outsourcing surveillance to service providers and fellow citizens, writes Alice Béja of Esprit.
The Snowden revelations revealed just how far some states had departed from the guarantees of privacy enshrined in the human and civil rights agreements of the post-war era. The European Union can play the central role in setting enforceable data protection standards internationally, however resisting the logic of surveillance also depends on pressure from society, writes Peter Schaar.
The UK government tried to rush through a “Snoopers’ Charter” after Paris and is playing the security card in the run-up to the May elections. Yet parochialism and complacency obstruct real progress in digital rights, writes Vicky Baker of Index on Censorship.
The smart city industry is continually conquering new terrain. But as the global rollout of the digital electricity and gas meter (smart meter) proceeds apace, Elke Rauth discerns a project that shows disdain for the private sphere and puts the intelligence of governments and city-dwellers to the test.
ArtLeaks founders Corina Apostol and Dmitry Vilensky discuss what lies ahead for the grassroots organization, in terms of revealing and resisting the toxic symptoms of neoliberalism in the cultural sector; not to mention creating a better (art)world.
As scholars, historians must discover the truth about the past, writes Volodymyr Sklokin. But following the Ukrainian intellectual community’s transformation after 1991, Ukrainian historians have also begun to find their feet as intellectuals responsible for sustaining a public sphere.
The reconstruction of deliberately destroyed public and religious buildings in Mostar has raised many questions and controversies. Arna Mackic embarks on a search for a new open architectural language that might encourage encounters between people, liberated from the burden of politics or ethnicity.
Before the Lebanese Civil War, Martyrs’ Square featured among Beirut’s most dynamic civic spaces. Over two decades after the war ended, the city centre’s reconstruction has all but cut the square adrift from civic life. However, Rania Sassine insists on its potential as a Lebanese laboratory of urban identity.
Swedish author and scholar Michael Azar weaves together a patchwork of narratives in which people matter just as much as the places in which they live; a practice that provides the key to the long overdue task of fashioning cities in accordance with human needs and hardships.
The triumph of the principle of competition among and within European member states has generated a continuous aggravation of disparities, writes Etienne Balibar. Not that the French philosopher allows this to stop him stubbornly envisioning a Europe other than that of bankers, technocrats and political profiteers.
Imogen Tyler looks at how the manufacture of an asylum invasion complex within the public sphere aided the passing of UK legislation that reconstituted the refugee as a “national abject”. That is, as a (likely bogus) asylum-seeker subject to destitution, detention and exclusion.
Greece doesn’t just need debt relief, it deserves it. Of this much Thomas Fazi is convinced. After all, most of the bail out money has gone to banks and creditors, which irrefutably puts to shame the claim that European taxpayers’ money was used to save Greece and the other reckless countries of the periphery.
How much longer can the European Union reasonably claim to guarantee the free movement of persons as a fundamental right? As the internalization of EU external migration policy starts to kick in, Peo Hansen examines the implications for the future of EU citizenship as we know it.
Offering undocumented migrants the assistance that they need is well within the means of EU member states, says Fabrizio Gatti in conversation with Glänta editors Göran Dahlberg and Linn Hansén. Instead, governments continue to bicker among themselves as to who is to pay and people continue to fall prey to the traffickers.
Thanks to a new wave of small intellectual magazines, an infectious buzz has returned to public debate in the United States. Roman Schmidt talks to David Marcus who, as a new editor at Dissent, is well placed to provide the lowdown what’s driving this genuinely critical movement.