Saskia Sassen compares the impact of two kinds of socio-technical formations on the public sphere: electronic capitalist elites concentrated in global cities and globally networked, local social activist movements. Both have the power to transform existing political and economic systems.
In Belarus, the digital dissident generation born in 2006 came of age during the political and economic crisis of 2011, writes Iryna Vidanava. However, bridging the gap between virtual and real-life activism remains one of the most serious challenges facing Belarus’ democratic movement.
A European constitution that covers no more than a few sides of paper and clearly sets out the values that we share: concisely and for the people. This, writes Res Publica Nowa editor Wojciech Przybylski, is what is required if the EU’s disintegration is to be averted.
We can only understand the Gezi Park resistance movement through the micropolitics of desire, argues Ali Akay. It drew not only the Turkish youth and elders but the whole world into a transversal resistance: from New York to Cologne, from Izmir to Adana and Antalya, and from Ankara to Bursa.
Until fairly recently, meat-eating wasn’t an issue at all. You didn’t think about meat, you just ingested it. Nowadays, writes Finnish critic Antti Nylén, it’s hard to imagine a more extreme phenomenon than modern meat consumption. So how can meat-eating still be possible?
The debate in the United States over the place of women in the professional world has intensified lately, reopening the “mommy wars” of the 1980s that pitted housewives against working women. Time to question the focus on work and career, and reappraise the value of family life?
Plenty of women are working as correspondents and reporters, but relatively few as opinion writers and editors. And while the gender gap in print is insidious, in broadcast media it’s glaringly obvious, writes Dawn Foster. Meanwhile, the gentrification of the media continues apace.
It is often said that every two weeks a language dies. But the statement belies a complex reality, in which languages are transformed, replaced or simply vanish along with their users. Giedrius Subacius on the fate of the Lithuanian language, among others.
Contemporary Islam in Europe, its modes of public expression and the visibility of associated religious signs and symbols all raise questions concerning the values of the European public sphere. And yet, writes Nilüfer Göle, religious agency itself remains a blind spot in the public debate.
As the use of the Internet in the post-Soviet space continues to evolve, Natalya Ryabinska shows how tools of control, surveillance and propaganda are more than up to the task of hindering online sources that promote democratization. Once again, the fate of civil society hangs in the balance.
A re-designed city is a means to an end. And for Peter Marcuse, that end is the welfare and happiness of those whom the city should serve: all of us. Moreover, he shows how the realm of work could be shrunk significantly without impacting negatively on a desirable realm of freedom.
One of the most important and ominous aspects of the NSA scandal is the secretive essence of the system, writes Ilija Trojanow: transparency is clearly the biggest enemy of the alleged guardians of freedom. This much Trojanow now knows from personal experience.
Acclaimed novelist Ilija Trojanow was denied entry to the United States en route to the German Studies Association’s annual conference on 30 September. Could this possibly have something to do with Trojanow’s critical stance on NSA-led surveillance?
Should the printed book soon become a relic of a bygone era in publishing, uncertainty as to modes of sharing knowledge and experience will remain. Neither will we know, according to Manuel Arias Maldonado, whether to mourn the loss of the well known or of the valuable.
Twenty years after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat shook hands over the Oslo Accords, Frida Skatvik reveals how Norway ended up a broker of peace in the Middle East and assesses the legacy of the ensuing peace process.
A controversial tweet by Richard Dawkins prompts incoming New Humanist editor Daniel Trilling to set out some basic principles concerning the way we discuss religion. He argues that finding common ground between people of different religious beliefs and none is key to political progress.