Out of sight, out of mind …seems to be a popular attitude of states to handle the ugly reality of an ever-worsening international refugee movement. The strategy to keep refugees on islands has moved to the core of the EU asylum system, and has recently hit fertile soil in Bangladesh.
Year: 2020
Eternal Putin
How does one leave the Kremlin after nearly two decades in office? And can one leave it gracefully and even more importantly—perhaps—alive? Russia’s Vladimir Putin has little to learn from his predecessors. Of the nine de facto Russian leaders since Lenin, five died in office, two were more or less
Tightening the Grip: Is Experience Necessary for a Successful Autocrat?
Right-wing populists and autocrats do not accept defeat. Challenged by reality, they clamp down—their position is rigid, very often averse to even the slightest possibility of change. Truth has been devalued, facts are treated as opinion, those who possess knowledge and expertise are treated with contempt. We live in an
A Society of Control: The actuality of Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts in the 21st century
Eighty-eight years ago, in 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote his infamous dystopian novel, Brave New World. Huxley tells the story of a futuristic World State in which all citizens are constantly happy, as well as content with the social order. They have been conditioned from birth by an overarching powerful state
The Swedish COVID-19 pandemic strategy or: The Comeback of the “Ättestupa”
A saying attributed to the ever-chipper Joseph Stalin goes: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Seeing death and knowing death are two very different experiences. And it can be argued whether those in charge, untouched by the pain suffered by people who have known
The Teacher Feature – Mikael Spång on Rights, Emancipation, and Domination
Mikael Spång is a professor in political science at the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University. He teaches in human rights and democracy. In 2017 he published a book with the title “Emancipation, Democracy, and the Modern Critique of Law: Reconsidering Habermas” in which he addresses the dialectic
The Other Pandemic
***Trigger warning: Contains explicit language on the subject of child sexual abuse*** At times one stands before a great abyss. A great expanse ordained by dark materials to which one has to decide to gaze into or turn away from. Why should we feel the urge to brand ourselves with
An Ideology of Selfishness — How Misinformation Propagates Inequality
Since the 2010s, a sharp uptake in the levels of misinformation can be observed, in the push for so-called austerity, in the war on facts, in the bold attempts of different socio-political organizations to exchange fact for opinion. The mechanisms of propaganda have mastered their most powerful array of tools
“Gender ideology”: The case of Colombia
In this interview, I talked to my former classmate Diana Rocío Rodríguez Benítez who specializes in the evolution of ‘gender ideology’ as a phenomenon pertinent to the Americas and Europe. In particular, Diana’s academic interest lies in discovering the role which anti-‘gender ideology[1] has played in Colombia since 2016. This