At the time of writing this, Sokoto State in Northern Nigeria is burning following the mob lynching of a 22 year old student, Deborah Yakubu, over a voice note she posted on a WhatsApp group asking her classmates to stop posting religious messages on the group intended for school work, and ostensibly insulting the Prophet in the process. Deborah was dragged out of the protection of the school’s …
There is no Crimean Tatar for whom the day of May 18th does not evoke strong emotions. This year, May 18th commemorates seventy-eight years of their mass deportation; almost 200,000 Crimean Tatars were torn from their beds in the middle of the night, and forced into cattle wagons.¹ Accused of collaboration with the Nazis by Joseph Stalin, they were declared the traitors and enemies—despite many of the male Tatars …
The imperial formations and colonial relations framing Russia’s war on Ukraine Framing the War Two months have passed since the beginning of Russia’s second recent invasion of Ukraine. Predictions of the outcome of the conflict have shifted from certainty of a full Russian occupation to a stalemate resulting in protracted war. Uncertainty over probable resolutions mirror myriad causal accounts explaining Russia’s aggressive behavior. Regrettably, almost all such interpretations …
Looking back at transitions to democracy and the quality of democracy thirty years later There is a global crisis of democracy in play. It raises the possibility of a potential reversal of the third wave of democratization and puts at risk even consolidated regimes (Mounk, 2019; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Przeworski, 2019; Rosanvallon, 2020). Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt and Adam Przeworski, among many other authors, set up the …
“Historicity, infinite perfectibility, the original link to a promise make all democracy a thing to come.” Jacques Derrida The war in Ukraine, as well as its prelude, the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, put the project of European integration at the center. This is surprising to many. In Brussels, Eurocrats in 2014 rubbed their eyes in amazement that someone was willing to die for an association agreement with the EU; …
A dilemma of democratic life Images v. Visibility The study of visibility is not the study of images, even though it includes it, and even though Images mediate and objectify visibility. Images are objects. They are addressed by semantics, syntactics, semiotics (Eisenstein, Barthes, Panofsky, Peirce). Visibility is part of a theory of action. Visibility can be seen as the result of the action of making visible (an action …
Some thoughts on the end of the end of history “A Quarrel in a Faraway Country” In March 2014, in an address presented in the Grand Kremlin Palace, Vladimir Putin celebrated the annexation of Crimea. The peninsula—he claimed—had been “plundered” from Russia, part of the “outrageous historical injustice” that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. Had a talented director made this into a film, those watching would …
There’s a dark joke that the Polish dissident thinker Adam Michnik likes to tell: If in 1987 God had asked the Poles what their three most fervent wishes were, they would have replied: First, we want to live in a country with no political prisoners. Second, we want a country without censorship and foreign armies. And third, we would like the Soviet Union to fall apart. And the …
There would be no world, this alleyway in the galaxy where love is possible, without small centers of the world. There was once, before time, a great center. Memory of it lays sleeping in the exile of man, in the death of animals and in the silence of plants, in the shells of a broken vessel, in the sparks of light hidden in dark matter, in the suffering …
The Refugee crisis as opportunity for change Care takers across the world have suffered disproportionately over the last two years in terms of securing their own well-being, as they navigate the ever changing landscape of the COVID pandemic. The gender disparity regarding the identity of these care takers, as well as the specific hardships they have faced, is also well documented across regions and regimes across the globe. …
