Issues gathers thematic collections of essays, reflections, interviews, and reports exploring contemporary challenges to democracy, human rights, political culture, and public life from diverse international perspectives.
Issues gathers thematic collections of essays, reflections, interviews, and reports exploring contemporary challenges to democracy, human rights, political culture, and public life from diverse international perspectives.
Growing up, my sister and I often retained the same posture in our photos. She stood on the left side and nuzzled me up to her chest with her right hand. We used to spend every summer together at our grandparents’ apartment in Hefei, a wet, fragile city in southeastern China. I thought of her as I watched Sylvia and Frances – throughout their testimony, they couldn’t help …
Six thoughts about engaging with a post-historical past (1) “History” as an academic discipline – and I am trying to articulate a possible vanishing point of Reinhart Koselleck’s life work here – “History” as a discipline would never have come into being without the existence of the “historical world view” as a specific social construction of temporality (we can call it a specific “chronotope”) with its own relationship …
In mid-September 2020, allegations surfaced in the media that Spanish-speaking female detainees in a privately-owned ICE immigration center in the American state of Georgia were being given hysterectomies without their consent. The claim, now being investigated, combines such an unholy and ghoulish combination of ingredients – women’s bodies, misogyny, racism, eugenics, immigration, incarceration – that it got my attention even in an endless news cycle saturated with unholy, …
Statue of Man at Work, Bratislava, Slovakia, author Diego Delso, (via WikiCommons) More than a century ago, Hans Vaihinger formulated his philosophy “as if” to describe our willing choice to live in a world of logical contradictions. As we cannot reach our ideals (e.g. a truly just society), we produce imperfect fictional explanations full of deliberate errors to fill in logical gaps and oversee the inconsistencies. When the …
Protest at the SNP Square on 9th of March 2018 in response to the murder of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová (via WikiCommons) Slovakia is a rather unique case within post-1989 Central Europe as far as democratic transition is concerned. The lack of a tradition of statehood is the most evident difference between Slovaks and the other nations of Central Europe. It is necessary to keep this fact in …
The urgent task for all democrats “To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government. Even the most intelligent large public of which we have any experience must determine finally who shall wield the organized power of …
On July 1st, the first day of the implementation of the Hong Kong version of the National Security Law, tens of thousands of Hong Kong people gathered on the streets in Causeway Bay to march. Source (via WikiCommons) The annual June 4 candlelight vigil in Hong Kong to commemorate those who died in the 1989 suppression of peaceful protests in China was canceled this year, although a few …
