Something profound and genuinely radical is taking place in Scotland.
The ritual slaughter of animals has become the last of many areas of contention that are changing the shape of our public domains. The way in which Islamophobia is becoming a part of our public ‘common sense’ has complex knock-on effects, not least for our Jewish minorities.
Europe’s civilizing mission is humanitarian - its duty to intervene to spread the good word, protecting the oppressed against local tyrants. The conditions by which this protection is granted are always dictated by the protector and never the protégé. Though this is not said, it is a given.
The campaign to give Soviet Jews the right to leave their country brought two diasporas and a world superpower together in an unlikely alliance. Yet while it was a brilliantly fought battle, it could hardly be described as a total triumph for human rights, writes Oliver Bullough.
In the UK, people lose their liberty simply for claiming asylum. On the 60th anniversary of the Refugee Convention, which enshrined the right to seek protection from persecution, it is worth reminding ourselves of how far we have fallen from those aspirations.
The Democracy Manifesto signals that the time has come to open ourselves to the many ways in which the demos, that is, the people, organize themselves around the world to take charge of their own destiny.
What is The Democracy Manifesto? A global conversation involving academics, civil society and social movement activists from Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America, has set out a credo for our fast-moving times, followed by responses from four of the participants as they continue th
There are particularities of fear in a post-communist Europe bewildered by the demands of neoliberalism, which also tap into a legacy of aversion matured during Communism.
Nobody has raised real debates in national or supranational parliaments to discuss the excesses of the securitarian discourse. Quite the opposite: the left has adopted the security discourse wholesale as its own and entered into a kind of auction with the right.
Right-wing populist parties tend to be anti-multinational and anti-intellectual: they endorse nationalistic, nativist, and chauvinistic beliefs, embedded - explicitly or coded - in common sense appeals to a presupposed shared knowledge of ‘the people’.
The debate in England over Scottish independence misses the point. It was the SNP's ambition and positivity, not the independence issue, that won them the Parliamentary majority. Now they must be more bold still, and build a path towards a distinctively Scottish future
