Turkey elected its first president through direct suffrage; so what can we expect now? It is populism that is increasingly in charge of Turkey's politics - not any one person.
In the absence of any political lead either from their UK masters or their indirect US ones, the UK's foreign office diplomats are left with little direction to exercise real clout, and no role, even on a realpolitik basis, to play in a changing and challenging world.
The super-rich have captured the electoral-representative institutions of contemporary democratic regimes. The ideal of anti-representative democracy can help us understand and counter this phenomenon.
As the war on Gaza continues, we should analyze the attacks on Jews and their property in Europe differently from how we view the masses of people taking to the streets in protest against that war.
Contrary to appearances, the embrace by some Egyptian liberals of anti-democratic practices may not be in contradiction with their liberal principles. This goes to show that the ‘goods’ of liberty and democracy are not identifiably the same or always harmonious, and it is mistaken to think so.
There are abundant signs of the weakening of Palestinian and Israeli willingness to engage with one another. The temptation to resort only to violence must not be allowed to take hold on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. This conflict will only be resolved when each sees the other and is wil
Uninformed public and low community participation have been the result of unsuccessful top down institutional approaches to implementing sustainable development plans, without incorporating local networks for cooperation mechanisms.
Desistance from violence can be to withdraw from a stance of violence through an act of violence, to leave off one form of violence by taking on another. Each Israeli attack on Gaza is simultaneously and implicitly recast by state subtext as a desistance from genocide.
These options distract people from the real priority: to find (or strengthen) practical forms of pressure in support of international consensus.
The most prominent case is the extreme right political party Golden Dawn in Greece. While all cases are different, they all address exactly the same fundamental question: what are the limits of political activism within a liberal democracy?
Political actors must address the place of religion and ethnicity, as defining identity markers, in the post-Arab Spring countries. The Arab Spring, after all, may have signaled the beginning of the end of exclusionary models of nationalism, and all the other isms that eventually lead to genocidal
An overview of the strengths and weaknesses of Turkey's presidential candidates, and of the electorate's views, indicate that Erdoğan will be the victor of the upcoming elections on 10 August 2014.
