Around the Bloc: Poland’s Tusk Takes Over Top EU Post, Moldova’s Pro-West Alliance Likely to Retain Power
Plus, the pope urges Turkey to open doors to Armenia, and a new Russian convoy enters eastern Ukraine.
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Plus, the pope urges Turkey to open doors to Armenia, and a new Russian convoy enters eastern Ukraine.
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Tracking the terms „populism“ and „the people“ from the 19th century, Marco D’Eramo offers a striking new interpretation of their current applications—the first levelled indiscriminately at any political force that steps outside the bounds of convention, the second banished from the scene.
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Information society can be defined from a technological, spatial, occupational, cultural or economic perspective. This is a society of technological, cultural, social and economic rapid change. But it is also a society that changes its purposes and ideals under the incentives of technologization and globalization via technology. Certain particular changes within the realm of information which are taking place in contemporary times induce significant consequences for society. A ”new class” can provide us with vocabularies for the social discourse of change, while creating new ideals for organising social affairs. Social capital gains a new virtual dimension. The Internet provided the means for an exacerbated development of investigation market methods and techniques which seems to come closer to a kind of totalitarian espionage. After the atom bomb, we are now facing the spectre of a second bomb: the information bomb, capable of using the interactivity of information to wreck the peace of mind for the individuals and maybe even the peace between nations.
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The growth of scientific knowledge should be investigated from the perspective of the philosophy of science and not merely from the perspective of the concrete results, registered by the history of science. From this hypothesis, the paper identifies key ideas and arguments (selected mainly from Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper) for a more accurate description and understanding of the growth of scientific knowledge starting from a distinction of the perspectives brought about by philosophy of science and, respectively, by history of science in what concerns the growth of scientific knowledge. The role of theory and practice in the growth of knowledge is also evaluated. Implicitly, this distinction involves also a distinction of the abstract, conceptual and qualitative aspects, different from the quantitative ones, (intuitively) associated with the specific of scientific knowledge and with that of the growth of scientific knowledge.
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The aim of this paper is to discuss the persecution of the Iraqi Yezidis by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria that took place over the last years, to present its political and religious background, and to analyse its legal consequences, which includes the possibility of punishing the perpetrators under international law. The article consists of three main parts: The first one gives a short account of the history and theology of Yezidism; the second part presents the origin and course of the religious persecution of the Yezidis; and the third part suggests some legal actions that could be undertaken by the international community with a view to punishing the perpetrators. The final section of this paper proposes the establishment of an international criminal court as an alternative solution to solve the problem of how perpetrators should be punished in such cases.
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This article is dedicated to the modernization in the Republic of Turkey that took place from its establishment in 1923 until the end of the 20th century. It analyzes Mustafa Kemal’s approach to modernization, which has imposed a radical separation with traditional Islamic values and Ottoman tradition. Despite the quick enactment of a European legislation and the restructuring of the country to a European model, the change in Turkish people’s identity has not been without difficulty. Alongside the introduction of a multiparty political system, the traditional Islamic values have made their way into the political scene, and shortly thereafter the Turkish army begins to intervene directly in political life as a guardian of the secular nature of the state, but at the same time undermines its democratic foundations. The movement toward a liberal political life during T. Özal’s administration has irreversibly shifted the direction of Kemalist Turkey’s development. The necessity of the merging of Islamic cultural identity with European values has sparked a public debate, marked by an uneven advancement, testing the country’s worldly stature.
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This article tackles the problem of how we understand the Other – a problem related to the dichotomy of ‘us vs. them’ in divided communities. Nycz identifies two dominant positions in this area: the Eurocentric position, which corresponds to European and North American anthropology’s universalist approach, and multiculturalism, which recognizes the equality of cultural variants. Both perspectives, Nycz argues, have reached an impasse: the first because by has appropriated the debate and attained a dominant position over the Other, and the second because it tends to stifle theoretical conflict, which risks weakening its ethical engagement. Nycz postulates a different approach. The ability to see individuals and the community (culture) from the perspective of the Other (a perspective that may be internalized or external) is posited as an inherent element of critical self-knowledge. Bakhtin’s notion of ‘outsidedness’ or ‘exotopy’ (vnenakhodimost) represents for Nycz a solid foundation to develop a universal category of historical cultural anthropology.
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The article discusses postmemory landscapes, understood both as a spatial disposition of Eastern and Central Europe, and their cultural – especially photographic, filmic, and literary – representations. The author shows that those landscapes allow to reconsider two crucial problems in the light of memory and trauma studies: i.e. spatial dimension of remembering and the meaning of site/landscape for the experience of postmemory, as well as the reinterpretation of the archive of visual clichés related to the representation of space, which is marked by historical trauma.
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This article is devoted to the historical and ethnographic description of the city of Wenshan — the administrative center of the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. This city, unattractive from the point of view of tourism, has an important historical and cultural content, encoded in its name, and associated with the fate of many non-Han peoples inhabiting it, and with the dramatic history of the national policy of Chinese power in different dynastic periods. The author attempted to reveal this content and to introduce ethnographic and historical plots into the Russian science, to help the reader better understand the ethno-social processes that took place in the past of this city and the country as a whole. Special attention is paid to such political institutions as Tu si and Liu Guan. They are the systems of indirect and direct administration, which represented the confrontation, the periodic dominance of the manifestations of the local and the central authorities, which determined the form of management of peripheral territories, which is now used in China. The example of Wenshan, which appeared as a reaction to the conflict between Tu si and Liu Guan, gives us the opportunity to see the high price and value of peace in the history of the Chinese multiethnic society.
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The neutrality as a theoretical concept and status, which has found its applicability in times and geopolitical conjunctures, is an issue, susceptible to research both in scientific and analytical papers. Recognizing the complexity of the institution of neutrality, the researchers concerned of the subject deal with the issue of neutrality nowadays by arguing that the recourse to the declaration of neutrality status had an obvious political underpinning throughout history. It was shaped by the position of the declaring neutrality state, the interest of the actors who imposed it on certain forms of pressure, and the countries that were the guarantors of security, as well as the cause-effect relationship or the cost-benefit perspective. The distinct and complex character of scientific studies in the field of neutrality is due to a solid foundation on the way of research of the concept of neutrality. The geopolitical realities have generated transformations, which have repercussions on status of neutrality and policies of neutral states, an impact manifested by discrepancies and interpretations of legal norms. For some countries, the status of neutrality has not been clearly defined and legitimized in official documents. Some scientific papers on the case study of some EU Member States have confirmed the irrelevance of this status and its compatibility with some regional and international cooperation projects. The essence of this practice has been strengthened by conclusions based on the provisions of the rules of the international law Some of the historical, legal, geopolitical or other forms of reasoning have prompted some European states to declare their neutrality in the twentieth century and have lost their topicality.
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This paper tries to further elaborate one of the most important external powers of the European Union: Its “reforming power” which goes in parallel with its ability as “normative actor” in the Western Balkans. Through Albania as a case study, it tries to argue that the process of Albania’s integration to EU has transformed the country in several directions: by introducing a deep juridical reform and by the full alignment of its foreign policy with CFSP and the “regional cooperation”. In fact, under the auspices of the EU integration, the country is making all the efforts to deliver on one of the most transformative reforms undertaken in the region, that of the justice system. This gives to EU the features of a “reforming power”. The term shows EU as a driving force which makes countries undertake deep reforms they would not have differently realized, if not under the conditionality for the EU integration.
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The generation of so-called digital natives assumes the paradox of having a series of competences for which they have not been trained: those related to transmedia and digital communication. Their context and their surroundings make them prone to an everyday and effective use of nwe technologies, but not necessarily reflective, mature and appropriate. This article presents an analysis on the crossing of competences related to Transmedia Communication and those that have to do with Critical Thinking. Its fusion is what we have called Transmedial Thinking. To this aim, a case study has been taken as a reference, the Guidance Project by the Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona. Through it, a series of university and secondary school students develop Transmedia and Critical Thinking skills that enable their personal and social empowerment.
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Critical thinking and effective communication are indispensable skills in any professional setting in contemporary globalized and computerized society. The era of globalization and the Internet pose new challenges to education. On the one hand, people have immediate, global, and facilitated access to information. On the other hand, the increasing amount of information inevitably requires one to operate in a selective and analytical way, and to be able to critically evaluate the knowledge and information acquired. These abilities are instrumental in effective decision-making processes and complex problem-solving in the contemporary world. Moreover, critical thinking skills have a direct impact on fostering initiative, autonomy, and leadership. This paper argues for the relevance of scenario theory and practice for critical thinking. Scenario analysis has been used in complex planning domains, cybernetics, business organizations and in vocational education, but we suggest that this approach can also be used more widely in developing critical thinking. In this article, a scenario refers to a set or collection of projections of future events (Wall, 1983). By allowing the investigation of the ‘what if’ questions, scenarios make in-terpretations about the future and engage with the domains of the possible, probable and hypothetical. Indeed, scenarios allow us to envision possible futures and alterna-tives in a hypothetical course of events. Viewed through this perspective, scenarios could be included in the toolkit of critical thinking as self-reflective tools to assess the present. How, then, could imaginary scenarios enhance critical thinking? After an introduction about the concept of scenario, we will test the scenario-based ap-proach to critical thinking in a two-level analysis. We will first analyze the scenarios employed in a corpus about climate change awareness (NASA Global Climate Change and Yale Climate Connections) and climate change denial websites (Watts Up With That and Climate Depot). Thus, we will build on the research by Oreskes & Conway (2010), Dunlap (2013) and others on the communication of contested science. The Internet plays a central role in shaping public perceptions today and hence needs to be discussed seriously as a source of misinformation. We will ana-lyze how scenarios are used by the two competing interest groups. In the second phase of analysis, the results will be used to develop pedagogical advice for using scenarios in teaching critical thinking.
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This article proposes an articulation between the conceptions of information literacy and a cultural and social approach of critical thinking, implemented through an original methodological approach of analysis and cartography of controversies. We begin by discussing some dimensions of the digital environment that affect the definition and consideration of the fields of Information Literacy (IL) and Critical Thinking (CI) and their articulation. We go on to present a state of the literature on critical thinking that reflects divergent visions. We extend this reflection by proposing a synthesis of the convergences between the concepts of information literacy and critical thinking and a form of articulation between the two fields. Subsequently, we present a reflexive analysis of our teachings on controversies at university since 2014, and which constitute an adequate support for teaching our cultural, social and creative approach of critical thinking.
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The objective of the study is to examine usage of persuasion techniques in media communication of politicians. The research sample consists of media statements of selected Slovak politicians on social networks. The selected politicians are the winners of the most recent election conducted on the territory of the Slovak Republic, i.e. election to the higher territorial units in 2017. We have chosen to analyze the issue mainly due to the fact that, in contemporary society, we often encounter negative ways of influencing a recipient, like for example, manipulation, propaganda, or scaremongering. Persuasion can generally be considered a means of persuading, while the actual conviction is based on a free and reasoned decision of the recipient. Political communication and election campaigns in Slovakia and in the world provide a vast space to analyze the means of public figures trying to win a recipient, in this case, a voter. We approach the research through a method of content analysis. We have analyzed media communication of the winners of the election to the higher territorial units 2017 on social networks in the pre-election week. The result of the research and this study is an evaluation of occurrences of persuasion techniques used most frequently by the selected politicians in Slovakia.
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The article analyzes the contribution of Nikolai Berdyaev to the disclose human dimension of politics. Special attention is given to the justification of the antinomy between the individual and society, as well as the analysis of the fundamental contradictions that characterize the historical existence of man. Originality of political and philosophical ideas of Berdyaev is derived from its particular attention to the human content of social phenomena to their religious and moral evaluation.
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The paper reflects on two main questions: "What is a political infantilism?", as well as - "Why do political people do evil?"
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The main goal of the paper is to clarify the essence and the meaning of the concept (and phenomenon) “civic educated-ness” in the context of Philosophy of Education. It is determinative, “fundamental” but neglected and omitted characteristic of civic education. A number of problems which stay in the focus of Bulgarian academic thought are discussed in the article. On the basis of a philosophical-historical analysis some original theses are propounded. The central thesis is the determination of the goal of civic education which is the achievement of civic educated-ness – a unity of personal “integrity” and “virtuousness”. Form this point of view the idea that civic education consists of two comparatively independent levels is proposed. The first level is bound with the “citizenship” in the juridical sense. The second is bound up with the realization of the socialpolitical activity and identity of the citizen and that is why this second level should be built upon the first one. It also should be the ultimate goal of the process of civic education – education in active citizenship
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