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Authoritarian regimes and religious institutions in the Muslim majority world see eye-to-eye on the topic of atheism. United by their fear of losing control over their populations and their desire for conformity, consecutive governments have pushed for unfair restrictions on their subjects’ beliefs since their inception. But even in society, non-belief remains a taboo. Should atheists in Muslim majority world become more vocal?
Bridge International is a for-profit chain of private (pre-)primary schools employing technology to allegedly provide “high-quality, affordable education” in the Global South. Like many other actors, Bridge (cl)aims to bridge the global digital divide and to use information and communication technologies to realize development (“ICT4D”), in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. But are such projects really allowing the region to “catch up” with the rest of the world and strengthen its weak global standing? Not necessarily. Many projects’ implementation mirrors existing global power inequalities and may even reinforce them.1 Moreover, the technologies employed themselves augment these imbalances. The present contribution illustrates this, using Bridge as a case study.
The discussion about the interplay between digital technologies and the process of globalization is often focused around the following question: who has access to global information networks and who benefits from digital communication technologies? These are essential questions and it can hardly be denied that they confront us with a series of political and ethical questions. However, we also need to recognize the ongoing digitalization of the globe, a process where more and more people are put on various kinds of maps...
Europe’s new digital borders
(2018)
The European Union’s (EU) external border framework is not only increasingly reliant on digital databases, but these databases are now set to become interoperable. By 2020, the European Commission (EC) aims to have a fully interconnected new architecture for identity management at the border in place. Based on biometric enrolment of all third-country citizens, Europe’s new digital borders raise a number of concerns, including suspicion, large-scale surveillance, and internal policing that spread well beyond the border site.
Border management today is embedded into a complex network of data collection and data analysis that provides authorities with knowledge about who (or what) attempts to cross the border. While still serving as physical chokepoints for the examination and extraction of dangerous, suspicious, or illegitimate elements from global flows of mobility, border operations therefore increasingly rely on a number of databases...
With the rise of big data, internet-of-things, machine learning, targeted advertising, face recognition algorithms, virtual assistants, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and cyberwarfare, we find more and more people and policy makers around the world debating whether technological advances are helping us or hurting us. Such debates often focus on trying to figure out a way to balance the need to preserve human values with the desire to not interfere with technological progress. The central problem that arises then is what to do when values and progress come into direct conflict with each other. Should we err on the side of caution and rein in companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook so they do not interfere with personal privacy and national democracy? Or should we take a more pioneering perspective and view the occasional rights violation as a necessary risk that can be outweighed by the rewards for medicine, manufacturing, and media? Or should we try to find a middle path and have tech companies and policy makers work together to develop guidelines for “responsible research and innovation”?
Almost a decade ago, the internet was celebrated as one of history’s greatest liberation tools. People have unparalleled access to information and a greater deal of freedom to express themselves without fear of censorship or reprisal. This enthusiasm was short-lived, however. Today’s internet is heaving with hate speech, censorship, fake news, misinformation, and all forms of extremism. Governments have tightened their grip on digital spaces, and tech companies have grown into nontransparent empires with immense influence on the world’s politics, economies, and societies. These changes have brought forward new terrains of conflict and have redefined the relationship between the citizen and the state.
Large-scale digitisation has brought cultural heritage objects and materials from the remotest places of the world to our computer screens. At first sight, this innovation seems to make cultural heritage accessible to everyone like never before. However, technological advances have not eliminated social inequalities between powerful and marginalized communities and ethical issues in communicating cultural heritage. These issues became much more vivid and obvious when the spread of cultural heritage reached the global scale.
Europe is a key normative power. Its legitimacy as a force for ensuring the reign of rule of law in international relations is unparalleled. It also packs an economic punch. In data protection and the fight against cybercrime, European norms have been successfully globalized. The time is right to take the next step: Europe must now become the international normative leader for developing a new deal on internet governance. To ensure this, European powers should commit to rules that work in security, economic development and human rights on the internet and implement them in a reinvigorated IGF.
On February 20 at the Max Planck Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, the Legal Historian and member of the Constitutional Court of Peru, Dr. Carlos Ramos Núñez, presented a crucial intervention on the problems that face the current constitutionalism in Latin America. Faced with a heterogeneous group of historians, philosophers and theoreticians of law, interested in the vicissitudes of Latin American juridical evolution, the political-juridical tensions of the Peruvian present served him as a framework to raise various constitutional problems and controversies. ...
The illiberal turn in Europe has many facets. Of particular concern are Member States in which ruling majorities uproot the independence of the judiciary. For reasons well described in the Verfassungsblog, the current focus is on Poland. Since the Polish development is emblematic for a broader trend, more is at stake than the rule of law in that Member State alone (as if that were not enough). If the Polish emblematic development is not resisted, illiberal democracies might start co-defining the European constitutional order, in particular, its rule of law-value in Article 2 TEU. Accordingly, the conventional liberal self-understanding of Europe could easily erode, with tremendous implications.