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Part V of our series on cyberpeace "Cyberpeace: Dimensionen eines Gegenentwurfs".
With everybody focusing on cyberwar, our blog has decided to discuss cyberpeace instead. So far we have seen musings on war and peace, the meaning of the term “cyberpeace” itself and how we construct it discursively and calls to end cyberwar by focusing on the technical aspects again. All of these points are valid. But I feel that they are limited in their scope, because they focus too much on the adversarial: The hacks, the malware, the evil hackers from North Korea. But peace is more than the absence of war – and, in our case, more than the absence of hacks. If we want to be serious about cyberpeace as a societal goal, we have to pay more attention to how we handle our data because this data has a huge impact on the peace within our society....
Right-wing populist parties often resort to a xenophobic rhetoric which both exploits and fuels existing illiberal anti-immigrant sentiments. Since populist anti-immigrant sentiments are at odds with fundamental liberal values and challenge the implementation of any liberal ethics of migration, this essay argues that states should adopt civic education policies to counter such sentiments and persuade citizens to develop liberal attitudes towards immigrants. Empirical evidence suggests that sentiments may be malleable, and there are already examples of local governments devising or supporting initiatives aimed at dispelling prejudices and promoting positive interactions. It might be objected that a government’s involvement in shaping sentiments and opinions conflicts with liberal democratic states’ commitment to individual autonomy and electoral fairness. However, I argue that civic education policies are not necessarily incompatible with such values and I provide five criteria to identify policies that liberal democratic governments may legitimately adopt to counteract anti-immigrant sentiments.
As part of her tour of Africa, German chancellor Angela Merkel recently (Tuesday, 11 October 2016) visited the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, which is also home to the headquarters of the African Union. During a joint press conference with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, Merkel urged the Ethiopian government to open up politics and halt violent behaviour by police in response to peaceful demonstrations...
This essay explores the problem of legitimation crises in deliberative systems. For some time now, theorists of deliberative democracy have started to embrace a “systemic approach.” But if deliberative democracy is to be understood in the context of a system of multiple moving parts, then we must confront the possibility that that system’s dynamics may admit of breakdowns, contradictions, and tendencies toward crisis. Yet such crisis potentials remain largely unexplored in deliberative theory. The present article works toward rectifying this lacuna, using the 2016 Brexit and Trump votes as examples of a particular kind of “legitimation crisis” that results in a sequence of failures in the deliberative system. Drawing on recent work of Rainer Forst, I identify this particular kind of legitimation crisis as a “justification crisis.”
After a recent spate of terrorist attacks in European and American cities, liberal democracies are reintroducing emergency securitarian measures (ESMs) that curtail rights and/or expand police powers. Political theorists who study ESMs are familiar with how such measures become instruments of discrimination and abuse, but the fundamental conflict ESMs pose for not just civil liberty but also democratic equality still remains insufficiently explored. Such phenomena are usually explained as a function of public panic or fear-mongering in times of crisis, but I show that the tension between security and equality is in fact much deeper and more general. It follows a different logic than the more familiar tension between security and liberty, and it concerns not just the rule of law in protecting liberty but also the role of law in integrating new or previously subjected groups into a democratic community. As liberal-democratic societies become increasingly diverse and multicultural in the present era of mass immigration and global interconnectedness, this tension between security and equality is likely to become more pronounced.
A tradição de pensamento conhecida como Teoria Crítica, que conta com os nomes de Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse e Habermas, entre muitos outros, é composta por diferentes modelos críticos. Encontramos, numa mesma geração ou ainda num mesmo autor, diferentes formulações da crítica social apoiadas em diagnósticos do tempo renovados. O presente artigo procura pensar as condições de renovação dos diagnósticos a partir da qual os obstáculos à emancipação ou potenciais emancipatórios, quando presentes numa dada sociedade, sejam considerados e analisados de modo crítico. Essa renovação implica desvincular a fundamentação normativa da crítica do "paradigma produtivista" e conceber as lutas emancipatórias na pluralidade de seus sentidos.
This article argues that populism, cosmopolitanism, and calls for global justice should be understood not as theoretical positions but as appeals to different segments of democratic electorates with the aim of assembling winning political coalitions. This view is called democratic realism: it considers political competition in democracies from a perspective that is realist in the sense that it focuses not first on the content of competing political claims but on the relationships among different components of the coalitions they work to mobilise in the pursuit of power. It is argued that Laclau’s populist theory offers a sort of realist critique of other populists, but that his view neglects the crucial dynamics of political coalition-building. When the relation of populism to global justice is rethought from this democratic realist angle, one can better understand the sorts of challenges each faces, and also where and how they come into conflict.
This article advances the argument that quality of democracy depends not only on the performance of democratic institutions but also on the dispositions of citizens. We make three contributions to the study of democratic quality. First, we develop a fine-grained, structured conceptualization of the three core dispositions (democratic commitments, political capacities, and political participation) that make up the citizen component of democratic quality. Second, we provide a more precise account of the notion of inter-component congruence or "fit" between the institutional and citizen components of democratic quality, distinguishing between static and dynamic forms of congruence. Third, drawing on cross-national data, we show the importance of taking levels of inter-dispositional consistency into account when measuring democratic quality.
What’s that again? Blasphemy law? An Egyptian court sentenced the Islamic scholar and theologian Islam Al-Buhairi to one year in prison for blasphemy. Al-Buhairi was accused of insulting Islam in his TV show “With Islam Al-Buhairi” on “Al-Qahira wa Al-Nas” channel. Al-Buhairi questioned the “Islamic heritage”, which angered the Al-Azhar scholarship...
The European Union is at the crossroads between intelligent expansion of future horizons and frightened shrinking to a perspective of local areas. Fear of descent of the citizens on one side and a politics of crisis, that goes along with harsh injustice have made upset the national societies against each other, missing courage on the side of politicians, to bring European issues to the fore, endanger the European project. There is only one way to overcome this situation by establishing a democratic union, which conserves not only the social and civilian achievements of the national state, as well as the assets of a greater democratic political unity, that offers an unity of European citizens and European state demos.