This section is a collection of blogs by academics. The blogs will be related to their recently published papers, which will also be open to the public for a limited period of time.
Courtney Freer, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science
As tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to rise, with the Iran-backed Houthis having claimed responsibility for an intercepted missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura port on 7 March (Nereim and Khraiche, 2021) and with reports emerging a week later about another attempted attack (Gulfnews, 2021), it is worth revisiting the role of sectarianism in Saudi domestic politics. I argue that sectarianism sustains the kingdom’s continued authoritarianism, which is further underpinned by a rentier economy financed by hydrocarbon wealth. The Saudi government is therefore uniquely placed to manage a Shii population which it has increasingly come to see as an Iranian fifth column, particularly as regional tensions with Iran mount.
By Barbara Gornik, Science and Research Centre Koper
The image of a razor-wire fence generally evokes connotations associated with oppression, incarceration, loss of freedom, and political violence. Ironically, several border areas in the European Union – a union that has always had a tendency to present itself as a political community where human rights are fully respected – are enclosed by razor-wire fences, with the aim of preventing people’s movement. How is it possible that on the threshold of the 21st century, when we live in the so-called “Age of the Rights”, such political actions are maintained? I claim it is because of the profound transformation of the meaning of the razor-wire fence that empties its violent character and endows it with new implications, including those related to humanitarianism, human rights, and the rule of law. The Slovenian story of the razor- wire fence serves as an example to demonstrate how this transformation of meaning, evident in the semantic contingency of a razor-wire fence, manifests at the level of political practice.
Image credit: Steve Hillebrand, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Licensed under CC0 for Public Domain Dedication.
Guest Contributor
Thomas Nail, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Denver
The current pandemic is another crisis being turned against immigrants. Five years after the terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015 migrants are again being treated as terrorists. This time they are being treated as bioterrorists. Bioterrorism refers to the intentional release of toxic biological agents and migrants are being treated as if their bodies were intentional biological weapons when they are not. This is part of the ongoing characterization of migrants as “invading armies” sweeping the media these days.
Migrants are being denied entry to apply for asylum along the southern border of the United states. This violates national and international immigration law, yet it’s happening anyway in the name of a national health emergency. Donald Trump has temporarily suspended immigration law claiming that immigration is bioterrorism even though the Center for Disease Control has publicly said that asylum seekers pose no health risk.
By Barbara Gornik, Science and Research Centre Koper
The idea that the coronavirus is an equal opportunity killer must be killed itself, wrote Charles M. Blow, opinion columnist for the New York Times, in his article on the privileges of social distancing. He argued that Covid-19 does not affect all people in the same way and to the same extent. Joining Blow in his view, this post reflects on that, metaphorically speaking, it is actually equal opportunity that this virus kills.
The global Covid -19 pandemic has dramatically changed the routines of our daily lives. After schools across Europe came to an effective standstill during the virus outbreak in March 2020, most children had to continue their educational activities through distance learning. Political authorities struggled to regulate the situation and introduced different approaches to alternative educational arrangements; online platforms were the most popular tool, while some also relied on educational packages, radio education and educational television (Schleicher, 2020; Schleicher and Reimers 2020). The situation was particularly challenging in the first weeks of school closure, when school staff were largely unprepared to teach online.
Bassel F. Salloukh, Associate Professor of Political Science, Lebanese American University
Consociational power-sharing is no stranger to academic and policy controversy. It tends to divide students of politics in plural and postwar places into unwavering proponents and staunch opponents. Some find power-sharing institutions necessary for any prospects for peace after protracted wars; others consider ‘power sharing as an impediment to peace and democracy,’ to borrow the title of Donald Rothchild and Philip G. Roeder’s seminal essay (Rothchild and Roeder, 2005: 29-50). This is not surprising, however. After all, the stakes are usually very high, especially in postwar contexts, and the policy choices are stark. For how do you reconstitute postwar states and societies? How can you convince one-time warring combatants to disarm, demobilize, and reconcile? How can you ensure that postwar consociational power-sharing arrangements do not end up reifying sectarian or ethnic identities at that moment when they are most injurious, or that they do not destroy the very state institutions they are supposed to salvage?
These are only some of the questions considered in a Special Feature I edited for Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism. The essays gathered in this Special Feature grew out of a desire to reflect theoretically and normatively on consociational power-sharing, take stock of its empirical record in Lebanon and Iraq, and interrogate its potential utility for other postwar states and societies in the Arab world after the popular uprisings. This is not strictly an academic exercise in an Arab world dotted by seemingly frozen conflicts. It is rather an attempt to examine both the pitfalls and the possibilities of consociationalism in institutional and structural contexts that differ substantially from those states that make up the theory’s original birthplace.
