Catalog essay for “Brotherville,” photographic exhibition by Farah Al Qasimi

Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan: both are futurologists who theorized about the impact of information exchange on societies. In the late 1960s, Toffler came up with the concept of future shock, while McLuhan “invented” the global village. I dared combining these two concepts into a sort of “theory of everything” to explain political process…[Read more]

Book review. Kate Langdon & Vladimir Tismaneanu “Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy: Ideology, Myth, and Violence in the Twenty-First Century”, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Deux controverses ont marqué (et continuent de le faire) la discipline des relations internationales.
La première est une controverse philosophique qui porte sur la nature du milieu international (entre «paix précaire» et « état de guerre») et continue, aujourd’hui encore, de diviser les auteurs.
La seconde est une controverse sur la nature de…[Read more]

People’s relationships to paid work are many and varied. For some it is an important indicator of their identity, while for others it is a form of inescapable drudgery, boredom, or a place of exploitation. For those under- and unemployed, this unbearable state of boredom might itself be an aspiration. Current literature on queer identities and…[Read more]

Les fondements politiques modernes d’une économie sans règle ni contraintes pour ses principaux agents sont à chercher aux Etats-Unis, dans une opposition, largement partagée, parmi ses supporters, aux réformes « libérales » (de gauche dans ce pays ») » contenues dans le New Deal (1933-1938). Engagées par un président démocrate Franklin D. Ro…[Read more]

If we look at the past three decades in the history of Eastern Europe, Ukraine may safely be placed at the top of the chart of “unstable” states. First was the student-led Revolution on Granite in the 1990s. The outcome of that revolution was a resignation of entrenched high-ranked Soviet officials under the pressure of public opinion. Then, if…[Read more]

C’est dans un contexte historique bien particulier, la seconde guerre mondiale, puis la guerre froide, et dans un pays (les Etats-Unis) qui se pose en leader du combat contre le communisme mondial et la socialisation de l’Economie, que des chercheurs en sciences économiques vont élaborer les cadres conceptuels et théoriques qui deviendront autant…[Read more]

Il est un « conte de fées » – issu de médias ne pratiquant pas la distanciation critique déontologiquement requise par rapport à leurs principaux actionnaires – selon lequel les organisations représentatives de la société civile et du monde des affaires exerceraient, dans les mêmes conditions, des pressions sur la décision politique pour assur…[Read more]

Plusieurs grandes idées président au développement des mythes et habitudes collectives caractérisant les Américains en société, à tout moment de leur histoire.

C’est dans ce registre, dont les thèmes traversent l’histoire des Etats-Unis et les partis politiques, que les « intellectuels organiques » (au sens Gramscien du terme) ou les manipul…[Read more]

Dini çoğulculuk, dini dışlayıcılık ve kapsayıcılıktan farklı olarak, her dinsel inanış taraftarlarının kendi dinleri içinde kalarak ilahi selamete erişeceğini söyler. Temelde, teolojik ve felsefi boyutları olan dini çoğulculuk tartışmasının siyasete bakan bir yönü de vardır. İslam tarihinde Meşşâî felsefenin kurucusu ve mutluluk filozofu ola…[Read more]

Book review. Taras Kuzio “Putin’s War against Ukraine: Revolution, nationalism and crime,” CreateSpace Independent, in association with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto, 2017

Book review. Abel Polese. “Limits of a Post-Soviet State,” Ibidem-Verlag, 2016. ISBN 978-3-8382-0845-9

Ukraine’s current fight against Russian aggression carries deep historic resonances which we ignore at our peril.

The research: (1) embraces peculiarities of the current EU foreign policy towards Ukraine; (2) enumerates and analyzes documents, agreements and treaties which establish the frameworks for this policy; (3) discovers the impact of human rights issues on shaping and conducting this policy. Based on the criminal trials against opposition leaders, the…[Read more]

Few people realise that the idea of establishing a Black Sea Union (BSU) – a regional bloc along the Black Sea littoral – was proposed in the immediate aftermath of WWII. This idea was primarily developed and advocated by Yuriy Lypa, a Ukrainian inter-war political thinker (1900-1944). In his books, Lypa described the dominant cultural, pol…[Read more]

Post-communist Ukraine is in the midst of implementing reforms which it missed for centuries. It gradually evolves into a unique geopolitical entity which, finally, acquires a fair chance to be consistent and self-sufficient. However, if the West takes a neutral stance today – as it frequently happened in history – a “decentralized” Ukraine…[Read more]

The article focuses on the Ukrainian geopolitical presence in the Black Sea littoral tracing its development since the beginning of the twentieth century. An attempt is made to predict the future regional policies of Ukraine taking into account ongoing irreversible processes: the recent Ukrainian democratic revolution, early presidential elections…[Read more]

The article outlines the geopolitical rationale behind contemporary Russian expansionism, as well as presents the asymmetric and “hybrid” mechanisms utilized by the Kremlin to solidify its authority in the post-communist space. To do this, the article refers to the findings of American, British, Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals on the nature of…[Read more]

This book highlights the quantitative methods of data mining and information visualization and explores their use in relation to the films and writings of the Russian director, Dziga Vertov. The theoretical basis of the work harkens back to the time when a group of Russian artists and scholars, known as the “formalists,” developed new concepts of…[Read more]