Monthly Archive: May 2011

Closing the Week 21 – Featuring Mladic and the Shadow of Srebrenica 0

Closing the Week 21 – Featuring Mladic and the Shadow of Srebrenica

A weekly round up of writings on the Internet, some relevant for my research, some political, some funny but all of them interesting (Dutch/English). (As usual to a large extent based upon suggestions from Dutch, other European, American and Middle Eastern readers. Thank you all.) This week featuring the arrest of Radko Mladic.

Bin Laden, geweld en de ontkenning van de politiek 2

Bin Laden, geweld en de ontkenning van de politiek

‘Justice is done’, zei president Obama toen hij de dood van Osama bin Laden openbaar maakte. Na tien jaar zoeken hebben de Amerikanen hun aartsvijand gevonden en geliquideerd. Maar wat betekent de dood van Bin Laden? De opkomst van Al Qaeda in de jaren negentig was een reactie op de toenmalige politieke repressie in het Midden-Oosten. Inmiddels is in veel landen een streven naar democratisering op gang gekomen. Bin Ladens ideologie was gebaseerd op de woede over vernedering en onmacht, terwijl de huidige ontwikkelingen gebaseerd zijn op het terugwinnen van waardigheid. Roel Meijer stelt de vraag of Bin Ladens dood het einde van een tijdperk markeert en het begin van een nieuw hoofdstuk in de geschiedenis van het Midden-Oosten.

Closing the week 20 – Featuring Women2Drive 0

Closing the week 20 – Featuring Women2Drive

A weekly round up of writings on the Internet, some relevant for my research, some political, some funny but all of them interesting (Dutch/English). (As usual to a large extent based upon suggestions from Dutch, other European, American and Middle Eastern readers. Thank you all.) This week featuring the Saudi Arabian campaign Women2Drive.

Veil, For A Change 0

Veil, For A Change

A few weeks ago the Dutch blog and twitter community saw a (small) explosion of messages about the headscarf. What happened? A young Tunisian-Dutch lady with the pseudonym Dunya Henya expressed her feelings and experiences about people who call her names and show other types of offensive behaviour because she wears a headscarf. It appears that both women who veil and unveil are trapped in a politicized idea of the headscarf that not only has consequences in political debates and policies, but also on the streets. This politicization makes real debates with Muslims and among Muslims almost impossible because the different points of view are reduced to simple us and them categorizations. And indeed, at one point someone really has to say: I draw a line, thus far and no further!

Het einde van religie in Europa 3

Het einde van religie in Europa

Volgens Amerikaanse onderzoekers Abrams, Wiener en Yaple zal georganiseerde religie uiteindelijk verdwijnen in negen Westerse democratieën: Oostenrijk, Tjechië, Finland, Zwitserland, Ierland, Canada, Australië, Nieuw-Zeeland en…Nederland. Met name in die laatste vijf ‘religion will be driven toward extinction’ zo stellen zij. Maar is dat ook het einde van geloof?

Catastrophe and Independence – Continuing Claims of Memory 0

Catastrophe and Independence – Continuing Claims of Memory

This week the Israelis remember the victims of the holocaust and of the establishment of the Israeli state. The Palestinians remember Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist armed forces. Both cases of remembrance are hegemonic and contribute to the construction of us and them while they are tightly connected at the same time.