About
42
Publications
2,220
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
80
Citations
Publications
Publications (42)
The article presents different theories and comparative analyses of freedom of speech in both liberal and non-liberal traditions. Whereas freedom of speech is not an absolute right, the question is if this right should depend wholly on the truth of the respective opinion or statement. Theories that justify free speech on the grounds of autonomy, te...
Liberalism believes that individuals are endowed a priori with reason or at least agency and it is up to that reason and agency to make choices, commitments and so on. Communitarianism criticizes liberalism’s explicit and deliberate neglect of the self and insists that we attain a self and identity only through the effective recognition of signific...
This chapter discusses Jürgen Habermas’, Tariq Ramadan’s and Michael Walzer’s approaches to religion and politics, analyzing in particular the identity politics of the Muslim communities in Europe. All the three thinkers concede religion to play a fundamental role in society and stress the political importance of religion. But how far should religi...
This chapter provides an overview and analyzes the different contemporary theories that seek to establish the compatibility of Islam and democracy. It distinguishes between epistemological theories that, on the one hand, argue that we cannot but access Islam from the point of view of political modernity (Abu Zayd) and those that, on the other hand,...
Populism puts the nation first and defends nationalism on the basis of a moral obligation that has its origin in national identity. The moral framework of populism is similar to that of communitarianism, even though the latter denounces the xenophobia, chauvinism and aggressiveness of the populists. Meanwhile, also many liberals believe that the cu...
We can distinguish between three approaches on how to deal with populism: exclusion and isolation; conscious ignorance; and instrumentalization. Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of populism points in the direction of the first approach, which is generally adopted by liberals. Social democrats, on the other hand, prefer to ignore populism and rather foc...
The book comes to the conclusion that the compatibility paradigm does not yet provide a valid theory that strikes the right balance between identity and emancipation. The pendulum swings either to the side of Kantian transcendentalism or to that of unfettered communitarianism. Therefore, this conclusion suggests that until we have found a theory of...
Most of contemporary postcolonial philosophers believe postcolonial self-constitution to be ‘multiple’ or ‘hybrid’. Aim of this chapter is to refute the postmodern strains in postcolonial studies and to show that, on the contrary, postcolonial self-constitution is centered around strong identities. Analyzing postcolonial self-constitution in terms...
This chapter discusses an alternative approach to liberalism in the empiricist tradition that goes along with the names of Harry Frankfurt and Isaiah Berlin. Although this approach makes non-cognitive states such as desires, preferences and loves foundational of a person’s reasons, it also argues that these are properly constitutive of a person’s f...
The book addresses the complicated nexus between identity and emancipation in politics. It keeps the two aspects closely connected and examines if there is a political project that manages to integrate both. The expected pay-off is a new form of liberalism that is able to overcome the widespread identitiarian resistance in the Global South and the...
This chapter analyzes poststructural theories of difference that question the grand narratives and rationality of Enlightenment liberalism and pay close attention to subjugated knowledges and the diversity of social and cultural contexts. Foucault individuates the will of the persons, their agency, as the criterion of personal identity, since it do...
As show the partly violent clashes between liberal secularists and Islamists in the aftermath of the Arab spring, the two fractions certainly defend two diametrically opposite political points of view. For liberals, politics finds its ultimate justification in the protection of individual freedom. For Islamists, only the application of the moral co...
The use of child soldiers is one of the most morally disturbing forms of human rights violations. Yet, children often join voluntarily armed groups and refuse to leave behind their military role, once they are offered a life more similar to that of a ‘normal’ child. Given the dramatic failure of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) p...
The chapter analyzes the motivations of religious fundamentalists. Typically, fundamentalism is considered to have its origin in determinate cultural or religious systems of beliefs and norms. In this regard, it can be distinguished between metaphysical and moral accounts of fundamentalism. First state that fundamentalism makes claims concerning th...
Is a Muslim still a Muslim when he crashes airplanes into the twin towers? Any serious theory of multiculturalism has to deny that Islam could ever come to justify suicide bombing and terrorism. My thesis is that none of the contemporary multicultural theories manages to do so, or at least not without collapsing into a Kantian conception of persona...
Today we can identify two challenges of pluralism: the ever-growing conflicts between religious, national and ethnic groups on the one hand and the oppression of dissenting individuals by their respective communities on the other hand. Both intercommunitarian and intracommunitarian conflicts find their origin in a communitarian conception of our po...
This chapter discusses the principal paradigm of multiculturalism, the struggle for recognition. The first part shows to what extent our need for recognition has epistemological grounds. The second part argues that truth cannot be the ground for cultural recognition. If truth is relative to cultures, then the grounds for recognition cease to apply....
Three recently published reports show to what extent democracy is losing ground in a global context increasingly characterized by authoritarianism and populism. The argument this articles proposes is that the deplorable state of democracies around the world is due to the neglect of substantial characteristics and sources of democracy, which are abo...
Despite the very different and to some extent opposite historical and political trajectories, there is today a convergence on nationalist affirmation and on majoritarian politics between South Asia and Europe. In India, the Hindu majority rebels against wide-ranging minority rights anchored in the Constitution. In Europe, the refugee crisis and Isl...
We can distinguish between three approaches on how to deal with populism: exclusion and isolation; conscious ignorance; and instrumentalization. Jan-Werner Müller’s analysis of populism points in the direction of the first approach, which is generally adopted by liberals. Social democrats, on the other hand, prefer to ignore populism and rather foc...
This volume assembles renowned scholars to address, for the first time, the relationship between minorities and populism in South Asia and Europe from a critical perspective. Despite the very different and to some extent opposite historical and political trajectories, there is today a convergence on nationalist affirmation and on majoritarian polit...
This book provides a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of identity in politics, featuring for the first time the question of individual emancipation. It addresses the burning questions of our times, viz. nationalism, populism, Islamic fundamentalism, multiculturalism, postsecularism and postcolonialism. The volume repudiates an easy reconcili...
Nowadays the question of toleration is less related to an international clash of civilizations than to the clashes that take place within the states and polities themselves. The article addresses the sources of toleration in this new global scenario, starting from the following set of questions: Do the sources of toleration differ across time and s...
The article addresses the following question: if an extensive period of globalization and also democratization after the fall of the Berlin Wall has been followed by populism (protectionist nationalism in the West and authoritarian nationalism in the Global South), does this mean that there is something wrong with liberalism itself? Must liberalism...
The article introduces to the issue of religion, rights and the public sphere. It analyzes 4 challenges that the conception of the public sphere currently faces: (1) Does there exists a trade-off between the public sphere and a legal regime of civil rights? (2) Does the public sphere really require us to keep the good and religious questions outsid...
The essays in this section are concerned with one fundamental question: Is Islam compatible with democracy or not? They give a rather straightforward answer: Yes, Islam and democracy are indeed compatible, even though some qualify this statement. In a sense, the articles attempt to respond to the challenge that remained open in the first section, n...
Many articles in the preceding sections have been concerned with the foundations of religious pluralism, tolerance and democracy as well as the political conditions that guarantee the peaceful coexistence of cultures and religions. We saw that liberal cosmopolitans contest the multiculturalists’ claim that the ultimate sources of toleration and res...
The articles in this section discuss the origins of contemporary conflicts with a particular focus on the Arab world and the Middle East. These extend over two decades of an ever-growing spiral of violence, starting from the rise of global terrorism and culminating in the civil wars following the Arab Spring. To some extent, these conflicts are not...
Some theorists sustain the hypothesis that the question concerning the compatibility of Islam and democracy is not that different from the accommodation of pluralism as such. From this perspective, Islam is just one of many comprehensive doctrines, to use John Rawls’ famous term in Political (1993), present in society and whose truth-claims all in...
This introduction discusses articles on the theory and politics of republicanism that were presented at the Istanbul Seminars 2015. It asks the following questions: Could it be that republicanism is at least in part the cause of the current cultural clashes and religious violence in both the Arab world and Europe?. Is it just an accident that repub...
This volume combines rigorous empirical and theoretical analyses with political engagement to look beyond reductive short-hands that ignore the historical evolution and varieties of Islamic doctrine and that deny the complexities of Muslim societies' encounters with modernity itself. Are Islam and democracy compatible? Can we shed the language of '...
The article analyses the motivations of fundamentalists. Typically, fundamentalism is considered to have its origin in determinate cultural or religious systems of beliefs and norms. In this regard, it is possible to distinguish between metaphysical accounts and moral accounts of fundamentalism. The first state that fundamentalism makes claims conc...
As show the partly violent clashes between liberal secularists and Islamists in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the two factions certainly defend two diametrically opposite political points of view. For liberals, politics finds its ultimate justification in the protection of individual freedom. For Islamists, only the application of the moral cod...
Is a Muslim still a Muslim when he crashes airplanes into the twin towers? Any serious theory of multiculturalism has to deny that Islam could ever come to justify suicide bombing and terrorism. My thesis is that none of the contemporary multicultural theories manages to do so, or at least not without collapsing into a Kantian conception of persona...
Today we can identify two challenges of pluralism: the ever-growing conflicts between religious, national and ethnic groups on the one hand and the oppression of dissenting individuals by their respective communities on the other hand. Both intercommunitarian and intracommunitarian conflicts find their origin in a communitarian conception of our po...
In this essay, I analyse the relationship between the diamond trade and the war in Congo/Zaire. Most analyses on this topic come to the conclusion that the diamond trade is the cause of the so-called 'first African World War'. My thesis is that motives of greed as such cannot explain the formation, course and dynamics of the war in Congo/Zaire. The...
In this essay, I analyse the relationship between the diamond trade and the war in Congo/Zaire. Most analyses on this topic come to the conclusion that the diamond trade is the cause of the so-called 'first African World War'. My thesis is that motives of greed as such cannot explain the formation, course and dynamics of the war in Congo/Zaire. The...
