Power and Crisis Archives - Page 2 of 6

Feature

Bannon at Booth

A conflict between principle and strategy?

March 15, 2018 • by Michael Weinman

Bannon, surely, needs no introduction, nor need we long belabor the reasons why the decision to invite him to speak at the University of Chicago proved controversial. Still, let’s note that in a letter of protest signed by over 100 members of the University of Chicago faculty, the rationale for objecting to ...

Europe & Central Asia

From Casting Director to Failed Coup

Unseating the Turkish military

March 6, 2018 • by Phyllis Jeffrey

The most recent period of competitive democratic politics in Turkey was bookended by two coups: those of 1980 and 2016. If the first heralded the re-organization of politics under the supervision of the military, the second instigated the transition to a civilian autocracy. The significance of the failed coup of ...

Europe & Central Asia

A Revolution in the Polling Booths?

The new constitutional order in Orbán’s “illiberal” Hungary

March 5, 2018 • by Mátyás György Endrey

In line with these ambitions, Orbán was also quick to announce that he considered the new parliament to be “a constitutional assembly,” tasked with setting the solid foundations for the new system in the form of a new constitution, The Fundamental Law, coming into force on January 1, 2012. This ...

Democracy

The Current Situation in Catalonia

Part two on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 4, 2018 • by Lucia Pradel

This piece is part of a two-part series. Part One is meant to contextualize Pradel’s essay. The Election on December 21st, 2017 The Catalonian independence movement won what appears like a clear victory on December 21. All the same, Ciudadanos (Citizens Party), a liberal pro-unity party that calls themselves “post-nationalist” won the majority ...

Democracy

America’s Hunger Games

The normalization of mass shootings will only stop when a majority of citizens start acting

March 4, 2018 • by Siobhan Kattago

In the dystopian novels of Suzanne Collins, the Capitol organizes annual Hunger Games, in which twenty-four youth – one boy and one girl from each peripheral district, which resemble colonies – are forced to fight to the death. The children, who are selected by lottery and mostly poor, are trained, ...

Democracy

Contextualizing Catalonia

Part One on Catalonia’s constitutional crisis

March 1, 2018 • by Skyler Maassen, Lucia Pradel and Leng Wah Sing

In the early- to mid-twentieth century, repeated regime changes instigated the devolution of power from a centralized government to localized authorities. The desire for a stabilized, democratic form of government prevailed in the late 1970s with the fall of General Franco. Spain is comprised of seventeen autonomous regions. The Spanish Constitution of 1978, states ...

Power and Crisis

The City Does Not Belong to its Inhabitants

A letter from Jerusalem

February 27, 2018 • by Ido Nahari

The holy is that which people have no control over: it is found only in the sovereignty of God and is unobtainable in the physical realm, which is what is described as “mortal” and is limited to people. Jerusalem is holy. That is why it was not the sovereign city ...

The City Does Not Belong to its Inhabitants

Feature

A Conversation We Must Not Stop Having

The #MeToo movement

February 5, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

I tried to speak out. I told our homeroom teacher and she yelled at the boys in our class in front of the girls, telling them that this was wrong. But no real disciplinary measures were taken. Most of the boys (at least in my class) engaged in non-consensual touching, ...

Education

Milo in Berkeley

Further reflections on the renewed academic free speech debate

January 23, 2018 • by Michael Weinman

What light if any, I will ask here, does this claim shine on the larger discourse about academic free speech, specifically as that discussion has come to focus, for historical and strategic reasons, on UC-Berkeley. The proximal cause of Berkeley’s centrality is the shutdown of an intended speech by Milo ...

Feature

Thinking After C’ville

A meditation on more of the same

January 12, 2018 • by Marcus Toure B. McCullough

Reverend Marcus Toure B. McCullough is a pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is a graduate Morehouse College, and has earned masters degrees in divinity and sacred theology from Harvard Divinity School and Boston University School of Theology.

Feature

Martin Luther King’s “False God of Nationalism”

Today’s animus against migrants is a legacy of Jim Crow

January 9, 2018 • by Vaughn A. Booker

A version of this essay was originally published on January 9 2018. Speaking on the first black-owned radio station in the US in 1953, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached on “The False God of Nationalism.” In the sermon, preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church and broadcast on Atlanta-based WERD radio ...

Martin Luther King’s “False God of Nationalism”

Feature

#Charlottesville: Before and Beyond

Public Seminar is launching a collection of essays that reflect on and respond to the violence in Charlottesville in August 2017

January 2, 2018 • by The Editors

These events occurred a year after a bitterly divisive election brought problems of racism, white identity politics, and America’s fraught history of racism to the fore. The violence that ensued — four casualties, including the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer — left the country bewildered, angry, and frightened about ascendant ...