scholarly journals The Issue of Terrorism: The Prospect of Security in South Asia

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (09) ◽  
pp. 85-89
Author(s):  
Shaibal Das ◽  

South Asia was under the colonial regime for a long period of time and it is a very diverse and unique region. South Asia has been plagued by terrorism for so many years. Due to terrorism, South Asia has suffered economically as well as politically and it has strained the relationship between many countries. Almost all the countries of South Asia are the sufferers of this threat and therefore a number of conventions and frameworks have been formulated to eradicate this. Terrorism is a challenge for all and a good cooperation among all the stakeholders is required in this regard. SAARC as a regional organization of South Asia has a lot of responsibility in this issue. Since its inception, SAARC has done various things but due to the political differences between the members it has failed to evolve an effective strategy. It has also failed to implement its guidelines and conventions on the ground and therefore a reform in SAARC is very necessary. To make South Asia a terror free region, all the countries should join hands and should work collectively. They should work by removing their political differences because a unified and strong SAARC will help South Asia in numerous ways and it will bring hope for the betterment of this region in all the possible ways. In this regard the present paper tries to examine the issue of terrorism and the prospect of security in South Asia.

2020 ◽  
pp. 2111-2139 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Subramanyam Raju ◽  
Nagarajan Balasubramaniam ◽  
Rajamanickam Srinivasan

Governance matters (Kaufman, et al, 1999) for growth is now an accepted dictum. However, there are as many hypotheses as to what constitutes governance 'as there are researchers in the field' (Bressers, J.T.A. & Kuks, S.M.M., 2003). Apart from econometrics, political science provides important insights on factors that influence governance and facilitate growth. This chapter examines the political history and economy of South Asia to determine the features that shaped governance and affected economic growth. It finds that governance in South Asian context evolved through three phases. Using a comparative perspective of GDP growth rates and World Governance Indicators in South Asia and Brazil, it analyzes the relationship between political history and economy in each phase. The findings indicate that political ideologies, stability of regimes and policy continuity hugely influence the institutions of government and economic growth. The chapter also finds that people's participation in governance would enhance growth and distributive social justice.


Author(s):  
A. Subramanyam Raju ◽  
Nagarajan Balasubramaniam ◽  
Rajamanickam Srinivasan

Governance matters (Kaufman, et al, 1999) for growth is now an accepted dictum. However, there are as many hypotheses as to what constitutes governance 'as there are researchers in the field' (Bressers, J.T.A. & Kuks, S.M.M., 2003). Apart from econometrics, political science provides important insights on factors that influence governance and facilitate growth. This chapter examines the political history and economy of South Asia to determine the features that shaped governance and affected economic growth. It finds that governance in South Asian context evolved through three phases. Using a comparative perspective of GDP growth rates and World Governance Indicators in South Asia and Brazil, it analyzes the relationship between political history and economy in each phase. The findings indicate that political ideologies, stability of regimes and policy continuity hugely influence the institutions of government and economic growth. The chapter also finds that people's participation in governance would enhance growth and distributive social justice.


Author(s):  
Ümit Atabek ◽  
Gülseren Şendur Atabek

The main aim of this paper is to explore Turkish communication and media policies through governmental programs. Governmental programs are valuable sources for tracing the historical development and change of public policies on communication and media. Our research examines 60 governmental programs. We used content analysis methodology in order to examine the communication and media policies in these programs. As unstructured data, the texts of 60 governmental programs (a corpus of 892 pages) are pre-processed (tokenized, stemmed, tagged and cleaned) by KNIME, an open source software for text analysis and data mining. Additionally, we developed a term dictionary for searching communication and media policies. These dictionary terms helped us exploring the themes of governmental policies. Finally, we graphed the data suitably for the historical analysis of themes in order to trace the policy changes. Our research findings helped us to monitor the changes in Turkish communication and media eco-system with regard to specific technologies such as newspaper, radio, television and internet. We also explored certain policy concepts on communication and media freedoms and rights. The analysis revealed that almost all governments included communication and media related issues in their programs, and the amount of references to communication and media policies increased historically. It is also found that the political differences of governments did not cause much difference in their quantitative references to communication and media issues.


Author(s):  
Kristina Dietz

The article explores the political effects of popular consultations as a means of direct democracy in struggles over mining. Building on concepts from participatory and materialist democracy theory, it shows the transformative potentials of processes of direct democracy towards democratization and emancipation under, and beyond, capitalist and liberal democratic conditions. Empirically the analysis is based on a case study on the protests against the La Colosa gold mining project in Colombia. The analysis reveals that although processes of direct democracy in conflicts over mining cannot transform existing class inequalities and social power relations fundamentally, they can nevertheless alter elements thereof. These are for example the relationship between local and national governments, changes of the political agenda of mining and the opening of new spaces for political participation, where previously there were none. It is here where it’s emancipatory potential can be found.


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354
Author(s):  
Zach Bates

Due to its status as a territory under the joint rule of Egypt and Britain, the Sudan occupied an awkward place in the British Empire. Because of this, it has not received much attention from scholars. In theory, it was not a colony, but, in practice, the Sudan was ruled primarily by British administrators and was the site of several developmental schemes, most of which concerned cotton-growing and harnessing the waters of the Nile. It was also the site of popular literature, travelogues and the most well-known of Alexander Korda's empire films. This article focuses on five British films –  Cotton Growing in the Sudan (c.1925), Stark Nature (1930), Stampede (1930), The Four Feathers (1939) and They Planted a Stone (1953) – that take the Sudan as their subject. It argues that each of these films shows an evolving and related discourse of the region that embraced several motifs: cooperation as the foundation of the relationship between the Sudanese and the British; Sudanese peoples in conflict with a sometimes hostile landscape and environment that the British could ‘tame’; and the British being in the Sudan in order to improve it and its people before leaving them to self-government. However, some of the films, especially The Four Feathers, subtly questioned and subverted the British presence in the Sudan and engaged with a number of the political questions not overtly mentioned in documentaries. The article, therefore, argues for a nuanced and complex picture of representations of the Sudan in British film from 1925 to 1953.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Morteza Karimi-Nia

The status of tafsīr and Qur'anic studies in the Islamic Republic of Iran has changed significantly during recent decades. The essay provides an overview of the state of Qur'anic studies in Iran today, aiming to examine the extent of the impact of studies by Western scholars on Iranian academic circles during the last three decades and the relationship between them. As in most Islamic countries, the major bulk of academic activity in Iran in this field used to be undertaken by the traditional ʿulamāʾ; however, since the beginning of the twentieth century and the establishment of universities and other academic institutions in the Islamic world, there has been increasing diversity and development. After the Islamic Revolution, many gradual changes in the structure and approach of centres of religious learning and universities have occurred. Contemporary advancements in modern sciences and communications technologies have gradually brought the institutions engaged in the study of human sciences to confront the new context. As a result, the traditional Shīʿī centres of learning, which until 50 years ago devoted themselves exclusively to the study of Islamic law and jurisprudence, today pay attention to the teaching of foreign languages, Qur'anic sciences and exegesis, including Western studies about the Qur'an, to a certain extent, and recognise the importance of almost all of the human sciences of the West.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.


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