By Arno Tausch · Monday, August 24, 2015
 This article presents statistical estimates of ISIL support in the Muslim world, based on Pew data covering 42 percent of the total global Muslim population on favorability of four terror organizations, to be well compared with ISIL: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and al Qaeda, and the favorability of suicide bombing. It is assumed that these data (average support rates) reflect the true, but unknown, rates of ISIL support, which will be at somewhere around 17 percent of the entire global Muslim population. The article analyzes mechanisms that contribute towards ISIL favorability, such as anti-Americanism, the hatred of the State of Israel, and the advance of violent Islamism. Finally a comparison of the evolving terror scene with the conflict in Northern Ireland is also outlined.
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By Matteo Calla · Thursday, July 30, 2015 This article places Benjamin’s late work in dialogue with recent attempts in media theory and structuralism to think the subject and historical contingency together. It argues their apparent incompatibility is reflected in Benjamin’s writing in the form of a recurrent contradiction between historical materialism and transhistorical theology. Through a reconstruction of the theorist’s historicization of an earlier theological theory of the fall of language in his Marxian-inflected work of the 1930’s, it claims that Benjamin initiates a historicist reconceptualization of the impasse of the Kantian subject onto being as the product of a particular field of mediation arising with mass modernity. Yet following the rejection of his nascent version of the Arcades Project by Adorno and the Marxist Institute for Social Research in 1938, theology returns as an attempt to reconceive of an aesthetic-formal break with this impasse. Benjamin’s late theorization of his materialist historiography thus represents a dialectical attempt to think materialism and theology, history and being together, with the aim of mediating not only distraction, but a revolutionary destruction of the subject and the historical order producing it.
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By Sabah Salih · Wednesday, July 15, 2015
The recent dramatic rise of Kurdistan as a major power player in the Middle East could not have happened without America’s 2003 regime change in Iraq. The change also resulted in a dramatic rise in the standard of living and in the way people live their lives and think about themselves and their world. Contrary to the common view in the West, the intervention did not break up a unified Iraq; it rather sped up the unraveling of colonialism’s post–World War I handiwork, which stupidly imposed the tyranny of a minority on the majority. Saddam Hussein laid the groundwork for ISIS’s emergence with his creation of Saddam’s Fidayeen paramilitary force following the first Gulf War.
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By Pekka Sulkunen · Monday, June 29, 2015 The Kurdish Question is a continuation of violence, protest, and repression that persist from the unfinished national state-building of the early twentieth-century Europe. This article compares it with similar but more successful ones in the Nordic countries. The Kurdish Question depends on the democratization of Turkish society. There are black holes on both sides of the conflict that absorb efforts to build democratic institutions. Enlightenment critique of absolutism in Europe established the supremacy of the social over the political order. The republic represents the will of the people. Koselleck argued that this idea potentially drifts towards totalitarianism and brutalities: those who do not obey are excluded to the point of losing their human worth. This is the heart of the Kurdish Question in Turkey today. In democracy different groups defend their interests in political movements that attempt to rule by law. In the Kurdish Question negotiable interests have been identified and reforms are on the way. The problem is that symbolic black holes absorb efforts to negotiate into the requirement of unity and consequent inability to deal with difference. On the Turkish side, the unity is imposed by the secular and modern nationalism itself. On the Kurdish side it consists of a silence about differences in the Kurd society, which is still largely tribal but with a large population outside the clan system.
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By Mohammed Saif-Alden Wattad · Tuesday, June 23, 2015
It is this article’s assertion that calls for academic boycott contradict with the classic rationales of the right to free expression and with the peculiar features of the right to academic freedom. Freedom of expression is about developing a dialogue between two opposing opinions, wherein each claims to be the right one. Calls for academic boycott promote monologues rather than dialogues, thus creating the illusion that they represent the truth because they are not challenged. Moreover, protecting the right to academic freedom of individual academics is necessary for their fulfillment as researchers who can respect academic standards exclusively rather than institutional mandates. The self-fulfillment for an individual academic is enacted through the ability to convey messages that can compete against other views.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, June 15, 2015 Telos 171 (Summer 2015) is now available for purchase in our store.
Standard accounts of American politics invoke an oscillation between idealist and realist inclinations. The idealists appeal to principles, which they identify as fundamental to the American polity, especially those enshrined in the founding documents: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, transformed into a broad democratization agenda. Of course, revisionist critics have no difficulty in pointing out the failure of that agenda, i.e., the extent to which the empirical history of the country fell far short of realizing its ideals. Yet even that critique, smugly put forward to debunk naïve idealism, in some basic ways is itself indebted to the same idealism, insofar as the complaint of insufficient democratization also implies a call for more democracy, the very core of the idealist program. This is why neo-conservatives and their left-liberal adversaries always had more in common than met the eye (as was abundantly clear to traditional conservatives).
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