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Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies (BRIIFS)

Despite the best efforts of many scholars, contemporary Middle Eastern politics is often understood as a battle between individuality, rationality and modernity, on the one hand, and group identities, religion and tradition, on the Other. Such images are current not only among external observers, but also among many of the participants in regional political activities. The perception of such a clash has real costs since it directs attention away from emerging syncretic approaches. In this paper, I examine two areas in which these two oft-claimed incompatible approaches have operated—constitutionalism and civic education. I seek to Show not only that syncretic approaches are possible, but that they have emerged and promise new possibilities for regional politics.

The first purpose of this paper is to Show how constructed knowledge always overcomes knowledge based upon observed science. The second is to Show how societies in neo-liberal industrial economies have, in late modernity, become very risk-aware. This high risk-awareness is a result of the campaigning of environmental and Other activists and the unprecedented ability to Share bad news rapidly through globalized information technology and the media. The resulting hyper-risk-aware societies are troubled as much by constructed risks as by real ones and there is confusion because risk can be more easily foregrounded and backgrounded by political imperatives than science-based arguments. These societies have also learned to be aware of the risks ‘manufactured’ by the processes associated With advancing modernity without being able to deal rationally With their causes. The Study uses cases from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) water sector to illustrate the consequences of these phenomena for water policy-making in the region.

This paper addresses notions of ‘risk’ in the context of HIV and AIDS. It looks at how ‘risk’ is understood from the position of researchers, including sociologists and epidemiologists, and from the position of persons at risk and it describes how these understandings are related to the ways in which rights and responsibilities are also understood. In its examination of these perspectives, the paper distinguishes between ‘traditional,’ ‘modern’ and ‘social’ public healths and the ideological or moral perspectives that underpin them. It also touches upon the ways in which globalization plays into this complex field and raises questions about patents and access to treatments. My argument is that, within the ‘modern’ public health, risk is understood as relating to the individual and that this construction or ‘selected form’ is one of the reasons for the failure of public health to control HIV.‬

Behind the risks normally associated with war and political violence–the wounds to bodies and the body politic- -are a much less visible series of actions with risks that are seldom assessed, actions capable of shaping global economic and political grids. Wars and, indeed, most politics and economics, rest upon a foundation made up of both legal and extra-legal activities. Hundreds of billions of dollars are made on unrecorded (extra-legal) weapons sales and hundreds of billions more are earned through the sale of resources to gain the hard currency needed to buy those weapons and to purchase all of the other supplies that a country at war requires, from medicines and food to industrial equipment and communications technology. If we were simply addressing illegal arms sales, assessing risk would be relatively straightforward. But the fact that countries at war depend upon the extra-legal as well as the legal to acquire the basic developmental infrastructure essential to their populations’ survival means that exploring the qualities and dangers of risk is much more complex and multifaceted: for example, how do we calculate the stakes of wide-scale profiteering from selling extra-legal pharmaceuticals to war-afflicted populations that do not have access to legal medicines? The sheer magnitude of the power and profits that accrue to the extra-legal (and the fact that analytical attention generally focuses upon illegal arms and drugs sales, while common commodities make up the bulk of the extra-legal—and represent unrecorded profits for legal enterprises) suggests that the systematic investigative invisibility surrounding these topics is purposeful–a form of political and economic prestidigitation or sleight of hand. This article investigates the dynamics of the extra-legal as it shapes political and economic processes in the world today.

As tension mounts during the build-up to the Orange marching season, which occurs each summer in Northern Ireland, the streets of many cities and towns are festooned with flags. The proliferation of Union Jacks, Irish Tricolours, Ulster flags and paramilitary banners adorning the streets symbolize loyalty and serve as sectarian markers of territory. In July 2002, however, something unusual happened: republicans started hoisting the Palestinian flag alongside their Irish Tricolours while, in neighbouring loyalist areas, the Israeli flag fluttered alongside the Union Jack and paramilitary banners. This paper suggests some reasons for this by focusing upon the concept of ‘fear’ in the context of the peace processes in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It begins by offering some thoughts on the phenomenon of Israeli flags flying in Belfast before moving on to consider briefly how the psychological and sociological literature generally treat the concept of fear (and risk). This leads to the argument that fear and the use of fear are unrecognized variables in popular discourses surrounding political negotiations and processes such as truth commissions. The paper analyzes the role of fear in the political transition process, a subject seldom dealt with in the academic literature, and examines the way that the concept of fear–like the suffering of victims of political violence–is politicized and depoliticized. The paper then concludes by trying to apply some of the ideas that it presents to the South Africa and Northern Ireland contexts and, particularly, to approaches to political risk-taking.

The “war on terrorism’ in the name of national security and anxiety extends a discourse on risk that is already prevalent as an organizing principle in our globalizing world. In sociology, “”risk society’ refers to the social precariousness of contemporary institutionalized patterns of existence, in which future possibilities, rather than past lessons, increasingly determine decision-making. The ‘war on terrorism’ has used the idea of risk not merely as a strategy to defend values and institutions, but to bring about social and political transformation. Pre-emptive wars have been launched against failed states or collaborators with terrorists abroad and anti-terrorist legislation has been introduced to acquire emergency powers at home. Michael Ignatieff calls the project of fixing failed states through military intervention “Empire lite,” commenting that “to the extent that human rights justify the humanitarian use of military force, the new empire can claim that it serves the cause of moral universalism” (Ignatieff 2003, 110). In reality, human rights and democracy are being offered under a form of imperial dependency in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq through ‘nationalist nation-building projects’ that are unlikely to succeed. Democracy entails self-rule and not just getting the right to vote. This paper argues that both the war on terrorism and humanitarian military intervention are shaped by risk, rather than justice, and are, therefore, more about containment than about realizing the aspirations of a moral universalism based upon rights and political participation.

Abstract: Recent titles discussed in this article include: Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and War, Routledge Encyclopedias of Religion and Society, no. 5 (Routledge, NY: Routledge, 2004), 530 PP., including 60 b&w photos, Hb. £90.00, ISBN 0 415 94246 2; F. E. Peters, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Volume 1: The Peoples of God, Volume 2: The Words and Will of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), Vol. 1: 328 PP., Hb. US$29.95, ISBN 0 691 11460 9, Vol. 2: 406 PP., Hb. US$29.95, ISBN 0 691 11461 7 , Vols. 1 and 2, Hb. US$49.50, ISBN 0 691 11561 3; Majid Tehranian and David W. Chappell, eds., Dialogue of Civilizations: A New Peace Agenda for a New Millennium, Human Security and Global Governance Series (London: I. B. Tauris in association with the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research, 2002), 302 PP., Hb. £35.00, ISBN 1 86064 712 X. ‬

This essay agues that the reduction in the cultural space occupied by the nation-state due to forces of globalization opens up hitherto less used spaces for expressions of solidarity and in ways that do not correspond to the old national mapping of the world. The new solidarities may be identified in terms of four central human values: i) interests (which give rise to material solidarities); ii) universality (which gives rise to humanist solidarities); ii) freedom (which gives rise to life-emancipatory solidarities); and iv) deep meaning (which gives rise to spiritual solidarities). The central argument is that, while nationalist ideology has daimed to provide for all such ales ente this tustin a comprehensio to the creation of social networks clustering around one or another of these central values. The paper begins by giving a brief synopsis of the historical trajectory of postnationalism in Europe, moves on to outline different possible political reactions to globalization that may impede the progress of postnationalism and then charts out fundamental differences between nationalism and postnationalism (the latter accepting conceptual fragmentation of values, not insisting on being coterminous with state ideology and is oriented toward acquired, rather than given, identity).

As recently as 2000, J. Nye Jr., a noted scholar of international relations, reiterated the well-known truism that Japan was Asia’s first ‘globalizer.’ Less known or less comprehensible is the actual nature of the Meiji state, which was culturally transformed into what some have described as a hybrid form combining contemporaneous Japanese and Western norms. Other historians, such as F. Braudel, have described the state in terms of the “duality of the traditional, awe-inspiring Emperor’s power and the modern.” The hybrid or dual form of the Meiji state was a ‘cultural construct’ fabricated on the basis of governmental and national/local interaction with the study missions sent to the West during the late Tokugawa and early Meiji eras. These experiences may also be referred to as transnational/local interactions or, in the words of M. Bamyeh, as one of the “historical relatives of transnationalism” and perhaps the greatest such experiment in international history dealing with “culturally meaningful borders.” In this context, the paper attempts to analyze the processes involved in the cultural construction of the Meiji state by drawing upon the experiences of the Iwakura mission to America and Europe (1871-73), which had decisive consequences, both positive and negative, for Japan and its Asian neighbours.

The process of globalization involves the transnationalization of production and capital, which gives rise to global trade. This transformation from international to transnational capital signifies an “”epochal shift”” in the world economy that has a fundamental impact upon the nation-state. The paper discusses the role that the state plays in advancing globalization and how that role has metamorphosed since the previous epoch of the world economy, which was primarily characterized by the dominance of the multinational corporation. An examination of public policy reveals the power relations and dominant groups in society as well as the manner in which public policy has been globalized by the state. Hawaii is selected as a case-study to demonstrate this hypothesis. Hawaii’s case is noteworthy since it is part of the United States, yet exhibits some of the characteristics of a developing country due to its location in the Pacific basin. This dual identity indicates the complicated nature of public policy as the state machinery tries to compete to secure a solid beachhead for Hawaii within the global economy. But the state’s actions have a price: the alienation of large sectors of society, which have been harmed by this transformation and which demand decision-making powers in devising public policy. This expression of globalization in the social arena and its implications for political power are central points in the study of these global/transnational processes.