Argument
Bosnia’s Question
With tensions within Bosnia escalating rapidly – encouraged by some European leaders – many have begun to wonder, how many times will the centuries-old “Eastern Question” reappear in today’s Europe?
Syria Policy and Global Stability
Given past U.S. failures to take on the Assad regime, Moscow’s and Beijing’s plans may well hinge on how Biden next acts in the Levant.
‘The Club’: Netflix’s Sephardic Heroine Braves Turkey’s Troubled Past
“The Club” also offers a biting social critique. For the show is less about the arrival of cocktail modernity to Istanbul than about the Turkification of cocktail modernity, i.e., a pincer movement by Kemalist state and society to substitute good secular Muslim Turks for Istanbul’s Greeks, Jews and Armenians.
An Unlikely Smash Hit, Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Exposes the Dark Side of Free Enterprise
The smash Netflix series “Squid Game” shows the material hardship of those trampled by the free market system, but more than that, it shows what that system does for compassion: If your goal is to win, you must become heartless.
The Façade of the Afghan Jihad
To this small but influential number of Muslims in Europe and the U.S., Afghanistan is not really a country, but a mythical canvas onto which they can paint their own hopes and dreams.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Nobel: The Right Award for the Wrong Reason
In a contemporary world plagued by xenophobia and racism, Gurnah’s novels nudge us to get quiet and listen, to probe beyond the surfaces of our understanding. We might ask why and with what burdens people find themselves crossing the gulfs between continents and cultures, in what peculiarities of personal experience they might locate their senses of themselves, and in what unanticipated places they might find belonging.
The ‘Echo Chamber’ of Syrian Chemical Weapons Conspiracy Theorists
The real issue here is not so much the denial of chemical attacks as the way it serves as a vehicle for normalizing conspiracy theories under the guise of critical thinking. Admirable though it is to view news reports and government statements with caution and scrutinize the evidence, the denial campaign was something else, encouraging people to reject information at will simply because it didn't fit their view of how the world works.