The Religion Factor

Today, 20 June, is World Refugee Day. The UNHCR released its annual Global Trends Report. For the first time in the organisation’s history, global displacement has crossed the 60 million threshold, with a total of 65.3 million people displaced in 2015. That’s 24 people every minute, or 1 in every 113 people.

In today’s post Ton Groeneweg continues his analysis of liberal de-culturalization as a deeper trend exposed by the responses to the attacks in Paris. In this second part of his blog, he focuses on how this process of de-culturalization has sincere consequences for our existence in liberal societies, and how the experienced threats to our liberal existence might offer some opportunities as well.

Today’s post continues our series of reflections on the attacks in Paris, Beirut and Iraq. Joram Tarusarira responds to Erin Wilson’s call to accept ambiguities, posing a few problems and questions with this approach

Radicalization’ is becoming an increasingly common word in contemporary politics and public discourse. Yet it crops up in seemingly unrelated contexts, most recently in Paris, in relation to both terrorism and climate change. This raises a number of questions about what or who radicalization actually refers to. Erin Wilson reflects on these ambivalent dimensions of ‘radicalization’ in today’s post.

The fallout from the Charlie Hebdo attacks around the tensions between “religion” and “freedom of speech” continue to feature prominently in public debate across Europe, particularly in the aftermath of the Copenhagen cafe shooting over the weekend.

“I am powerless. (…) Please do something. Do not forsake me and all the other mothers”. 18-year-old Robin converted to Islam one and a half years ago.