Oppressive Regimes Research Articles

In Search of Monsters to Destroy: U.S. Relations With Habsburgs and Greeks

Nicole M. Phelps. U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Confer- ence: Sovereignty Transformed. Cambridge, U.K.: University of Cambridge Press, 2013. xi + 293 pp. Abbreviations and index. $99.00. Angelo Repousis. Greek-American Relations from Monroe to Truman. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2013. viii + 255 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00. Upon reading the titles of these two books, one wonders why they were not written long ago. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans saw Greece and the Habsburg Empire as archetypes for good and evil. They identified with Greeks, whom they saw as heirs to an ancient heritage of democracy and cultural achievement. U.S. citizens sympathized with the Greek struggle for independence against the Ottomans. They believed that the Greek revolutionaries, much like the rebellious American colonials in the 1770s, sought freedom from an empire notorious for its dissipated, rapacious, and brutal behavior. In contrast, Americans perceived the Habsburg Empire, which opposed the Greek insurrection of the 1820s, as something to define themselves against. Like the Ottomans, it was an immoral and oppressive regime to be hated, feared, and, perhaps, battled. Both books tell fascinating stories and conclude with major twentieth- century events that changed the world in ways that remain controversial. Both display solid research and clear writing. Methodologically, they synthesize diplomatic history—focusing on the activities of powerful officials recorded in government records—with approaches based on social and cultural history emphasizing the study of non-elites, and nontraditional elites, who sometimes possessed forgotten influence and, in any case, had stories worth telling. Al- though these books share many of the same strengths, their weaknesses are quite different. Greek-American Relations is based on English-language sources, and thus is more a study of U.S. interactions with Greece—the idea and the place—than a full examination of both sides of the relationship (three sides, if one includes

Using cotton, needles and threads to break the women's silence: embroideries as a decolonising framework

Like many other countries in the world, South Africa is going through a process of transformation (with a high focus on gender transformation). After existing under an oppressive apartheid regime that rendered many people as second-class citizens for decades, most South Africans are seeking ways to move forward and make meaning of their newly found democracy. One of the ways in which meaning and balance is sought is through empowerment processes that have been put in place by the government and other non-governmental agencies. With this in the background, and borrowing from Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed and Yuval-Davis's notions of citizenship, this paper seeks to look at how empowerment is understood, put into action and possible challenges that accompany it. Drawing briefly from a research project I conducted, I shall highlight how visual methodologies such as embroideries can be used as narratives that break the silence and challenge the taken for granted. I will further highlight the importance of taking seriously the effects of history in the present, and the importance of engaging the communities with which we work in our quest for meaning-making and social justice.

Forensic analysis of video steganography tools

Steganography is the art and science of concealing information in such a way that only the sender and intended recipient of a message should be aware of its presence. Digital steganography has been used in the past on a variety of media including executable files, audio, text, games and, notably, images. Additionally, there is increasing research interest towards the use of video as a media for steganography, due to its pervasive nature and diverse embedding capabilities. In this work, we examine the embedding algorithms and other security characteristics of several video steganography tools. We show how all feature basic and severe security weaknesses. This is potentially a very serious threat to the security, privacy and anonymity of their users. It is important to highlight that most steganography users have perfectly legal and ethical reasons to employ it. Some common scenarios would include citizens in oppressive regimes whose freedom of speech is compromised, people trying to avoid massive surveillance or censorship, political activists, whistle blowers, journalists, etc. As a result of our findings, we strongly recommend to cease any use of these tools, and to remove any contents that may have been hidden, and any carriers stored, exchanged and/or uploaded online. For many of these tools, carrier files will be trivial to detect, potentially compromising any hidden data and the parties involved in the communication. We finish this work by presenting our steganalytic results, that highlight a very poor current state of the art in practical video steganography tools. There is unfortunately a complete lack of secure and publicly available tools, and even commercial tools offer very poor security. We therefore encourage the steganography community to work towards the development of more secure and accessible video steganography tools, and make them available for the general public. The results presented in this work can also be seen as a useful resource for forensic examiners to determine the existence of any video steganography materials over the course of a computer forensic investigation.

Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction ed. by Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz (review)

Reviewed by: Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction ed. by Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz Kaylee Jangula Mootz (bio) Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Edited by Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. In the past ten years, the dystopian subsection of young adult fiction has exploded in popularity. With Amazon.com listing over four thousand titles in this category, and the enormous Hunger Games and Divergent series’ fan base, this collection couldn’t have come at a better time. Divided into three sections, the essays presented here analyze how female protagonists of this genre navigate gender, sexuality, relationships, and self-discovery while dealing with the oppressive regimes under which they live. The authors generally follow a similar pattern of outlining an analytical framework, giving a brief plot overview, and then delving into a deeper exploration of the text. While some are more heavily theoretical than others, all of the essays in the collection draw on contemporary scholarship in the field of young adult literature and offer excellent insight into what it means to be a rebellious teen girl in the dystopian future. Section 1 includes four essays, of which the first two focus on how rebellion complicates and shapes [End Page 208] subjectivity and gender in the selected novels; the second two examine the ways in which selected dystopian young adult works fail to seize the genre’s potential to break down existing stereotypes and gender norms. The first essay, Sonya Sawyer Fritz’s “Girl Power and Girl Activism in the Fiction of Suzanne Collins, Scott Westerfeld, and Moira Young,” examines the protagonists of three trilogies—Katniss in The Hunger Games, Tally in Uglies, and Saba in Dust Lands—as celebrations of the defiant teen girl. By layering discussions of Girl Power and comparing the protagonists to the Riot Grrrls of the early 1990s, Fritz explores how these protagonists depict the complications of being a politically active, empowered girl in the twenty-first century. She argues that these novels contribute to developing a new era of feminism and encourage readers to activism. Perhaps the most distinctive of the essays in the collection, the third essay in this section, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka’s “Of Scrivens and Sparks: Girl Geniuses in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction,” analyzes two steampunk dystopias, Fever Crumb and Girl Genius. Dean-Ruzicka begins her article by describing the “Draw a Scientist” test, which measures the perceptions of children about professionals in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Overwhelmingly, this test shows that children perceive scientists as male. Dean-Ruzicka uses this example to frame her argument that dystopian fiction has the potential to break down stereotypes about women in STEM fields and offer positive role models for female readers interested in STEM. However, she finds that both female protagonists examined here reinforce gendered stereotypes and fail to offer engaging role models for female readers. The second section focuses on the performance of gender via beauty, fashion, and gendered behaviors. The first of its four essays, Meghan Gilbert-Hickey’s “Gender Rolls: Bread and Resistance in the ‘Hunger Games’ Trilogy,” provides an in-depth analysis of the significance of bread throughout the trilogy. Gilbert-Hickey also argues that the characters in Collins’s trilogy do not simply reverse gender roles, but complicate and diversify them. Though she remarks on several characters, her primary focus is on Katniss, who, neither wholly masculine nor wholly feminine, represents and performs androgyny; she willingly performs both femininity and masculinity in order to survive and to take care of those she loves. Gilbert-Hickey argues that this blending of gender roles and the act of giving bread becomes a form of rebellion. Of all the essays in the collection, I find the fourth essay in this section to be the most interesting. “‘Perpetually waving to an unseen crowd’: Satire and Process in Beauty Queens,” by Bridgitte Barclay, focuses on disability, race, and non-normative sexuality in a way that the other essays do not. Though some essays remark on the troubling implications of hetero-normative romance in young adult dystopian fictions and the relative lack...

Sabbath in Egypt? An Examination of Exodus 5

This study presents indicators from the narrative of Exodus 5, which in their entirety may suggest the notion of Sabbath rest among the Israelite slaves in Egypt. One such indicator is the verb shabbat, ‘to cease’, a verb that marks the seventh day of the creation week with the quality of divine Sabbath rest. Its particular form and use in Exod. 5.5 entails various semantic notions, such as the indication that the Israelites ceased from their slave labors regularly. In addition, contextual, structural, and discourse elements allow for a reading that is indeed telling with regard to the Israelites’ social status and the impact of a possible Sabbath cessation under an oppressive regime. Finally, certain verbal expressions link with Sabbath texts of the Pentateuch such as Exod. 23.12, a Sabbath text that is embedded in the exodus narratives of slavery and freedom. All these indicators when taken together allow for a Sabbath-motivated reading of Exodus 5. The implications of such a reading tell of a world that longs for freedom, restored identities, and renewed relationships.

Double defiance and the diary’s generic boundaries: Nuha al-Radi’s chronicle of war and exile

Abstract As the US-led coalition forces were bombing Baghdad in 1991, the prominent Iraqi ceramist Nuha al-Radi began writing a diary in English, which now represents, as a book titled Baghdad Diaries ([1998] 2003), a valuable document about what the ordinary civilians went through during a war in which they had no say. While the diary demonstrates the horrible human losses, material damages and environmental degradation inflicted by a savage war, it also reveals the fear of living under an oppressive dictatorial regime. The diary becomes a nuanced, carefully coded message, defying the double tyrannies of a genocidal, rogue regime that brutalizes its people and an arrogant superpower that so callously harms a helpless, hapless population. As well, al-Radi, with the prescience of an artist, anticipates the future horrors that befall Iraq after yet another war in 2003, launched by the same superpower. In this respect, I query Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s argument that ‘literature cannot predict, but it may prefigure’. Moreover, by exposing the hypocrisy and illogic of war and by organically extrapolating her own suffering during the war and in exile with the collective agonies of an entire nation, al-Radi expands the boundaries of the diary by transcending the solipsistic pitfalls with which the genre might tempt the diarist: she politicizes the hardships and emotions of the personal and endows the intimacy of the private with a public significations. The expansive contexts embracing Baghdad Diaries ([1998] 2003) thus demonstrate the genre’s validity, versatility and open possibilities.

Enabling Transitional Justice, Restoring Capabilities: The Imperative of Participation and Normative Integrity

What does transitional justice require if it seeks to achieve justice in periods of radical change from oppressive regimes and violent conflict to peaceful democracies?1 The examination of pretransitional injustice typically reveals law’s instrumentality and its pathological effects, namely those caused not only by violations of civil-political human rights but also by violations of socioeconomic human rights. A normative shift is, therefore, the key to legitimizing the new dispensation. Yet, given law’s complicity in past injustice, a normative shift is only possible on the basis of law’s own rehabilitation. Therefore, law’s normative integrity can only be recovered through a substantive rehabilitation of victims’ capabilities negatively affected by previous human rights violations, especially violations of socioeconomic rights. With their capabilities restored, victims of historical injustice will be able to participate in the operations of transitional justice and function as equal citizens in the new dispensation. Accordingly, the imperative of participation based substantially on human rights to socioeconomic capabilities is at the heart of this reconceptualization of transitional justice.

Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard (review)

Reviewed by: Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard Kate Quealy-Gainer Aveyard, Victoria Red Queen. HarperTeen/HarperCollins, 2015 [400p] Trade ISBN 978-0-06-231063-7 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-231065-1 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8-12 Like all other Reds, seventeen-year-old Mare Barrow leads a life of poverty and destitution, picking pockets and barely making ends meet for her family, while the Silvers—people with stunning supernatural abilities—flaunt their power and wealth. A chance encounter with a mysterious stranger lands her the sweet gig of a servant’s position in the royal house, until another chance reveals latent superhuman powers of her own, to the horror of both Mare and the royal family. Now the royals are trying to pass her off as a misplaced Silver, betrothing her to their second son to keep an eye on her and perhaps use her as a force to quell a budding Red rebellion. Mare has no plans to obey quietly, however, especially after she learns of the death of her brother at Silver hands, and she finds a surprising ally in the prince as she joins the revolutionary forces as a spy. Readers will be familiar with many of the elements here, from the oppressive government to the reluctant heroine to the stirrings of rebellion, but Aveyard uses this conventionality to her advantage, setting her audience up for a gaspworthy twist that reconfigures nearly every character’s role and leaves Mare with no one to trust but herself. The plot turn also provides nuance to characters that initially seem two-dimensional and casts their previous actions in a more complex light. This blend of fantasy and dystopia will be an unexpected and worthy addition to many genre fans’ reading list. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

International support for the Arab uprisings: Understanding sympathetic collective action using theories of social dominance and social identity

Inspired by the popular Arab protests against oppressive regimes that began in 2010, people around the world protested in sympathy with the Arab peoples. The present research draws on two major theories of intergroup relations to develop an initial integrative model of sympathetic collective action. We incorporate social dominance theory’s (SDT) concept of (rejectionist) legitimizing myths with the solidarity and emotional mediation concept of the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA) to understand motivations for sympathetic collective action among bystanders. Using data from 12 nations ( N = 1,480), we tested three models: (a) SIMCA (i.e., solidarity, anger, and efficacy), (b) a social dominance theory model of collective action (i.e., social dominance orientation and ideologies concerning Arab competence), and (c) an integrated model of sympathetic collective action combining both theories. Results find the greatest support for an integrated model of collective action. Discussion focuses on theoretical pluralism and suggestions for future research.

Things of Poverty and War: Ben Okri and Thing Theory

Things of Poverty and WarBen Okri and Thing Theory Eleni Coundouriotis (bio) Cameras, transistor radios, gramophones—objects introduced as technologies of modernity appear ordinary in Okri’s fiction, which is otherwise replete with highly symbolic actions and spaces. Furthermore, these technologies frequently carry on functions that belong more conventionally to the symbolic realm of the traditional, passing seamlessly into that realm. Thus writing on the role of the photographer in The Famished Road, Philip Whyte notes that he functions as “a bridge between the traditional and the modern” becoming “indispensable” at occasions such as weddings, funerals, homecomings, where he performs in the role of the traditional “praise-singer” or “griot” (22). Although assimilated into existing cultural practices with ease, the photographer and the images he produces in Okri’s novel do surprise all the same. They provide compelling “new ways of seeing the world,” both Azaro’s immediate world and places farther afield like the United States South, or South Africa (Whyte 23).1 And, more importantly, the photographer is politically significant, exposing corruption and thus becoming a target, along with the people, of an oppressive regime. The photograph itself passes into the ordinary of Okri’s spiritually charged universe and forces a confrontation between that universe and the “real” and historical. Okri has called the photographer “the concretizer,” the “visualizer,” and the “maker-realer.” The photographer is, furthermore, in Okri’s words: “representative of the changing consciousness of the people” and hence a powerful marker of the historical (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). He and Azaro occupy different temporalities: “he gives the present where Azaro gives timelessness” (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). The photograph as truth-telling challenges Azaro’s sense of his own visions and throws him off balance (Whyte 24). Okri, however, is engaged by the tension between the two forms of the visual and what they reveal about each other rather than being interested in making commentary on the obsolescence of one, or danger of the other. Thus he also describes the photographer as the “counterpart to Azaro’s consciousness,” the one who facilitates a “dialogue between technology and tradition” (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 25). In The Famished Road, we find a matter of fact acceptance of the camera and an engagement with what it does, rather than a fetishizing of the object. Michael Taussig argues that it is the “scienticity” assumed of the medium (its function primarily to record reality, to be in Okri’s world the “concretizer”) that enables the camera to be easily assimilated and become almost transparent (199). By contrast, Taussig’s close reading of the colonial archive for accounts of early encounters between Europeans and primitive cultures shows that phonographic equipment (the Victrola) and the music it played retained a much greater [End Page 1087] fascination. Phonographic equipment drew attention to itself as object instead of passing transparently into practice (Taussig 194–95). Importantly, Taussig specifies that he is not interested so much in “the ‘sociology’ of the phonograph or camera or their effects on ‘the natives,’” but rather in the colonial explorers’ own fascination with the attitudes towards these machines of the people they encountered (198). And with this question in mind, he notes the “camera barely rates a mention in comparison with the reproduction of sound by the Victrola” (Taussig 198). Thus the attitudes that need examining relate to the dialogue or exchange that takes place in encounters of tradition and modernity. It is in that shared space that the camera slips in without drawing attention to itself. Taussig’s discussion provides an opening for examining how and why the camera can pass convincingly into Okri’s syncretic world. The cumulative logic operating in Okri’s fiction and the vacillation between recording and reflection that propels his child protagonists into action give the camera a privileged status.2 Okri insists that contiguity and contingency govern the logic of his fictional world (Guignery and Pesso-Miquel 27), which critics have noted is highly visual even as it problematizes vision (Guignery 5–6). It also provocatively alerts us to the difference of sound technologies from the camera that pertains to Okri’s imaginative world. This essay uses the representation of...

Bidarzani Collective

Bidarzani Collective

Refugee repatriation and voluntariness

Repatriation programmes facilitated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and non-governmental organisations have been criticised as not being truly voluntary, because refugees’ decisions are made under oppressive government policies. Yet, failing to facilitate repatriation may force refugees to stay in a host country against their will. While current literature focuses on governments’ responsibilities in repatriation, agencies must often determine if a given choice of a refugee is voluntary, even when states fail to fulfil their minimal obligations. This article first examines three cases of repatriation from Israel to South Sudan, based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and South Sudan between 2011 and 2013. In the first case, a woman repatriated from a mental health institution in Israel, where she had been placed after attempting to murder her infant son. In the second case, a man repatriated with his family after being arrested for child maltreatment. In the third, a family repatriated to a town in South Sudan without employment prospects or food security. After presenting these cases, the article draws upon literature on consent and autonomy from analytical philosophy to suggest five criteria for determining if these individual cases were sufficiently voluntary to justify private organisations assisting in repatriation, even when Israel failed to fulfil its basic obligations.

Slavery Service Accounting Practices in Brazil: A Bibliographic and Document Analysis

This study focuses on the social and economic aspects and institutional relationships that determined a unique pattern of inequality. We aim to examine the particular role of accounting as a practice used to dehumanize an entire class of people. The primary purpose of this study is not to examine slavery's profitability but rather to identify how accounting practices served slavery. A qualitative research method is applied in this study. Regarding technical procedures, this study makes use of bibliographic and documentary sources. For the purpose of this investigation, and in accordance with bibliographic and documentary research methods, we analyze scientific articles, books and documents from the Brazilian National Archive, the Brazilian Historic and Geographic Institute and the Brazilian National Library Foundation. In light of what was discovered through the study's development, we can consider accounting as a tool that is more active than passive and, therefore, as a tool that was used to support the slave regime. In essence, accounting was used to convert a human's qualitative attributes into a limited number of categories (age, gender, race), through which slaves were differentiated and monetized to facilitate commercial trafficking. We believe that accounting practices facilitated slave trading, conversion and exploitation, procedures that completely ignored qualitative and human dimensions of slavery. Opportunities for future studies on accounting in the slave period, as is the case of other oppressive regimes, are infinite, especially in the case of Brazil.

Shakespeare’s sisters in Istanbul: Grace Ellison and the politics of feminist friendship

This article attempts to reconstruct a story of friendship between an English journalist, Grace Ellison, and two Turkish sisters, Zeyneb and Melek Hanoum. The sisters served as Pierre Loti’s models for the main characters of his novel Les Désenchantées. In 1906, they left Istanbul to escape from the oppressive regime of Abdülhamit II and started living in Europe, where they met Ellison. Ellison encouraged them to write, and edited and co-authored their books in English. She pursued Virginia Woolf’s idea of women’s solidarity, working for women whom Woolf might have termed “Shakespeare’s sisters”. Although her friendship with the sisters raises the question of subaltern agency within the discursive domain of orientalism, it cannot be reduced to the binary relationship between orientalism and its silenced Other. Taking the historical context and class background into account, this article argues that what Ellison sought for was an eternally postponed, future friendship between women across cultures, nations and classes.

Oppressive governments, dependence on the USA, and anti-American terrorism

We study the nexus between US economic and military aid, human rights conditions, and the emergence of anti-American transnational terrorism in aid-receiving countries. Using data from 126 countries for the period 1984–2008, we show that a combination of local repression and military or economic dependence on the USA results in more anti-American terrorism. This relationship only breaks down at high levels of dependence. There is no evidence that the USA is made any safer by providing foreign assistance, even if this assistance is substantial or is channeled to highly oppressive regimes which might be less restricted in terms of their instruments of fighting terrorism. Our findings also hold true when we account for the potential endogeneity of US aid and human rights conditions to anti-American terrorism.

English

This paper examines how the educated people of Tigray took over the illiterate ones to fight against the imperial government. Local songs, poems and sayings used against Emperor Haileslasie are discussed. Following the liberation of Ethiopia from the Italian occupation in 1941, Emperor Haileslasie introduced a number of reforms, many of which were rejected by the people of Ethiopia. The imperial government used different measures including force to implement its policies. This created resentment in the people over whom repressive actions were undertaken. What happened in Tigray in 1942/43 is a good example. The Qedamay (First) Woyane Rebellion of 1942/43 broke out due to high taxation, maladministration, corruption, political feud etc. Although the rebellion failed because British Royal Arms intervened, the people did not remain submissive to the regime. A number of Tegaru University students from different Awrajas of Tigray joined Hailslasie I University at different times. The university served as an academic and political school where they agreed on how to save their communities from miserable lives. They formed an organization called Tigrean University Students Association (TUSA) that served them as an umbrella and binding pot. Members and supporters of this association were ready to pay any sacrifices for the betterment of their people. They made the society fight against the feudal regime and did everything to solve the problem of their people. With time, TUSA supporters increased. The association was renamed MAGEBT, then TNO and finally TPLF. Many Tegaru University students paid with their golden lives, time and properties in their struggle against the feudal regime. Finally, they successfully toppled the imperial regime. However, their struggle continued after the end of the imperial regime. Due to the absence of well organized civil government, another oppressive government, the Derg, assumed power.   Key words:  First Woyane, TUSA, MAGEBT, TNO, university students, political opposition.

Maze of Resistance: Crowd, Space and the Politics of Resisting Subjectivity

In 1968 the streets around the world saw a rise of a mass political movements. Nowadays, 46 years later, a nostalgic revolutionary aura surrounds that time; as since, such is the impression, the street is yet to emerge as a strong political actor or an effective practice of resistance is yet to take form. It seems as if the old ways of resistance have met their end, and new ways have not quite come in place. However, the most recent protests, as this paper aims to show, might have started a new path of resistance at the centre of which is a particular political subjectivity gaining its power from a space of resistance and appearing in a form of a ‘crowd’. By looking at the power of the crowd as a particular embodiment or a cross between a political subject and a multitude this paper explores the constituent power of political gatherings by rejecting race, ethnicity, religion, class or gender as their mobilizing force and instead focusing on the power of coming-together (common) in a particular space. The political capacity of such ‘common’ mobilising force was fully exposed in the recent protests across Europe and the Arab world (the two examples on which this paper draws). The paper opens with a discussion of the distinct relationship between the sovereign (or state) and political subjectivity. The constitutive moment of subjectivity (the self-other relation) is placed in a political context and by drawing on the examples of sans papiers and Bouazizi's act of self-immolation the difficulties of the act of resistance and their inherent and unavoidable violence are highlighted. These two recent acts of resistance expose the need to think political subjectivity otherwise, and point to vistas (the crowd), which can facilitate such a different thinking. By drawing on the constitutive idea of the common as logic of subjectivation the intricate relationship between the body and the political space as manifested in the most recent against austerity and oppressive political regimes protests is interrogated. In the hope of placing the political subject closer to the driving seat of politics a case is made for a rather distinct relationship between political subjectivity of the crowd and the emerging space of resistance. This is a relationship that amounts to a new ‘resisting political subjectivity’ and that can bring about a new way of engaging with the politics of oppression and begins to think political contestations otherwise.

Europa w arabskiej myśli społeczno-politycznej XIX wieku

Reformatory ideas of Khayr ad-Din at-Tunusi and Rifa at-Tahtawi inscribed into an interesting discussion which has been going on in the Arabic and Muslim world since the beginning of the 19th century; the discussion which centred around very important matters concerning the political system, social and political reforms, comparison of the representative system and democracy with their antithesis: despotism, and also around the search for the ways out of stagnation and backwardness, which essentially included the reform of the educational system – which idea was emphasised by all thinkers. Their objective was to find the answer to the basic question pervading the representatives of the Muslim world: the question about the reason of its fall and backwardness, and the basis of European supremacy considering the role of the oppressive governments, anachronistic state structures, lack of modern school system and other issues, but most of all – crystallisation of the ideas and notions concerning the relationship between tradition and modernity, modern state, social and political system. Hence the contemplation of settling the relationship with the West, the character of this relationship and the idea of complete or partial acceptance of the European models of government.

Tor under attack

A technology relied on by activists, whistleblowers, journalists and people operating under oppressive regimes is coming under attack from a number of directions. The Onion Router (Tor) technology was initially developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, and is now supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which distributes an easily used browser package. Yet, in spite of its impeccable credentials, Tor is the target of subversion attempts by governments and exploitation by criminals.

Nokia Siemens Networks: Just Doing Business - Or Supporting an Oppressive Regime?

This case study examines the relevance of taking social and political factors into consideration when a corporation is making a key business decision. In September 2009, Simon Beresford-Wylie, the outgoing CEO of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), was reviewing the company’s achievements — while acknowledging the latest public criticism regarding NSN’s business relationship with the Iranian government. In the summer of 2009, NSN was accused of complicity in human rights violations linked to Iran’s presidential election. The company sold network infrastructure and software solutions to the Iranian government, which then used this technology to observe, block, and control domestic communications. Should NSN have acted differently? Students are asked to examine the economic and moral arguments for and against selling products to an oppressive regime that might then use those products to violate human rights. In such a case, does the corporation bear co-responsibility for human rights violations committed by an oppressive regime?