Over the last 30 years, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly present in international discourses and active in international decision-making. Among the estimated several million NGOs in existence today, an increasingly visible number of organizations are defining themselves in religious terms – referring to themselves as "religious", "spiritual", or "faith-based" NGOs. This book documents the initial encounters between the particularly international segment of tho...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.A tense science thriller about ethics, identity, and ancient knowledge.Outside a research institute, protesters accuse scientists of experimenting on children. Conspiracy—or a warning no one wants to hear?Five‑year‑old Lisa attends the institute’s open house. Days later, her mother faces hostility at a parent meeting, and tensions begin to rise.Then Lisa starts to change. She speaks fragments of ...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.A tense science thriller about ethics, identity, and ancient knowledge.Outside a research institute, protesters accuse scientists of experimenting on children. Conspiracy—or a warning no one wants to hear?Five‑year‑old Lisa attends the institute’s open house. Days later, her mother faces hostility at a parent meeting, and tensions begin to rise.Then Lisa starts to change. She speaks fragments of ...

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.A tense science thriller about ethics, identity, and ancient knowledge.Outside a research institute, protesters accuse scientists of experimenting on children. Conspiracy—or a warning no one wants to hear?Five‑year‑old Lisa attends the institute’s open house. Days later, her mother faces hostility at a parent meeting, and tensions begin to rise.Then Lisa starts to change. She speaks fragments of ...

In five essays, followed by extensive notes and bibliographies, Ivan Illich embarks on a major historical and sociological analysis of modern man's economic existence. He traces and analyzes options which surpass the conventional political 'right-left' and the technological 'soft-hard' alternatives and presents the concept of the 'vernacular' domain: "...to name those acts of competence, lust or concern that we want to defend from measurement by Chicago Boys or Socialist Commissars...the p...

The break with the past, which has been described by others as the transition to a capitalist mode of production, I describe here as the transition from the aegis of gender to the regime of sex.' Ivan Illich insists that we survey attitudes to male and female in both industrial society and its antecedents in order to recover a lost 'art of living'. 'While under any reign of gender women might be subordinate, under any economic regime they are only second sex... both genders are stripped, a...

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization?Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange ...

In this powerful, timely study Ronald Niezen examines the processes by which cultural concepts are conceived and collective rights are defended in international law. Niezen argues that cultivating support on behalf of those experiencing human rights violations often calls for strategic representations of injustice and suffering to distant audiences. The positive impulse behind public responses to political abuse can be found in the satisfaction of justice done. But the fact that oppressed ...

This work treats the European political philosophy that has engendered the Nation-State concept -- considered to be the logical evolution of human history as a linear periodization into the Modern State. This Modern State concept is treated as the end of history in liberal democratic theory, in spite of it remaining a European phenomenon. Where it has been imposed beyond the European political culture it has provoked a plague of civil wars and occupations, such as in Palestine. In Europe i...

Democracy and extremism are usually considered as opposites. We assume that our system (in the UK, the USA, the Netherlands etc.) is democratic, and extremists try to destroy our system and introduce some kind of dictatorship, if not chaos and anarchy. Yet in many cases, the extremists seem sincere in their attempt to construct a more democratic polity. Hence, they can be called democrats and yet also extremists, in so far as they strive for a regime with characteristics that are more extr...

Many people these days regard religion as outdated and are unable to understand how believers can intellectually justify their faith. Nonbelievers have long assumed that progress in technology and the sciences renders religion irrelevant. Believers, in contrast, see religion as vital to society's spiritual and moral well-being. But does modernization lead to secularization? Does secularization lead to moral decay? Sociologist Hans Joas argues that these two supposed certainties have kept s...

Coined in the third century B.C., the term diaspora has evolved into a buzzword used to describe the migrations of groups as diverse as ethnic populations, religious communities, and even engineers working abroad. This concise book provides a critical introduction to the concept of diaspora, bringing a fresh, synthetic perspective to virtually all aspects of this topic. Stéphane Dufoix incorporates a wealth of case studies—about the Jewish, Armenian, African, Chinese, Greek, and I...