Secularism Is a Women's Affair

The drama between the secularist legacy of Ataturk and the popular surge of Islamist‐rooted politics continues in Turkey, centered on the debate over the headscarf. Is it a sign of religious reaction, or a sign of non‐Western modernization that will ensure higher education for Muslim women? We represent here all sides of the debate. Elsewhere in the Muslim world are the reformers and critics listening to each other, or impeding progress with a blame game? Europe's most controversial figures in this debate—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Tariq Ramadan—engage here.     

Walther Kastner-Preis – Einladung zur Teilnahme

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

War,transparency and control: the military architecture of operational warfare

In contemporary research, transparency is commonly understood to indicate and guarantee openness, in ways that make it synonymous with positive characteristics of governing. However, the allegedly benevolent link between transparency and governing has also been questioned, giving rise to arguments that transparency enables violent social control. Drawing upon this latter view, the article stages an encounter between critical debates on transparency and critical accounts of war to examine the way that they come together in the operationalization of warfare. Engaging particularly with Jean Baudrillard’s writing on transparency, the article inquires into the way control is socially manufactured and administered through military doctrines. It concludes that the operationalization of warfare is not, as many tend to argue, first and foremost about a response to practical problems when conducting wars. Rather, it consists of the potential to unveil global space and global time as an attempt to maintain and control future political becoming.     

VIOLENCE AND THE COSTS OF HONESTY: RETHINKING BUREAUCRATS' CHOICES TO TAKE BRIBES

Explanations of bureaucrats' decisions to take bribes include accounts of incentives as well as expectations. However, there are further considerations in violent contexts, where refusal of bribes may have dire consequences. Yet, insight into this topic is limited. This article investigates how violence upholds bribery, through interviews with South African officials who enforce regulations in communities where gangs operate. The investigation shows that when citizens offer bribes to enable rule violations, this is a process of both temptation and threats: officials who refuse bribes face intimidation by both citizens and colluding colleagues. This illustrates how violence may function as a mechanism to enforce corrupt contracts between bureaucrats and criminal citizens. Through reducing costs in such settings, bribe‐taking is partly a strategy of social protection. This has implications for policy and suggests that, besides incentives and expectations, administrative reforms may benefit from ‘fixing the security’ of bureaucrats in violent contexts.     

Transgovernmentalism Meets Security: Police Liaison Officers,Terrorism, and Statist Transnationalism

Studies of transgovernmental activities have enhanced our understanding of changing global politics, but their claims have not been fully investigated with respect to the security realm. Therefore, this article first acknowledges a gap between the practices and capacities of nonstate entities creating transnational threats and those of state‐based agents of response. States' ability to respond to these threats has been questioned. Is this skepticism warranted or have states begun adapting and developing new responses to address nonstate security challenges? This article looks at transgovernmental responses to transnational terrorism and identifies an unconventional group of substate pioneers, police liaison officers (PLO), making moves into the transnational realm. Data collected through interviews with international PLOs reveal these activities to be characterized by increasing informality, depoliticization, and demonopolization of global security cooperation. This cooperation nevertheless maintains its strong ties with state legitimacy and capacity, and is therefore conceptualized here as statist transnationalism.     

Multi‐Level Democracy

Modern democratic polities regularly operate at several political levels. In the case of the EU at the level of the member‐states and the EU itself, and in addition at federal, regional, and municipal levels. Is there any democratic rule to determine which level is more legitimate than the others? The article argues that from a majoritarian perspective there is none. Individual citizens may have quite different preferences with regard to the level that is of particular political importance for them. The article critically analyses different concepts, from sovereignty to demos, subsidiarity, and the judicial review of competences, and tries to show that none of them can provide a solution to the dilemma. Instead, democratic theory has to assume that in the co‐evolutionary process of institutions and societies at different political levels, the question of the final say has to be left open.