ISIS

France’s long and troubled relationship with Islam, and its connexion to a sense of insecurity, is unpacked by Olivier Roy and Esther Benbassa, who also explore the current role of religion in politics in general.

Is our response to the threat of Islamic State merely aiding their rise by unwittingly contributing to their strategy?

Turkey’s crucial position in relation to IS and Syria requires Europe to improve its policy towards the country.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), a coalition of Left-wing, Kurdish and progressive parties, was founded in in 2012 in order to help smaller parties amplify their voices and gain access to the Turkish Parliament, where the electoral system stacks the odds strongly against them. In both the 2014 and subsequently recalled 2015 parliamentary elections, the party succeeded in winning over 10% of the vote, the necessary threshold for entering Parliament.

“France is at war,” declared the French President, François Hollande, in front of the Congress of the French Parliament on 16th November 2015. He was using the same words as Le Monde on 14th November and Manuel Valls the same evening on TF1 television news. The Prime Minister then said that Islamic State (IS) would lose the struggle, but he admitted that it was only just beginning.

After the Paris attacks on 13th November 2015, instead of selectively grieving within a national frame and restricting liberties, what we need is transversal grief, time to think and a serious monitoring of the discourse on liberty. That will prevent dangerous classifications and dichotomies as well as impulsive actions and belligerent acts.

The numbers of deaths in Syria and Iraq are deeply disturbing. But the numbers create the false impression that civilians are merely victims of violent conflict, passively waiting to be overwhelmed by violence or exhaustion.

“War,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, is the “father of all things.” In view of the bloody – indeed barbaric – events in the Middle East (and in Iraq and Syria in particular), one might be tempted to agree, even though such ideas no longer seem to have a place in the postmodern worldview of today’s Europe.

Medication and water bottles have numerous advantages in a crisis situation, but it’s quite sure that they cannot be used to stop ISIS. The greatest dilemmas of European Greens are rooted in a conflict of values, as well as in the difficulty of reconciling theory and practice. To overcome them, Greens need to work on a political solution.

The Kurds have conducted a remarkable democratic experiment in the north of Syria: Their “Canton-based Democratic Autonomy” is a pursuit of freedom, justice, dignity and democracy led by principles of equality and environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, protecting this area with weapons and the blood of martyrs shouldn’t be applauded.