Politics

  By Roberto Savio •This op-ed by Roberto Savio, IPS founder and President Emeritus is adapted from a statement he made as a panelist on Migration and Human Solidarity, A Challenge and an Opportunity for Europe and the MENA region held on 14 December at the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue.   ROME, Dec 14 2017 (IPS) – The misuse of religion, of populism and xenophobia, is a sad reality, which is not clearly addressed any longer, but met with hypocrisy and not outright denunciation. Only now the British are realizing that they voted for Brexit, on the basis of a campaign of lies. But nobody has taken on publicly Johnson or Farage, the leaders of Brexit, after Great Britain accepted to pay, as one of the many costs of divorce, at least 45 billion Euro, instead of saving 20 billion Euro, as claimed by the...

By Sheri Berman • Several of Europe’s centre-left parties have suffered disappointing election results since the financial crisis, but is this slide in support permanent or can they arrest their decline? Sheri Berman writes that with the rise of new parties on the populist right, the centre-left risks sliding into irrelevance unless it can respond with viable and attractive solutions to contemporary problems. Europe today is in crisis. Economically, much of the continent suffers from low growth, high unemployment and rising inequality, while politically, disillusionment with the European community as well as domestic institutions and elites is widespread. Partially as a result, right-wing populism is growing, increasing political instability and uncertainty even further. Although many have noted a correlation between the rise of populism and the decline of the social democratic or centre-left, the causal relationship between them has not been sufficiently stressed. Indeed, to a large degree the failures...

By James Fitzgerald • This paper examines how the politics of state, border, and biological control affect the journeys and experiences of asylum seekers and “irregular” migrants who are, at once, the victims and recipients of care and security. Building on fieldwork carried out at the “migrant aid centre” in Porte de la Chapelle, Paris, the harsh realities of the indefinitely displaced in supposedly-liberal democratic spaces reflect not only a disintegrating duty of care, but also the very conditions—and political logics—that make such moves possible. It exposes these practices in terms of biopolitics, the state of exception and humanitarian government; an assemblage of domination that seeks not to provide adequate security to those subjects seeking refuge, but to instead “enhance the biological and emotional well-being of host populations“ (2017, p. 809) which must be innocultated from them. It has long been argued by political theorists and philosophers of a certain...

• Multiple and more frequent crises have been taking place in consolidated democracies where governments fail to solve problems, politics takes extremist directions, and entire institutional systems perform poorly. In a few words, the performances of democracy have been disappointing, and these conditions of dissatisfaction and distress risk to undermine the legitimacy of our institutions. Despite the many differences between countries, this phenomenon is mainly related to both the European states and the United States of America. As Russell J. Dalton’s researches show us: “the cross-national breadth of this pattern suggests it is a general feature of contemporary politics in advanced industrial democracies, not the specific experience of only a few nations.” (Dalton 39). Dalton was correct when publishing this research more than ten years ago. Today, we observe the emergence of a new type of contemporary policies, which represents a challenge for the stability of our institutions and their...