Instead of addressing a very real crisis in teaching and learning conditions that threatens to seriously degrade British universities, Boris Johnson’s ministers have thrown their energies into manufacturing a campus “free speech crisis”. Having deliberately excluded higher education from COVID-19 support, they have spent the pandemic making nonsensical claims about campus “cancel culture” and crafting legislation to protect exactly the kind of hateful speech Durham University students exercised their right not to listen to. The point is less to enshrine freedom of thought than it is to force discredited ideas upon young people.
Behind the UK government's false flag 'free speech' campaign | Education | Al Jazeera - 0 views
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The Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill now progressing through Parliament seeks to prevent invitations to speakers from being rescinded if they are discovered to have peddled discredited or hateful ideas. The legislation targets the tactic of “no-platforming” which was adopted by the National Union of Students in 1974 to stop fascist organisations, like the National Front, from using universities to disseminate their views.
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A 2018 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights investigation found that there was “no wholesale censorship” at universities
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The Real Reason the Middle East Hates NGOs - Foreign Policy - 0 views
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when pressed, the head of the officers’ delegation became red-faced with anger. Apparently, laying the groundwork for more open and just politics did not include human rights organizations, good-governance groups, environmentalists, private associations that provide aid to people in need, or other NGOs.
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in Egypt, employees of NGOs have become virtual enemies of the state. In keeping with its reputation as the lone Arab Spring “success story,” Tunisia has created a more welcoming environment for these groups, but even there, the ability of NGOs to carry out their work can be constrained given that a state of emergency and other laws place restrictions on the right to assemble
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the relentless pressure Middle Eastern governments have long applied to NGOs. Leaders in the region do not do well with ideas like “self-organizing,” “relatively autonomous from the state,” and the creation of associations and “solidarities” — and it is hard, without justifying repression, not to see why. Civil society groups have the potential to help people with common interests overcome the considerable obstacles to collective action that many Middle Eastern governments have put in place and, in the process, give greater voice to people’s grievances.
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(Why Brexit is) the Perfect Catastrophe - Eudaimonia and Co - 0 views
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that’s what Brexit is really all about: empire’s ghost, the need to dominate and control, the inability to be a true equal in this world, the desperate dream of supremacy
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despite the fact that the majority of them would now cancel Brexit in a second referendum, nobody much seems to understand the urgency of scale of the problem at issue here. There’s just a sense of weary frustration. But if your country was going to run short of food and medicine in approximately two months — wouldn’t you want to, well, stop it? So why do both sides in British politics seem not to care?
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A poorer, more desperate society is not often also a tolerant and happy one
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Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match - The New York Times - 0 views
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No organization has ever had to police billions of users in a panoply of languages.
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Despite criticism and concerns from civil society groups, the company has done little to change its strategy of pushing into developing societies with weak institutions and histories of social instability, opening up information spaces where anger and fear often can dominate
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From October to March, Facebook presented users in six countries, including Sri Lanka, with a separate newsfeed prioritizing content from friends and family. Posts by professional media were hidden away on another tab.“While this experiment lasted, many of us missed out on the bigger picture, on more credible news,” said Nalaka Gunawardene, a Sri Lankan media analyst. “It’s possible that this experiment inadvertently spread hate views in these six countries.”
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Bringing Indigenous Experiences into International Relations - Duck of Minerva - 0 views
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Many scholars of International Relations (IR), especially in the past couple decades, have sought to study and teach about a more diverse set of political actors to counter-act the biases of a relatively homogeneous professoriate. In a word, this has been described as an effort to decolonize IR. As was noted in a 2016 symposium in Perspectives on Politics, however, political scientists still all too frequently ignore indigenous groups—including Native nations in the United States
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IR as a subfield currently lags behind other subfields in examining indigenous experiences
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International Security and International Organization had exceedingly few relevant results, and International Studies Quarterly fared slightly better, but these IR journals did indeed lag behind the other journals in terms of substantive research on indigenous experiences
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