Lévy, un ami qui vous veut du bien: the (mis)appropriation of Islamic practices in Bernard-Henri Lévy’s fulfilling of France’s mission civilisatrice

This article analyses the dynamics of cultural (mis)appropriation underpinning Bernard-Henri Lévy’s (BHL) catchphrase islam des Lumières. Be it against the backdrop of global terrorism in Qui a tué Daniel Pearl?, that of Franco-French societal issues in Ce grand cadavre à la renverse, that of French interventionism in La Guerre sans l’aimer, or that of homegrown terrorism in “Le moment churchillien de la Ve république,” BHL warns against the danger of a certain form of Islam whilst advocating an “enlightened” Islam that is, for him, compatible with French republican values. To this end, he (mis)appropriates conspicuous Islamic practices by claiming that they have nothing to do with Islam. Thus, BHL’s islam des Lumières is invisible and reduced to a cultural heritage that is void of religious practices. Drawing from cultural studies, social sciences, postcolonial studies, and African American studies, this article will argue that BHL is a “well-meaning colonizer;” a paternalist who seeks to fulfil France’s mission civilisatrice by (mis)appropriating Islamic practices in order to tell Muslims how to live their faith.

Link Prediction Between Structured Geopolitical Events: Models and Experiments

Often thought of as higher-order entities, events have recently become important subjects of research in the computational sciences, including within complex systems and natural language processing (NLP). One such application is event link prediction. Given an input event, event link prediction is the problem of retrieving a relevant set of events, similar to the problem of retrieving relevant documents on the Web in response to keyword queries. Since geopolitical events have complex semantics, it is an open question as to how to best model and represent events within the framework of event link prediction. In this paper, we formalize the problem and discuss how established representation learning algorithms from the machine learning community could potentially be applied to it. We then conduct a detailed empirical study on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) using a set of metrics inspired by the information retrieval community. Our results show that, while there is considerable signal in both network-theoretic and text-centric models of the problem, classic text-only models such as bag-of-words prove surprisingly difficult to outperform. Our results establish both a baseline for event link prediction on GTD, and currently outstanding challenges for the research community to tackle in this space.

Journey of Indonesia Foreign Policy and Recommendations in Responding Global Terrorism and Radicalism

Terrorism is a significant issue in national and global security. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, USA, the fight against terrorism has continued to this day. Resistance to terrorists has also changed the stereotype of Muslims, which affects Indonesia's reputation as the largest Muslim country in the world. The Bali I bombing attacks in 2002 by Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) terrorism group reconstructed its identity as Islam Moderate and Indonesia's foreign policy. The method used is the literature study method. Literature study is all efforts made by researchers to collect various information relevant to the topic or problem that will be studied. Through the identity, Indonesia can convince the western countries that Indonesia is worth reflecting true Islam and space to involve in the international political stage. As a pioneer of the Non-Aligned Movement and track record in the region, Indonesia trusted to be a role model for the Islamic world, especially the Middle East, that Islam and democracy are compatible. Through this, Indonesia seed as a strategic country to build international cooperation against radicalism and terrorism, which still becomes a global challenge presently.

Global Terrorism as a Virus

Two decades after the twin towers collapsed, the identification of global terrorism still remains an open question for everyone. However, since 9/11, the trope of the virus entered the scholarly discourses as well as the sociopolitical debate. This investigation is aimed at moving from the metaphor of terrorism as a virus to the virus-like pathogenic processes that affect terror threats. The proposal is to highlight the fluid identity of a main viral phenomenon of evildoing, according to a strict dialogue with the microbiological domain. New lenses are needed. As the author argues, systemic thinking better suits this subject matter than traditional linear thinking. The author will seek to highlight the development of global terrorism in terms of the biological mechanism of the virus's life (pathogenesis). Finally, it will be assumed that through the subject matter of global threat philosophy can improve the understanding of a dynamic principle of identity suitable to living entities/open systems.

THE AFGHAN EXODUS AND THE POSSIBLE NEW CONJONCTURE IN THE POST-USA REGION

Human history is not alien to the phenomenon of mass migration. Humans has been withnessing migration many times for ages. After the U.S announced that it will withdraw its troops from Afghanistan on August 31, a mass exodus of people from Afghanistan to other parts of the world began. The expansionist foreign policy of the USA presented itself as a country which seeks to contribute to the development of Afghan society and its state, resorting to “democratization and the fight against global terrorism” rhetoric. The main reason behind the U.S’s entry into Afghanistan is to achieve its objective of gaining geostrategic advantages. The U.S, which uses radical salafi movements as a stepping stone, has recently tried to make a presence in Central Asia, in a region confined by China, Russia and Iran, and to show a sustainable presence in the region from Afghanistan where the Taliban is now in control. The main issue is centered on what will occur after the 31st of August, when the USA leaves Afghanistan, how the conjuncture will unfold in the region and how the Taliban regime will interact with Iran, Pakistan and China. Western societies tend to analyze and construe the Taliban over their approach to women. However, the accurate approach should be contributing to the formation of a non-marginal, legitimate political regime in Afghanistan, which will also be in accordance with international law. With the stability to be achieved in Afghanistan, a refugee crisis can be prevented.

ISLAMIC TERRORISM AS A THREAT TO THE SECURITY OF EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

The article presents the analysis of the threat to the security of Eastern European countries posed by groups and individuals invoking the ideology of radical Islam. Particular attention is given to the region’s two biggest countries: Russia and Ukraine. After a general assessment of the terrorist threat in individual countries based on the Global Terrorism Index, the following are analysed: evolution of the terrorism of North Caucasus groups, scale of threat from the Islamic State, and particularly from foreign terrorist fi ghters (FTFs), as well as examples of homegrown Islamic terrorism in Russia.

Military and monetary power: Are they the right counter-terrorism strategies?

Two-century efforts of the global war on terror, using overwhelming monetary power and modern destructive weapons, still could not obliterate terrorism. The suicide attacks into Kabul airport are evidence of the existing risks of the return of global terrorism. They, terrorists, might come back stronger and deadlier, using the weapons that used to belong to counter-terrorism fighters to damage their homeland. So, is it time to rethink the grand global counter-terrorism strategies? In my opinion, terrorism can be countered by neither modern military weapons, technologies, nor monetary power but through trust-based international collaboration and trust-building activities

Terrorism and emergency constitutions in the Muslim world

Previous research has indicated that constitutionalized emergency provisions effectively constrain the behaviour of democratic governments subsequent to terrorist attacks. In this article, we ask if this is also true for autocratic governments. Are non-democratic governments equally subject to constitutionalized constraints regarding their reactions to emergencies and particularly to terrorist attacks? To answer the question, we analyse the behaviour of a specific group of predominantly autocratic governments that are particularly subject to frequent terrorist incidents, namely the states that are members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Employing data on terrorist activity from the Global Terrorism Database and constitutional data from the Index of Emergency Powers, we estimate the association between constitutionalized constraints and terrorist attacks in a dataset covering 48 member-states of the organization observed annually between 1970 and 2014. As hypothesized, we find that emergency constitutions that politically make it relatively cheap for governments to declare a state of emergency are more likely to be invoked. In addition, we find that governments are more likely to increase repression after terrorist events when the constitution allocates more discretionary power to the government in emergencies. Our evidence thus suggests that emergency constitutions also impact on the behaviour of largely autocratic governments.