The second decade of the 2000s was turbulent and rich in events that will leave a mark in history. From the 2011’s financial crisis to the Arab Spring, from the Greek’s OXI referendum to the Libyan Civil war after the killing of Gaddafi, the war in Syria, the rise and the decay of the ISIL, to the wave of violent extremism in France, the migration crisis in Europe, the rise of the right-wing populism and the election of Donald Trump. These are just a few of the events that have shaken our world in the last ten years. This decade
Category: Active Citizenship
Positive peace and the rise of populism in Europe
Political scientist and professor Peter Taggart have lately said that populism is “one of the most widely used but poorly understood political concepts of our time” [1]. Populism by definition is an ideology that has at its core the creation of an “us vs them” mentality, thus dividing the political discourse. “Us” being the people, seen as the morally and ethically superior force to “them”, the elite, portrayed as corrupt, egotistical and deceptive. Populist leaders carefully pick their side, their people, along the lines of class, ethnicity or nationality and oppose them to the carefully engineered idea of the homogeneous
Cyberbalkanization
In this article, I will try to go through a topic that has been gathering a lot of attention in the last years, and that personally fascinates me: the study of Internet echo chambers, and how information is spread through them. A study by the Anti-Defamation League focused on the instant messaging app Telegram as a source and safe haven for echo chambers. Telegram, a cloud-based online social networking, and messaging app count more than 200 active users, and hosts around 221 thousand between groups and channels. Some are private, some public and some require a digital “key” to access, rendering
The lost future
This era is the era of the past, the era was there is no space for the future, for the unknown. Now we are not any more dreaming of something new, we are just living in a temporal loop where nothing changes and we think that nothing can change. Capitalism is no more one of the possibilities, is the only possible world we can live in. Margaret Thatcher would say “There is no alternative”, the war is over, capitalism won and you have to accept it. The Berlin Wall fell down and with it, they say, an ideological world, which was
Sport as a social cohesion and redemption tool for the damned of the periphery
The most common image of Europe in the eyes of foreigners is one of the perfect and beautiful old country, filled with art, culture, and technology. The most common image Sicily in the touristic guide is that of an island full of beauties and history, which is true but is just one part of the story. The ancient island from one century to the other is passed in the hands of many dominators: the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Germans, the French and so on. All we have now is a rich cultural and historical heritage that belong to
Samajhdari, the community radio of the women
Nepal is a little rocky state embedded in the Mountain in the border between China and India. Well known for the historical city of Kathmandu. Aside from this, the condition of women in Nepal is one of the most dramatic in the world: marginalized, underestimated, bent to a patriarchal family environment that often brings them into a spiral of violence and sexual exploitation. A context where women do not really have the possibility or the power to have independence and control over their lives is also likely to be affected by high rates of violence against women. As a consequence,
Citizen journalism
“Do not hate the media, become the media” Citizen journalism is a phenomenon that is older as of the story of the web form itself. As a premise, citizen journalism means journalism created by non-professional writers, which usually using the web as the platform to easily spread their articles, create their own news not depending on any editorial line, than their own political sentiment of the day or the life. Nowadays the way that citizens journalism is structuring is a little bit different from the past when little websites were created ad-hoc to share thoughts or scoops, and it is built more