Colonialism led to the importation, or better still imposition, of European administrative systems on the indigenous people of Africa. France specialized in this, practicing direct rule and an assimilation policy in their colonies up to the time of independence. In Cameroon, French administrative law (“droit adminstratif”) became part of the national legal system.

Soon after a series of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, African-American protestors there and Palestinian protestors in the West Bank began to include the slogan “From Ferguson to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime” in their public statements. In Neither Thugs nor Terrorists, Randa Serhan uses cutting edge first-hand research to explore how these two distant communities found common cause in protesting the militarization of the forces that policed and criminalized them.

By 2015, four years after the dawn of the Arab Spring, the prospects of a unifying political reform narrative in the Arab World were noticeably dwindling. The unprecedented opportunity for a regional workshop of reform and state building had stalled, with Islamist movements more anxious about questions of identity and religious ethics, and with the old guards of the “deep state” establishments (mainly military or religious personnel) countering the revolutions, rather than being concerned with constitutionalism.

Edited by veteran Czech diplomat and senior religion scholar Glenn Hughes, The Presence of the Past presents new insights from a conference hosted by the Václav Havel Program for Human Rights and Diplomacy at Florida International University, in cooperation with the Czech non-profit organization Post Bellumand the Vaclav Havel Library. Its fundamental topic is memory, the human capacity to retain its contents in the flux of time, which is explored and discussed both theoretically and in terms of current action-oriented public discourse.

We are now entering an era where the human world assumes recognition of itself as data. Much of humanity’s basis for existence is becoming subordinate to software processes that tabulate, index, and sort the relations that comprise what we perceive as reality. The acceleration of data collection threatens to relinquish ephemeral modes of representation to ceaseless processes of computation. This situation compels the human world to form relations with non-human agencies, to establish exchanges with software processes in order to allow a profound upgrade of our own ontological understanding.

Translator:
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

ISIS’s Use of Sexual Violence in Iraq explores how and why the Islamic State organized and used sexual violence against Yezidi women in Iraq. Sexual violence in conflict is one the most devastating types of attack waged against non-combatants. It separates families, displaces communities, and perpetuates on-going social and psychological conflicts long after surviving victims are freed. It is a highly effective weapon that degrades and humiliates people when they are most vulnerable.

By 2015, four years after the dawn of the Arab Spring,the prospects of a unifying political reform narrative in the Arab World were noticeably dwindling. The unprecedented opportunity for a regional workshop of reform and state building had stalled, with Islamist movements more anxious about questions of identity and religious ethics, and with the old guards of the “deep state” establishments (mainly military or religious personnel) countering the revolutions, rather than being concerned with constitutionalism.

ISIS’s Use of Sexual Violence in Iraq explores how and why the Islamic State organized and used sexual violence against Yezidi women in Iraq. Sexual violence in conflict is one the most devastating types of attack waged against non-combatants. It separates families, displaces communities, and perpetuates on-going social and psychological conflicts long after surviving victims are freed. It is a highly effective weapon that degrades and humiliates people when they are most vulnerable.

Jo Bac’s groundbreaking legal study asks why and how the United States legal system should grant legal personhood to artificial intelligence (AI). This new legal status of AI is visualized as a dependent person. The AI dependent legal person would be determined by an inextricable connection between AI and a new type of corporate body, introduced here as “AI-Human Amalgamation” (AI-HA).