Suchergebnisse

"Social representations of the colonization and decolonization processes among young people from a former European colonial power (Portugal) and from an African ex-colony (Mozambique) were investigated through surveys using open- and closed-ended questions about national history, focusing on the identity functions of collective memories. Hegemonic and contested representations were found of the most prominent events related to Portuguese colonization of Mozambique, arousing a range of collective emotions. A central place is occupied by memories of the Colonial War, which ended with the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and the subsequent independence of the Portuguese African colonies. Overall, the depiction of colonialism was more negative for Mozambican than for Portuguese participants. The violent effects of colonial action were very salient in Mozambican memories, which stressed the most oppressive aspects of the colonial period, associated with slave trade and brutal repression. On the Portuguese side, the idealization of the voyages of discovery persisted, obscuring the most violent effects of colonial expansion. However, collective memories of colonization of former colonizer and former colonized do not simply stand opposed. Both Mozambican and Portuguese participants reported ambivalent feelings towards the colonization process." (author's abstract)

American foreign policy will more effectively counter Islamist terrorism if it more effectively counters the terrorists' invocation of Islam. The indirect promotion of religious tolerance in the Muslim world, rather than direct promotion of Western-style democracy, is the key. To that end, the United States must cultivate Muslim human-rights activists and intellectuals as assiduously as it did their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War. First, however, it must reassert the constitutional separation of church and State that some Americans seem eager to blur. No velvet revolution impends in any case: the Muslim political future will probably look more like Yugoslavia than Czechoslovakia. But long-running internecine conflicts may have left the umma in a state of exhaustion analogous to Europe's at the end of the Thirty Years War. Ihere is, in short, a moment to be seized if American diplomacy can muster the cultural sophistication to seize it. (Survival / SWP)

Der ägyptische Staat hat die Krise, die von der gewaltsamen islamistischen Opposition seit 1990 ausging, offenbar überwunden. Dieser Erfolg resultiert zum Teil aus der internen Spaltung der islamistischen Bewegung. Der Beitrag untersucht die Maßnahmen der Regierung zur Abwehr der islamistischen Bedrohung und fordert von den USA eine behutsame Unterstützungspolitik, die gewährleistet, dass die Menschenrechte gewahrt bleiben und mit der militanten islamistischen Opposition nicht zugleich die legitimen oppositionellen Kräfte verfolgt und aus dem politischen Leben ausgeschlossen werden. (DÜI-Hns)