Values are more than opinions: they claim to have some coherence, to shape a world-view, to be opposable, even imposable, to others, and to organise own’s life. They are often the result of a secularisation of religious norms (or “translation” in the Habermas sense: making religious values acceptable to secular people by rending them “autonomous” […]

Even if as a general rule authoritarian regimes might be more politically resistant than democratic ones to a high level of mortality due to the Covid-19 epidemic, they cannot prevent information from spreading, not only because of social networks but also because the population will have concrete and personal experiences of the losses. The argument […]

Epidemics, like the many plagues that have struck Europe (for example in 1347 at the start of the Hundred Years War and during the Thirty Years War in 1618-1648), have never ended a war in history, even though sometimes they have played a long-term role by weakening empires or exhausting the fighters. There are two […]

The majority of speculation on the future of ISIS sees it as a central organisation that has been masterminding global jihad. We tend to forget that jihadism and terrorism predate ISIS by 20 years. There are in fact three “theatres of operations” where ISIS has been the dominant factor since 2014, corresponding to three different […]