The last thirty years has seen the re-emergence of a civil economic challenge, side by side with the advance of globalisation, as a distinct strand in the development of global civil society. Don’t underestimate its longterm significance in the glacial shifts now taking place in the world economy.
This book shows how citizens must not wait for government to solve the crisis, but to take the initiative through innovation and collective civic action. It is a call for citizens to swift from passive consumers to co-producers.
Témoignages de l’autre côté (Testimonials from the other side) is a film of 33 minutes whose main characters are African immigrants living in Spain, mainly from Senegal. They tell us their experience since they arrived to the country, offering us a personal recollection of everyday realities as seen “from the other side”, that is, the Spanish coast known in Senegal as “El Dorado”.
Interview with Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, president of Iceland since 1996, or how a large financial sector can ruin a nation, and how to avoid it.
Europe has had several years of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs push depressed economies even deeper into depression. Rather than admit that they’ve been wrong, European leaders seem determined to drive their economy — and their society — off a cliff.
Life is not a property; life is a gift. Knowledge is not a property; it is a gift. We partake in this gift of life, we stand upon the great heritage of knowledge and life, and the only way we can pay back our debt to this heritage is by giving unconditionally knowledge and life we have received, argues Ananta Kumar Giri
On May 3rd and 4th, the Forum of Concerned Citizens of Europe organizes, in conjunction with the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), a public conference to reflect on and discuss the apparent incapacity of the European Union to face the challenges of the current protracted economic and social crisis. The conference is titled ‘Reinventing Democracy in Europe, Reimagining the Commons’ as it aims to articulate solutions to the seeming policy impasse – solutions which we see in the broad formula of a renewed solidarity.
A decade of huge investments in cooperation and development has not really consolidated in our society the idea that solidarity should be practiced not only between generations, social classes, territories and individuals, but also beyond our frontiers.
The “scandal of reason” was the name given by Immanuel Kant to the degeneration of rational search for truth either into dogma or into uncertainty, as reason gets entangled in its own contradictions. “For Kant, this was the curse of modern man’s rational effort to do the right thing”, Albena Azmanova reminds us in this interview conducted by Lowell Frye on the occasion of the publication of her book The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment. For Azmanova, the “scandal of reason” is not a threat, it is the solution: “I propose that we embrace the scandal of reason and dare to judge”, she challenges us.