Mediterraneo, Società Civile, Politica e Interculturalità
Articles in English language
The last weeks have been very painful for many activists and human rights defenders. Watching the indiscriminate terror carried out against Syrians in Ghouta while the International Community was distracted or cautious in raising their voice has been another shocking punch in the face for whom he still believes that international human rights law…
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On May 2008, I was invited by the Turin Book Fair to join a debate on Jerusalem. At the speakers’ table, there were as well a couple of Italian journalists who had just published a stylish book on the Holy City. At the end of the debate, I asked one of them: “When were you…
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A month has passed since the closing of SabirFest 2017 (5 – 8 October 2017), the festival of Mediterranean Culture and Citizenship which is held in Sicily since 2014, and whose I am one of the founders. Many emotional feelings have crossed our hearts those days, and many things have been said, especially at the…
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We are hosting here an interesting analysis of the Austrian social and political context after the recent parliamentary elections by my friend Agnes Tuna (*), highlighting the irreversible impact of anti-immigrant narratives and the strategic failure of Left parties. It has only been four times in the past 72 years, after the end of World…
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Lebanon has different faces. Not only those of the Maronite Christians of the Mount Lebanon towns, the Sunnis of Old Tripoli, or the Shia communities of the Southern coastal harbours. There is not only a cultural or religious multiple spectrum of identities in the country of cedars. There is also something related to the new…
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Rome, sixty years later. Children swarm into the streets and the gardens of the Capital, where cars cannot drive, and walls are covered with placards. The spring has just found its way through, and fresh grass grows between the sampietrini and along the rifts on the asphalt. An old man in a line 19’s tramway…
Continua a leggereThey are holding a gun to our heads. They have seized 2017. This is how the new year begins. Like in a big bank robbery, they have pointed their gun-machines at people. This is the image which comes to my mind when I look around myself and listen to the news. We are walking in…
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My new book has been released in January 2017. It is entitled “Citizen Activism and Mediterranean Identity – Beyond Eurocentrism” and is published by Palgrave Macmillan, part of the Springer group. You can order it here: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319459608 The book explores the commonalities between the struggles of the last years around the Mediterranean and tries to find the cultural roots of this…
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Despite the fact that Donald Trump, addressing his supporters in New York right after having received the news that he would be the new president, said: “It is time for us to come together as one united people. It is time”, many voiced out their hostility marching a few hours later in the streets of…
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Never Facebook has been so proliferous in offering the most disparate views on the same topic, as in the day after the Brexit referendum. Some fellows were predicting the European Apocalypse, others were vocalizing their excitement for their rewarded hate against Europe, and others were sending to hell the Brits. Some distinguished friends were writing:…
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Fuck Humanity. [Signed] Aleppo, April 28, 2016. This is what someone wrote on a wall of Aleppo while the recent bombing campaign of al-Asad’s regime was going on without hesitations, with the backing of Russia, after having buried the ceasefire and started doing what they have always wished to do: annihilate people to win territory.…
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Yesterday, once I heard about the terror attacks in Brussels, the first thing I did was to call a couple of very close friends to make sure that they were all right. In Europe, even someone who is not familiar with that city must know someone else there. One of my friends, passed by Maalbeek…
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My first time in a fertilizers factory. Built by the Soviet Union in 1967 and commissioned in 1974, located nearby Mazar Sherif, not far from the borders with Uzbekistan. Large, rationally designed, antiquated in its appearance, surrounded by scattered trees and high grass, in the middle of the countryside, accessible via an old paved road,…
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Scene 1 The husband calls the wife complaining that nobody serves him a cup of tea. He sits on a cushion, in the living room. The wife comes, reassures him that the water is boiling, and asks him to talk over an important topic. The husband, a moustached man, raises his voice and says: “Bring…
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Kabul reminds me of Rio de Janeiro, a never ending urban carpet teeming with life, surrounding rocky and statuesque peaks, at which feet the poorest build their own shelters clinging to the mountain’s vertical walls. The only differences are that Kabul’s peaks are naked and trees are lonely, women are hiding their beauty in public,…
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Gianluca Solera 