Integrating Islamic Positions into European Public Discourse: The Paradigmatic Example of Tariq Ramadan

As the continuing relevance of religion to secular European societies garners increasing recognition, the question remains of which religious positions may assume a public role, with Islam at the center of many debates. This article complements the ongoing theoretical debate with a detailed case study analyzing the major works of Islamic scholar and public intellectual Tariq Ramadan. I show that in the last two decades Ramadan significantly modified his views on Islam and European societies. I argue that these adjustments were interdependent, and as such paradigmatically illustrate that the integration of Islamic positions into public discourse depends on shifts in the understanding of both concepts.

Cleverer than we thought: the change in discourse of the Georgian Orthodox Church

This paper will focus on three episodes of contemporary church-state relations in Georgia, in particular, the conflicting interaction between law and religion in the public space. The first episode will be an open confrontation between the church and the state over the law on Registration of Religious Minority organizations (2011) which allowed the religious minorities to freely register; second: the Law on Self-governance (2013) which Georgian Orthodox Church considered “a threat to territorial integrity of Georgia”; and lastly: the Law on Anti-discrimination (2014) which was deemed “legitimization of Sodomic sin”. By reflecting on the three examples where for the first time after the collapse of Soviet Union, the Georgian state openly confronted the church and made a decision notwithstanding its position, I will attempt to argue that the role of the Orthodox Church in influencing the law making process is in gradual decline. However, on the other hand, by presenting the results of an ethnographic study conducted in 23 eparchies and perishes in 7 regions of Georgia in 2014, I will also show that church has adapted to its declining role over policy making, and to regain its political influence it gradually started to employ a civic rather than ethno nationalist discourse on matters of religious freedom while engaging with government. The paper will suggest that both unilateral decision-making of the state and civic shift in the discourse of the church constitute an important change in understanding church-state dynamics in the post-communist Orthodox Christianity dominated society.

Does a reference to evaluations contribute to discourse quality? The case of Swiss direct-democratic campaigns on school policy: a conceptual framework

This article examines how references to evaluations in school policy debates contribute to discourse quality. The article consists of two parts: First, it presents a descriptive overview of the references to evidence in direct-democratic campaigns. These results are based on a quantitative content analysis of the newspaper coverage and governmental information documents of 103 direct-democratic Swiss school policy votes. In a second step, it discusses these findings in view of the question of whether the incorporation of evaluation results in policy debates contributes to discourse quality. It presents a conceptual framework, including hypotheses and a research design to answer this question.

Humanitarian intervention and the issue of state sovereignty in the discourse of legal experts between the 1830s and the First World War

This article discusses the tensions between the principle of state sovereignty and the idea of a "humanitarian intervention" (or a intervention on humanitarian grounds) as they resulted from the debate of leading legal scholars in the 19th and early 20th century. While prominent scholars such as Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Gustave Rolin Jaequemyns or Aegidius Arntz spoke out in favour of a form of "humanitarian interventions", others such as August Wilhelm Heffter or Pasquale Fiore were much more critical and in many cases spoke out in favour of absolute state sovereignty.

Placing Strategy Discourse in Context : Sociomateriality, Sensemaking, and Power

There has been increasing interest in the discursive aspects of strategy over the last two decades. In this editorial we review the existing literature, focusing on six major bodies of discursive scholarship: post-structural, critical discourse analysis, narrative, rhetoric, conversation analysis and metaphor. Our review reveals the significant contributions of research on strategy and discourse, but also the potential to advance research in this area by bringing together research on discursive practices and research on other practices we know to be important in strategy work. We explore the potential of discursive scholarship in integrating between significant theoretical domains (sensemaking, power and sociomateriality), and realms of analysis (institutional, organizational and the episodic), relevant to strategy scholarship. This allows us to place the papers published in the special issue Strategy as Discourse: Its Significance, Challenges and Future Directions among the body of knowledge accumulated thus far, and to suggest a way forward for future scholarship.