Eid, Islamic finance and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

Posted by and & filed under Humanitarianism, Religion

Muslims all over the world are celebrating Eid-ul-Adha, the ‘festival of sacrifice’ or the Greater Eid. The other Eid, Eid-ul-Fitr is the festival which marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. This is when many Muslims pay their annual zakat – a religious tax equivalent to 2.5 percent of a person’s wealth each year.

Islamic aid organizations offer qurbani (animal sacrifice) services for Eid-ul-Adha (as shown in an advertisement above), and use the profits from sales of the animal skins to fund their welfare programmes. Photo: Marta Bivand Erdal / PRIO

Meanwhile, in conjunction with Eid-ul-Adha, Muslims worldwide conduct qurbani, sacrificing a goat, sheep, cow or camel, where a third of the meat is distributed to the poor or vulnerable. The sale of animal skins, donated by individuals after the ritual sacrifice, is a major source of income for many charity, welfare, and aid organizations. Religious festivals in Islam often involve distribution of food and donations to help people in need.

Contributing to social justice through the redistribution of wealth is a central tenet of Islam and is implemented by requiring those who are able, to share their wealth. These transactions are private affairs and, according to the Quran, must be conducted discreetly. Accordingly, it is difficult to know how much money is actually involved. But estimates suggest Muslim charity amounted to US$ 2tn (2015) and is on the rise. Even the lowest estimates of Muslim giving globally put the figures at 15 times the global total of official humanitarian aid in 2011.

Religious alms-giving is often criticized for failing to support long-term, sustainable development. Our research among Muslims in Norway and Pakistan shows, however, that many Muslims are keen to give to organizations and initiatives designed to achieve lasting change in people’s lives, for example through funding education. Many are also concerned about sustainable development.

This can be seen as part of a global trend, as Muslim actors have become increasingly prominent internationally in the areas of development and humanitarian aid. Institutions such as the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) and Muslim NGOs are signing up to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This is a new trend, but what does it mean?Read More

This Week in South Sudan – Week 33

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Tuesday 14 August The next phase of IGAD’s peace talks started in Khartoum. Wednesday 15 August President Salva Kiir proposed that 14 of the 32 states should be governed by the opposition as part of the peace deal. Thursday 16 August Military chief General Jok Riak returned unimpeded from a visit to China, despite the… Read more »

Dead Male Bodies: A Challenge for Feminist Legal Thought

Posted by & filed under Gender, Humanitarianism, Research Politics, Security

The scholarship on law, conflict and suffering has for the past two decades been dominated by a moral and analytical concern with “women and children” and sexual violence. However, when we look up and do the body count out in the physical and political world – in the city and along the borderlands – those bodies by a large majority belong to a specific subset of males.

Photo: Flickr/FreedomHouse

Battle deaths, torture, unlawful imprisonment, disappearances and extrajudicial killings overwhelmingly affect young poor men of non-Caucasian ethnicity. These dead male bodies constitute a challenge for feminist legal thought.

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Climate change and violence: The case for mechanisms

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Bookshelves are getting heavy from dire portrayals of a hotter future with more conflict. Two of today’s most high-profile conflict cases – Darfur and the war theatre in Syria – have been strongly connected to environmental change, at least judging from media sources and pundits. While over a dozen studies have conducted statistical analyses on… Read more »

The politics of identifying potential terrorists

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Is it possible to identify someone who might, one day, go on to commit an act of terrorism? And if it is, is it possible to intervene in order to disrupt or mitigate this potential? These questions have been central to state responses to the “war on terror” and have led to the creation of… Read more »

Game of Thrones – the Middle Ages and Today

Posted by & filed under Conflict Patterns

Every generation has its own concept of the Middle Ages. Game of Thrones is a fantasy drama, but it also reflects the present, viewed through the prism of the Middle Ages.

From Middle-earth to Westeros

Many young people today picture our distant past in a way that is strongly influenced by The Lord of the Rings. There the battle is between good and evil and – except in the case of some turncoats (such as Saruman) and certain conquered lands – the battle fronts are clear. This reflected Tolkien’s own experiences, both in the trenches during World War I and as he composed his epic work in the shadow of World War II. Tolkien took inspiration from Beowulf, The Elder Edda and The Kalevala to describe a human universe that is a battle between the forces of good and evil, between freedom and tyranny, between individuality and regimentation.

All hope depends on the ruler Daenerys Targaryen. Still the most important and complex figure of the Middle Ages is the advisor – here represented by Tyrion Lannister. Photo: HBO

“I don’t believe that giants and ghouls and white walkers are lurking beyond the Wall. I believe that the only difference between us and the Wildlings is that when that Wall went up, our ancestors happened to live on the right side of it.”Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, Season 1

A battle between such forces is still taking place today, but with the major difference that the battle fronts are mutable. Western interventions designed to liberate regions such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya from dictators and extremism have had the opposite effect: violence is increasing, security is being eroded, and extremists are growing ever stronger. One may do evil despite good intentions.

Accordingly, it is not surprising that Game of Thrones, the latest epic narrative to be set in an imaginary past, is a tale where heroes and villains swap roles, where good people often suffer defeat, and where “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”, to quote Bernard of Clairvaux.Read More

Liquid Warfare: AFRICOM and its pop-up militarization

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In recent years, an expanding conglomerate of armed actors is engaged in training operations, targeted killings and manhunts, often outside conventional war zones across the Middle East and Africa. These Western state-led operations mark a shift away from ‘boots-on-the-ground’ deployments towards light-footprint military interventions, and involve a combination of drone strikes and airstrikes, special forces,… Read more »

This Week in South Sudan – Week 32

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Monday 6 August The National Salvation front (NAS) distanced itself from the agreement on outstanding issues of governance. The leader of NAS, Thomas Cirillo Swaka, fired six leading members of the party, accusing them of plotting to overthrow him. Tuesday 7 August The Troika (US, UK, Norway) and the European Union called on the government… Read more »

A Venezuelan Incident: Maduro and the Politics of Latin American Drones

Posted by and & filed under Security

Photo: CSIRO / Wikimedia Commons

On 4 August 2018, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s speech at a military parade in Caracas was interrupted by the sound of two explosions. Maduro’s camp immediately claimed that the explosions resulted from a failed assassination attempt by drones carrying explosives. Although the nature of the incident remains disputed, and is being described as “an apparent” assassination attempt, this event sheds light on new types of security challenges that result from the growing presence of drones in Latin American airspace.

The incident can either be interpreted as evidence that a political assassination with weaponized miniature drones is possible, or that political actors (whoever they may be) consider such a scenario to be “believable”. In the latter case, these political actors thus end up conferring credibility to the idea, which in turn kindles certain political and popular responses and imaginations.Read More

Decolonization Gone off the Rails

Posted by & filed under Peace Research, Research Politics

This summer we have had the opportunity to read about the campaign to ‘decolonize academia’: the call to improve the representation of non-Western voices in the curricula of Norwegian educational institutions.

Photo: Otto Haeckel, German East Africa, 1906. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

The supporters of this campaign justify it on the basis that it will challenge ways of thinking in the sciences and humanities that were formed during the colonial era. The motives behind the campaign are good. An academy consisting of researchers from diverse backgrounds will help boost the competition between ideas that is crucial for scholarly progress.

It is therefore sad to see the campaign now running down a blind alley, by promoting a radical form of epistemic relativism: an attack on scientific objectivity in the guise of advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups. Read More