Coercion,Peace, and the Issue of Jihad

This essay analyzes different perspectives on the issue of jihad; based on this analysis, it sheds light on the contemporary application and understanding of the word in the Muslim world.     

Just War and Terrorism: A New Policy Perspective

The idea of terrorism as policy in any policy discussion is abhorrent in most academic circles. The fact is, however, if one removes the emotion attached to the use of terrorism and approaches it as a tool it can be placed in several models used by policymakers today. For many centuries the concept of “just war” has been discussed by philosophers, policymakers, and warriors. When standards have been established that those engaged in conflict can use to determine whether or not an action is considered “just.” How did Christianity in particular move from emphasizing love (agapē, caritas) to the acceptance of waging war? This problem was dealt with when the law of war was included in discussion of natural law theory.     

Transnational Civic Education Inquiry in the Lands of Contention

Transnational civic education as defined here refers to the systematic study of nations throughout the world as they struggle with lawlessness and recover governance values and ideas consistent with human dignity and the rule of law. Analytical reasoning is heralded as one approach to dissecting nations' civic cultures. One hundred Palestinian teachers examined the civic education documents and practices of seven nations, including Romania, the United States, and Palestine. They read original legal texts, conducted oral histories, learned content analysis, and learned horizontal human rights debate practices.     

Christian–Muslim Relations in Egypt in the Wake of the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring protests that brought massive and largely unforeseen political change to Egypt included all sectors of society, including the Egyptian Christian population, known as Copts. Copts participated in large numbers in the protests that brought about regime change in February 2011, but the broader implications of the revolution to Copts are unclear. In this essay, I address the changes in Christian–Muslim relations that attended the development of a new republican regime in Egypt as a result of the Arab Spring. While the former regime of President Hosni Mubarak had formed a stable elite partnership with the hierarchy of the Coptic Orthodox Church (a “neo‐millet” system), the 2011 revolution contributed to the erosion of this partnership in favor of a republican and pluralist model of citizenship in which individual Copts represent their own interests. The increasingly assertive public role of lay movements among Copts, coupled with the death of the Coptic Patriarch (pope) and his replacement by a younger successor, points to the continued erosion of the elite partnership in favor of the new model. Time will tell whether or not pluralist representation or a retrenched corporatism that favors the church will dominate Christian–Muslim relations in Egypt into the future.