Neither participation nor revolution: the strategy of the Moroccan Jamiat al-Adl wal-Ihsan

Scholars and students of Islamist movements are divided over the issue of Islamists' commitment to democracy and a number of studies have attempted to discover the true nature of Islamist parties. This paper rejects this approach and argues that the behaviour of Islamist parties can be better understood through an analysis of the constraints and opportunities that their surrounding environment provides. Specifically, the paper aims at explaining the choice of the Moroccan Jamiat al-Adl wal-Ihsan neither to participate in institutional politics nor to undertake violent actions to transform the regime. This is done through an examination of its relations with the other political actors. The paper argues that Jamiat al-Adl wal-Ihsan's behaviour is as much the product of rational thinking as it is of ideology and provides evidence to support this claim. Such findings are important not only in the Moroccan context, but contribute to a growing literature claiming that Islamist movements should be treated as rational political actors operating under 'environmental' constraints and opportunities

Self-control enhancement in children:Ethical and conceptual aspects

Childhood self-control is currently receiving great scientific and public attention because it could predict much of adult’s life success and well-being. Specialized interventions based on findings in social psychology and neuroscience potentially enhance children’s capacity to exercise self-control. This perspective triggers hopes that self-control enhancement allows us to say good-bye for good to potentially unsafe psychopharmacological agents and electronic brain stimulants. This chapter provides an in-depth ethical analysis of pediatric self-control enhancement and points toward a series of serious conceptual and ethical concerns. First, it gives an overview of current psychological as well as neuroscientific research on self-control, and it presents longitudinal studies that emphasize the importance of childhood self-control for adult life success. Second, it critically discusses the concept of self-control presupposed in these approaches and points to crucial limitations. Going beyond an understanding of self-control as a sophisticated means of goal-achievement, i will argue for a comprehensive understanding that takes the inherent normativity of self-controlled behavior seriously. In that context, self-control enhancement appears as not necessarily desirable and occasionally even detrimental. Finally, this chapter questions the notion of childhood implicit in current research and how values typically put on this phase of life could get affected by self-control enhancement. I finish with an exploration of the conditions under which pediatric self-control enhancement is either impermissible, permissible, or maybe obligatory

Not all is lost in translation: world varieties of cosmopolitanism

Of the many challenging issues facing cosmopolitan thought today a major one is the problem of conceptual and cultural translation since it is often the case that cosmopolitanism is highly relevant to developments in Indian and Chinese thought, even though the term itself is not used in the sources or in the interpretations. Indeed, the actual use of the term may itself disguise more relevant applications if acceptable forms of conceptual and cultural translation can be found. There is also the question of which register of meaning should be privileged, western explanatory concepts or non-western concepts or whether it is possible to find an alternative language. This methodological challenge is central to the concern of this paper. Three problems are addressed, namely universalist versus contextualist positions, Eurocentrism, and the problem of conceptual and cultural translations between western and non-western thought. The central argument is that cosmopolitanism thought needs to expand beyond its western genealogy to include other world traditions. However the solution is not simply to identify alternative cultural traditions to western ones and which might be the carrier of different kinds of cosmopolitan values, but of identifying in these different cultural traditions resources for cosmopolitics. In this way critical cosmopolitanism seeks to find an alternative both to strong contextualist as well as strong universalist positions. The upshot of this reasoning is that all world varieties of cosmopolitanism reflect different aspects of the cosmopolitan imagination which cannot be reduced to any one tradition