Recently, young environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s visit to France’s National Assembly caused quite a stir. Critics were quick to point out her young age and her lack of scientific credentials. Yet if there is one thing that her detractors cannot deny, it is that her speech has had spectacular and unexpected effects.
First Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle organized by Professors Rodolphe Desbordes and Frédéric Munnier.
Stéphanie Chasserio Interviews Zahra Hankir. She is the award-winning, best-selling editor of Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World.
Zahra writes about the intersection of politics, culture, and society in the Middle East. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Vice, BBC News, Al Jazeera English, Businessweek, Roads & Kingdoms, and Literary Hub, among other publications.
In the field of social psychology, cognitive dissonance is the tension experienced by an individual when their thought system, feelings or behaviour are conflicting. In its own way, slavery placed our societies in a state of cognitive dissonance: the proclamation of human rights coexisted with the reduction of people to the status of objects deprived of rights. To this day, this reality is often overlooked.
Illegal drug trade, arms and human trafficking, counterfeiting... “Grey globalisation” players have spawned transnational organised crime (TOC) that is difficult to stamp out. Indeed, it is complex on account of its production bases, networks, funding and demand. An analysis of drug trafficking through the lens of consilience provides a better understanding of this issue and its challenges.
Over the course of the 20th century, a spectacular decline in religious practice occurred within Western societies. Numerous studies now indicate that this trend is escalating. A multifactorial analysis provides a better understanding of what is driving this (r)evolution...
Our modern world continues to be plagued by persistent gender inequalities that contrast sharply with the prevailing egalitarian discourse. These inequalities are rooted so deeply in our history that our societies have, in a manner of speaking, “naturalised” them. Of late, some research – notably by Alberto Alesina, a highly respected economist, recently deceased – has endeavoured to shed light on the origins of these inequalities.
Karl Popper believed that what defined science was its “refutability” or “falsifiability”. Unlike an ideology, a scientific hypothesis can be…
In these times of great uncertainty, everyone is seeking to better anticipate the future. In the military and intelligence fields, it is striking that, besides tactical or technological solutions, top officials are adopting transdisciplinary approaches similar to consilience.
The use of statistics is crucial for anyone wishing to understand how society is evolving. They should be analysed very meticulously though, because the devil is in the detail and one statistic can hide another. Here is a demonstration.
Value measurement is supposed to be one of the strengths of our metric dominated economies. And yet, the true value of things is often ignored, at the risk of ending up with catastrophes.
Godwin’s law asserts that “as an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.” More generally speaking, the longer a debate goes on the higher the likelihood of using extreme analogies. It would seem that the current rivalry between China and the United States is no exception to this rule.
It is not unusual to read that private players threaten state prerogatives. A detailed analysis of the situation, including through the prism of international investment agreements, gives this idea a certain credibility while shedding some new light on it.
In a complex world, it is no longer possible to content ourselves with deeper but disjointed knowledge. Consilience or “the…
The coronavirus epidemic has generated an abundance of literature on past pandemics. In these publications, the Justinianic plague in the…
In the current coronavirus pandemic, our societies are being confronted with a risk that many believed had been left in…
To cope with the high influx of patients, European hospitals called for additional intensive care beds. What if this shortage,…
