In 2015, French writer Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, which depicts a future France with a Muslim president, was repeatedly cited in political discourse about Islam, French identity, and terrorism. In the year of the novel’s publication, several Islamist terrorist attacks targeted France, and Houellebecq was often named in the debate on multiculturalism, immigration and the French secularist principle of laïcité. The reception of the novel is analysed in this article, focusing on ideological argumentation and political debate. Two opposite camps can be identified in this reception structure. Interestingly, the arguments of these camps are analogous to the arguments of the prosecutor and defence lawyer in the 1857 trial of Gustave Flaubert concerning his novel Madame Bovary. One and a half centuries after that trial, questions about the reader’s moral capacity and the author’s responsibility remain at the heart of the debate. While some liberal critics praise the ambiguities of the novel, trusting the reader’s ethical faculties, other critics condemn the novel and accuse the writer of expressing dubious values. As for the ideological homes of these critics, the liberal group represents left-wing, right-wing, and uncertain ideologies, whereas the gatekeeping group largely consists of left-leaning agents. The division into two reception groups and their respective discursive patterns and practices are analysed using the Bovary trial as a basis for comparison. It is concluded that in the anxious political climate of 2015 when terror, migration, and Islam were attracting considerable attention and when the populist right was on the rise, Houellebecq’s novel functioned as a political vehicle in government-sympathetic opinion making and as a practical tool for critics who positioned themselves as safeguarding generous migration and integration policies.

On reading C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution’, I was struck by the deep split he describes between scientists and literary intellectuals. One cause he proposes is the age-old specialization of English education, where each of the two cultures has long been segmented into rigidly defined subcultures. I came to learn about UK specialization in the 1980s in Brazil when I mentored a student for his Masters degree based on a study of leishmaniasis and its insect vector, the sand fly. When the student later went to England for his PhD, he was not required to learn about any other parasites – or other any other vectors – to pass his examinations. A different story from what would have happened at the Harvard School of Public Health where, for his PhD, he would have taken a variety of courses and been examined on all the parasites infecting humans as well as all the other insect vectors, not just sand flies.

Reading C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, ‘Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ in 2017, I was struck by the ways in which the essay, written over half a century ago, addresses issues that I’ve been engaged with for most of my life. Snow defined a world of cultures split between: ‘Literary intellectuals at one pole, at the other scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension, sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.’ I’ve encountered this lack of understanding in my own profession and in public life. But it was Snow’s closing argument that really grabbed my attention: he proposed to his Cambridge audience that they had ‘better look at education with a fresh eye’ and that there was a ‘good deal to learn from the Russians’. Not really. If, as Snow proposed, ‘Scientists have the future in their bones’, we’d all do better to respond to the cool reason of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Anatol Sharansky and to recognize the ultimate power of free speech, which only exists in a free society.

The economic crisis in Greece, and the reaction to it by key European institutions, gives scholars a unique opportunity to test the instrumentalist model for explaining the dynamics of political identity. This study seeks to do that, marshalling both quantitative and qualitative indicators of European identity in Greece, and examining how this identity has changed over the past decade under conditions of crisis and external pressure. Do Greeks now self-identify less as European than they used to because the utility of such an identity has diminished? The evidence presented in this analysis suggests that that is the case.

The existing policy and academic debate on the social mobility of Roma have been focused almost entirely on entry barriers (the cost of entry into the mainstream society), whereas exit barriers (the cost of exit from the traditional Roma lifestyle) have been acknowledged and studied to a much lesser extent. In this study we advocate that from a policy perspective it is important to understand differences between the two types of social mobility barriers, as they have different causes and hence have to be addressed by different policy instruments. However, it is important that both types of social mobility barriers are addressed simultaneously, as they interact and reinforce each other mutually. Further, addressing social mobility barriers of Roma requires a change of both formal and informal institutions. Therefore, policy measures have to be implemented and sustained over a long period of time in order to have a sustainable impact on the social and economic integration of Roma.

This article seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) why have the Chechen leaders become extremely religious, whereas at the beginning of the Russo-Chechen conflict in the 1990s, they were predominantly secular; and (2) what led the Chechens to use terrorism to fulfil their aspirations for complete independence from Russia. The article shows that the flow of foreign religious terrorists into the republic, as well as financial assistance to the Chechen population and its fighting leaders, turned the Chechen leaders from predominantly secular ones into extremely religious ones. At the same time, the traumatization of the Chechens by Russia’s disproportionate use of force against civilians was the reason that Chechens use terrorism against the Russian forces.

Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) is one of the best-known philosophers and public intellectuals of post-Soviet Russia. While his geopolitical views are well-researched, his views on Russian history are less so. Still, they are important to understand his Weltanschauung and that of like-minded Russian intellectuals. For Dugin, the ‘Time of Troubles’ – the period of Russian history at the beginning of the seventeenth century marked by dynastic crisis and general chaos – constitutes an explanatory framework for the present. Dugin implicitly regarded the ‘Time of Troubles’ in broader philosophical terms. For him, the ‘Time of Troubles’ meant not purely political and social upheaval/dislocation, but a deep spiritual crisis that endangered the very existence of the Russian people. Russia, in his view, has undergone several crises during its long history. Each time, however, Russia has risen again and achieved even greater levels of spiritual wholeness. Dugin believed that Russia was going through a new ‘Time of Troubles’. In the early days of the post-Soviet era, he believed that it was the collapse of the USSR that had led to a new ‘Time of Troubles’. Later, he changed his mind and proclaimed that the Soviet regime was not legitimate at all and, consequently, that the ‘Time of Troubles’ started a century ago in 1917. Dugin holds a positive view of Putin in general. Still, his narrative implies that Putin has been unable to arrest the destructive process of a new Time of Trouble.