Why Nobelists Fail

Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim dedicated his life to fighting for democracy and human rights in his country, but ended up endorsing an authoritarian government. A long-time advocate of including Islamist groups in democratic processes, he pioneered civil society efforts in Egypt, often at personal risk, drawing intellectual inspiration from the 14th-century scholar Ibn Khaldun. However, after the 2013 Rabaa massacre, Ibrahim unexpectedly supported the military regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, publicly justifying its actions. Faruqi embarked on an investigation of Arab liberalism, and found it is constructed upon an authoritarian contradiction: faced with populations unwilling to adopt liberal ideals, proponents of liberalism forged authoritarian alliances.

“Ibrahim’s inconsistency is especially baffling given his debt to the legacy of Ibn Khaldun. … Ibrahim interpreted the Khaldunian paradigm as requiring that every new social movement, if it hopes to offer tangible political outcomes, must offer an alternative king and pope, to replace a currently decaying king and pope. … [Ibrahim] he emphasized the appeal of a social movement capable of offering a vision of a lost ideal to the downtrodden. Islamism, in his estimation, offered precisely that vision, however reactionary it arguably was. Egyptian liberalism, on the other hand, offered no competing spiritual or emotional force. …The project of Egyptian liberalism has fallen short in large part because it has failed to appreciate that religious mission, or to offer an alternative king and pope to the Egyptian people. Rather, it had no place for religious actors of any kind in the public sphere. Faced with the choice, the Egyptian people have repeatedly rejected that proposition.”

Edwards and Shatz discuss Martiniquais poet and politician Aimé Césaire’s 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to the writings of Césaire’s protégé, Frantz Fanon. They highlight how Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land reclaims negative terms and explores identity through a deep, often painful engagement with the history of blackness, colonialism, and personal transformation. They go on to explore Césaire’s Négritude, the far-reaching movement of black consciousness he founded with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Césaire’s broader ambition to define Caribbean identity as globally connected, contrasting the common perception of the islands as isolated from global history.

“And in the way the speaker of The Notebook proceeds, it’s not enough to just say, I reject the negative terms. Black is beautiful. I’m proud of myself. Césaire, on the contrary, says we have to wallow in negativity. We have to get down. There’s a culminating point about a third of the way through the poem where the speaker says, I find a man lying flat on the ground. I have to get down to the bottom of my self-hatred, of my internalized racism, in order to come out on the other side. And so rather than pretending I can forget about the negativity of the past of enslavement and colonization, I have to dig down into it and recognize my own complicity in it in order to think myself, to dream myself, to push myself beyond it and to get to a place where I can take a term that still has that complicated negative baggage and make it into a positive term without forgetting the negativity, but making it into a term that we can rally around.”

Ding critiques the conventional “knowledge” frameworks that often marginalize local lived experience in favor of Western scientific language—focusing on how these may lead to misguided climate “solutions”. She questions Western models that posit environmental concerns as priorities that emerge in post-modern societies, that have passed basic survival mode.

But, “I doubt many college-educated liberals living in the OECD world voting for green parties could get so detailed and empirical about “climate change” as these Mongolian herders do. Herders know better than anybody else about the climbing of temperature, the drying of rangeland, the flooding of rivers, the dwindling of plant and animal species, and the unfolding collapse of ecosystems. It didn’t take me much time to realize that it’s not that herders are oblivious or nonchalant about the consequences of climate change; it’s just that they have never heard the phrases “climate change,” or “global warming,” or “renewable energy”—all foreign jargon translated from English.”

Karayiannides complicates the facile narrative that explains the relatively high number of “white South Africans among dot-com moguls turned conservative crusaders against liberalism” with their home country’s history of institutionalize racism. He instead points to South Africa’s mix of corporate capitalism and social reform ideologies at the turn of the 20th century.

“While it might be cathartic to compare Musk’s tech firms to apartheid-era mines, the connection between South African engineers and American capitalism is a more complicated one. It must be viewed as a part of the evolution of expertise in the American century. It has to do with the transformations of capitalist firms, their regulatory environment, and experts’ navigation of both. It also has to do with the global diffusion of experts.”

Paris Marx is joined by Julia Black to discuss how Curtis Yarvin’s anti-democratic ideas, once niche, have gained significant influence among Silicon Valley elites, especially in recent years, highlighting themes like opposing democracy, dismantling the “Deep State,” and controlling the media to serve state agendas.

“He is … very largely responsible for a movement that is called sometimes the “dark enlightenment” and sometimes “neoreactionary thinking” and basically what it boils down to is fundamental anti-democracy thinking, anti-egalitarian thinking and this idea that society is meant to be run by elites, that some people are better than others and we should embrace that.”

Georgia’s election last week reflects a deeper geopolitical struggle between Western alliances and local interests, as the ruling party Georgian Dream seeks to balance EU integration with economic ties to Russia and China. With polarized views on sovereignty, EU membership, and influence from NGOs, the election was also a referendum on the country’s alignment amid shifting global dynamics. This tension is heightened by Georgian Dream’s shift toward cultural conservatism and ambivalence over full EU integration, challenging Georgia’s long-standing Euro-Atlantic orientation.

“A growing political, yet ideologically eclectic, chasm between Atlanticists and US-skeptics is widening in Europe and beyond. Many states around the world are embracing “functional neutrality” toward great-power conflicts to avoid the shocks and uncertainties alignment brings. Tbilisi’s neutrality over Ukraine may sit uneasily with Georgian Dream’s stated goal of EU membership, but the war’s end could drastically change the EU and South Caucasus alike. Already today, tensions over the meaning of sovereignty, Europe, and the West are polarizing ideas about Georgian political identity, just as they are in the EU.”