Inter-Research And Studies (IRAS)

By Tatiana Gabroussenko " ... Young guerrilla girl Kumsuni delivers letters to comrades, and one day is caught by the police. When the policemen demand the girl disclose information about the guerillas, she spits into the faces of her interrogators. As the policemen drag Kumsuni to her execution, the heroic girl cries out 'Long Live General Kim Il Sung!'" ...Pre-teen boy Ri Kwang-ch'un is a member of a secret anti-Japanese children's organization. Along with others, he helps the "Red Guard uncles". However, one day policemen apprehend the boy. When the "bastards" torture the young patriot, Ri cuts off his own tongue in defiance. His last words are "Long Live the Korean Revolution!" Even if one supports patriotic education of the younger generation, one is still likely to find such notions of slicing off one's own tongue, torture or execution to be much too disturbing and complicated to present to children. Yet the plots ci...

We all know that the state consist of formal bodies and institutions designed to service human needs as they have developed over the incredibly long history, where most of it unwritten, of the social evolution. The state is in many respects an extension of the family - the family and also the clan and the tribe, were all designed to ensure minimum of security and well-being for their members and so is the state. The greater impersonality of the state reflects the bureaucracy that comes inevitably with routine, specialization of task, the distribution of benefits in terms of more of merits than personal acquaintance and not least, large number of people living in an extended geographic location. We also know that the emergence of the state is signaled in part of a self-conscious effort to explain its origins and to lend legitimacy of its institutions, bodies, personnel and policies. States also may differ markedly from one another in many ways, but they all have in common the primary ch...

By Nour Samaha With the presentation of the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations Security Council happening now, activists, analysts, and academics within the Palestinian diaspora are becoming more vocal on issues that they say need to be addressed immediately. Two issues have been coming to the forefront of the debate; the representation and the right of return of the diaspora, and the legitimacy of the Palestinian officials presenting the bid. Karim Makdissi, an associate professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera that "the reputations of Mahmoud Abbas and Saeb Erekat are shoddy, and their track records demonstrate the kind of success they are going to bring at this stage." "Erekat resigned from his post earlier this year, and suddenly made a comeback, how was he able to do this? There is almost no accountability to the questions raised in the Palestine Papers, neither of them seem to understand the notio...