ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the conquest and colonization of independent states and peoples of southern, southwestern and western Ethiopia. The Gibe Oromo states were among the southwestern states that were targeted for conquest by both Shawa and Gojjam in the late 1870s. In fact, the time was unfortunate time for …
The events which we see in the universe are classified into two categories: the reversible and the irreversible. The arrow of time is relevant to the latter than the former. It is alongwith the reversible-irreversible syndrome that a major light can be thrown on the notion of time’s arrow. Read more
Law is a social phenomenon and has been of interest to sociology since the early days of the discipline. However, much discussion of law has been and remains monopolized by legal practitioners and legal theorists who primarily focus on legal doctrine; they are concerned to analyse patterns, directions and inconsistencies in judicial thinking and decision …
Since processes take place by chance alone, and this leads to increasing randomness, we can say that in any spontaneous process (one that takes place of its own accord and is not driven by outside influences) entropy increases. This is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics and is probably the most fundamental physical law. So processes that …
We believe that ideas within the classical liberal tradition serve as the foundation for the good society — an intellectually open, tolerant, and pluralistic society — in which individuals and communities thrive in peace, prosperity, and mutual respect. For those ideas to take root, it is essential they are taught, explored, challenged, and developed in higher …
Liberalism is the philosophical, moral and political system that begins with the presumption that we human beings—all of us—are one another’s dignified equals. From this starting point follows other liberal principles such as individual liberty, equal rights, the rule of law, toleration, intellectual openness and pluralism. Read more
Liberalism, Adam Gopnik tells us in A Thousand Small Sanities, “suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs.” While I mostly agree with Gopnik’s characterization, I disagree that liberalism suffers for it. The liberal temperament …
American conservatives should be pleased. They hold a set of beliefs and assumptions that, when applied to current policy challenges, will enable the United States to navigate a difficult and complex global environment. The principles that undergird a conservative foreign policy—the primacy of liberty, national sovereignty, military power, and a realistic appreciation for the inherently competitive nature of …
Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense, but biological concepts of race are needed to access their reality in a non-species-specific manner and to see if cultural categories correspond to biological categories within humans. Modern biological concepts of race can be implemented objectively with molecular genetic data through hypothesis-testing. Genetic data sets are …
At the October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and their teams found themselves in a parallel universe, where the Strategic Defense Initiative had potential, in Reagan’s view, to protect U.S. citizens from nuclear ballistic missile attack and, in Gorbachev’s view, to negate the Soviet Union’s deterrent forces, …