Reset Dialogues

When Donald Trump visited Beijing in May of this year, Xi Jinping promoted a new definition of Chinese foreign policy, a “constructive strategic and stable relationship” (jianshe xing zhanlue wending guanxi) or a “constructive relationship of strategic stability” that both the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the White House defined as “a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability on the basis of respect, fairness, and reciprocity.” Xi’s follow-up visit to Washington...

In Les Lumières sombres (Gallimard, 2026; forthcoming English translation from Polity Press), Arnaud Miranda traces the genealogy of “neoreaction” — the current born at the crossroads of libertarianism and Silicon Valley that, from Curtis Yarvin to Nick Land, has set its sights on the death of democracy.

For decades, the prevailing view has been that Latin America’s authoritarian regimes were exclusively right-wing. It was also believed that, unlike other regions of the world, the Americas made it easier to establish authoritarian rule through coups d’état than through the manipulation of democratic procedures — this despite widespread and repeated instances of electoral fraud. The one exception, it was thought, was Cuba.

Palantir Technologies, the software-developing, data-mining, national-security-oriented giant, fielding approximately 4,500 employees around the globe, is facilitating lethal violence by armed agents, not only against anti-American foreign terrorist organizations, militias, and other “enemies of the West,” but also against non-violent U.S. citizens and supervised immigrants in American cities, towns and workplaces.

Since April 2023, Sudan has entered a brutal war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) fighting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), both hitting civilians across the country, manipulating and weaponizing pre-existing communal tensions. The power struggle between the two former allies, which removed the Al Bashir regime in 2019, was in the making since 2021, when they derailed the civilian-led transition.

You may think that Americans have heard more than enough by now about how the influence peddler and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein “networked” with accomplices, victims, and their apologists. But all the tawdry cravings for money, sex, power, and, later, conspiratorial dealings by this country’s plutocracy-serving elite have been merely symptoms of a deeper, more dangerous craving that we need to understand.

The fact that one of the longest conflicts in contemporary history, which has resulted in over 40,000 deaths, could soon come to an end is undoubtedly an event worth celebrating. Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan has ordered the armed wing of the party he founded in 1978 to end the armed struggle and dissolve the organization. Is this the end of an era? It’s still too early to say.

Yassin al-Haj Saleh, born in 1961, is one of Syria’s foremost intellectuals and a long-standing dissident against the Assad regime. He spent sixteen years in prison for “political reasons,” including time in the maximum-security facility of Tadmur, also known as Palmyra. With the onset of the Syrian Spring, he immediately emerged as an opponent of the regime.

“I just hope that both of my children are returned to their tribe,” says Masta Bibi, a partially blind Pashtun woman in her seventies. Originally from Mirali in North Waziristan, Pakistan, she is the mother of two missing sons: Bilal, who disappeared 11 years ago, and Ihtesham, who vanished two years ago. Her home was destroyed during a military operation targeting terrorist groups that sought refuge in the ex-FATA region after September 11, 2001.

⇒ In person: Register here to attend the event ⇐ ⇒ Online: Register here to follow the event on Zoom ⇐ The round table will present the preliminary research of the working group on Catholicism and Pluralism as a component of the comparative project on the theologies and practices of religious pluralism within the Abrahamic traditions.