آرشین ادیب مقدم

How did racism creep into the algorithms that govern our daily lives, from banking and shopping, to job applications? Connecting the legacy of enlightenment racism to forms of discrimination in modern day algorithms and Artificial Intelligence, this article examines what data feeds into AI technology - and how this data will shape our future, in terms of both social relations and politics.

This short intervention peruses new movements in the discipline of International Relations with a particular emphasis on the “post-western” turn in IR theory which promises to usher into better concepts for the analysis of world politics

The article deals with enemy images in east and west and their historical invention. Connecting the reader to current controversies about “Muslim bans”, the article guides the reader through the nexus of power and knowledge with a particular emphasis on the discourse of Orientalism and Occidentalism.This type of discourse is retroactive, not only because of its ideological content;, it is in fact and quite directly retroactive. Above everything else, the idea that there are essential, unbridgeable differences between cultures and by extension human beings is simply false. This urge to identify us in strict opposition to others has to be resisted, firstly because it is a false polarisation and secondly because it negates the prospect of dialogue and sustainable peace. 

The article sketches a nexus between philosophy, art (poetry) and critique with a particular emphasis on the contribution of classical Muslim philosophers. At the same time, it demonstrates how luminaries such as Omar Khayyam and Ibn Sina, contributed to the renewal of philosophy as a freedom seeking exercise and as a means to pursue happiness through knowledge. In the second part of the article this discussion is geographically de-located to include critical theories from mainland Europe. The conclusion focuses on the comparability of these contemporary critical theories with the philosophies of the “east”.