Kaisa Schreck

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When You Feed the Blog, It Grows

Nourish it and it will grow... photo: Brenda Anderson/flickr

To give our readers a sense of who reads the ISN blog, and exactly how many readers we have every month, I thought I’d take you on a quick tour of the ISN Blog readership. The impetus for this ‘tour’ came with the realization that our blog has been on a trajectory of healthy, even robust, growth in the past half a year, with October alone marking a 20 percent jump in our unique visitor numbers, now up to 7,000 unique visits each month. Page views, conversely, continue to hit the 30,000 mark every month.

This is great news and such rapid growth is particularly encouraging. What about the location of our readers then? As you read this, do you find yourself in a country where our reach is particularly wide or are you an ISN Blog pioneer? Most of our readers are based where we are based- Switzerland, but our US and UK readers are almost as numerous. We’re also increasingly popular in France, Germany, China and Israel, displaying the scope for growth in emerging and rapidly growing regions like the Middle East and Asia.

But is readership steady throughout the week? Interestingly enough, although it is quite steady, with many people checking out our blog even on Saturdays and Sundays, Thursdays are the most high-traffic days with the blog receiving an average of 1,900 page views on that day.

Thank you for your support and patronage thus far- keep visiting us, keep interacting and keep spreading the word!

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ISN Insights: Look Back, Week Ahead

A new week, a new month, photo: Leo Reynolds/flickr

Last week, ISN Insights examined China’s foreign relations in more detail:

This week, we’ll be looking at the following topics: US mid-term elections, the Israel-Syria-Hezbollah triangle, the African National Congress, and China-Burma relations in the run-up to Burma’s impending elections.

Make sure to check back each day for the newest ISN Insights package. And if you’re an active Twitter or Facebook user, look us up and become a follower!

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Keyword in Focus

Keyword in Focus: Gay Rights

Gay rights are human rights, photo: William Murphy/flickr

In the wake of an Ugandan newspaper publishing the names and pictures of the country’s “top homosexuals” recently (with an appalling banner reading ‘Hang them’ on the cover), gay rights across the world and particularly in Africa have become a topic of discussion once more. As many Ugandan homosexuals said in response to the publishing of what can only be described as a ‘hit list’, the situation had been much calmer and more stable prior to the publishing of this article and in the years before homosexuality had become a religiously and politically charged issue on the continent.

With well-documented involvement from western, especially American evangelical groups in stigmatizing and condemning homosexuality openly and vociferously, the space for maneuver for many African gays has become suffocatingly narrow. They are trapped between traditional norms that do not approve of homosexuality; attitudes that had simply lain dormant or been overlooked until recently, and a religiously conservative movement that has systematically stoked intolerance and hatred against gays.

Will the situation for the LGBT community only get worse or are we witnessing a mix of setbacks and progress worldwide, with true human rights respected in some places, while a wave of intolerance and prejudice hits others?

We hold an excellent set of resources on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights in the ISN Digital Library. Feel free to explore and let us know what you found particularly interesting. Here are some highlights:

  • An ETC paper on the LGBT community as an ‘easy target’
  • A News Article on the position of gays and lesbians in the military

Plus a host of excellent Links and Organizations.

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ISN Insights: Look Back, Week Ahead

The new ISN Insights week starts today, photo: Michael LaCalameto/flickr

Last week ISN Insights explored the following issues:

In the week ahead we’re going to be looking at China’s foreign relations in a special ISN Insights week. Look out for articles on the Sino-US relationship, China’s aid policy in the Asia-Pacific, Sino-Russian relations and China’s increasingly strained relationship with India. Friday’s ISN Podcast will discuss North Korea with Aidan Foster-Carter.

Stay tuned and keep checking the ISN site each day for the newest ISN Insights piece.

The Death of “Multikulti”?

Is it really ‘us’ versus ‘them’? photo: Alejandro Angel Velásquez/flickr

When the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, spoke on Saturday about the “utter failure” of German attempts to foster a multicultural society, the move was widely seen as an attempt to bolster her position in a coalition increasingly focused on the issue of immigration.

In the aftermath of Thilo Sarrazin’s controversial book that accused Muslim migrants in particular of sapping the country of its intellectual vigor, her comments to young Christian Democratic Union (CDU) members seem particularly opportunistic.

Meanwhile, prominent members of Merkel’s coalition, chief among them the premier of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, have called for a halt to migration from other cultural spheres. Claiming to reflect the popular will, Seehofer has chosen to frame a thorny, complex and multifaceted issue in starkly populist terms.

While clearly immigration is a problematic issue in many European countries that struggle with economic uncertainty and immigrant populations of varying degrees of integration (and facing a variety of challenges from entrenched unemployment, language barriers and discrimination), the increasing acceptability of xenophobic rhetoric is a deeply worrying phenomenon that is taking root beyond the geographical margins of Europe. In addition to the well-documented cases in Holland, Switzerland and most recently Sweden, German politics seem to be lurching in a similar direction.

Instead of debating the issue constructively, and engaging positively with those immigrants (whether Muslim or not) that seek to integrate- the public debate across Europe seems to be moving towards the blanket-stigmatization of immigrants. A sense of xenophobic dread and a wish to turn back the time on increasingly diverse and ethnically, socially and religiously diverse societies seems to underlie this trend.

Continue reading “The Death of “Multikulti”?”