wellington college yearbook 19/20
OW Society Bevir Report Dates: 30th May-11th June 2019 Who: Joseph Fennell (Bd 19); Jack Chong (Hg 19) Where: Paris, France; Berlin, Germany, Krakow, Poland
She mentioned that only by treating climate change as a potential apocalyptic event can human race unite and resolve common differences.
Section 1 European Religion and Politics Research Study We are very grateful to be sponsored by the Bevir Fund. Without the funding, this research project would not be possible. We made several changes to the plan we originally submitted in our scholarship application. We were not able to include the Trans-Siberian railway as originally planned because of our underestimation of the actual transportation cost that it entails. The railway trip becomes more expensive if we want to stop and stay overnight in the cities along the way. Furthermore, we realized that we intended to have genuine discussions with European citizens and residents. Getting on the Trans-Siberian railway would not give any access to any people that we targeted interacting with. Our final change is that we have made contact with 5 individuals, fewer than our original expectation. Fortunately, and perhaps unfortunately too, we were not able to arrange in-person meetings with ultra-nationalists in Krakow, Poland, probably because of the fact that we stayed in a city rather than the countryside. Our first meeting in Paris was with Paya, who was careful not to define herself as a Islamic feminist activist but rather as an ordinary Muslim woman contributing to a feminist magazine. She attributed one of the biggest obstacles to successful harmony/assimilation in a diverse multicultural society as mis-portrayal of minority groups in popular media. She shared with us that many local French non-Muslims are often surprised by the fact that she does not have to wear a more prominent head dress. She pointed out that Islamic and liberal Western
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values are compatible from the views of mainstream German Muslims. The very fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, as misprotrayed and perhaps occupying a significant amount of Western media attention, only belongs to a very tiny portion of the Muslim population. The goal of Lallab, the magazine that she works for, as a platform, is to give Muslim women their own voice and platform so that they can authentically represent themselves. Next in Paris we observed and participated in an event in Paris, where we met with members of Extinction Rebellion (ER). ER is a large-scale popular movement with millions of members particularly among the youth population. One of our discussion with an activist revolved around how climate change, as in her words, “a species-level extinction threat”, can only be alleviated by global co-operation. She mentioned that only by treating climate change as a potential apocolaysic event the human race unite and resolve common differences. It was an interesting discussion especially because we were able to see how keen she is in her ideology. In Berlin, we met with a representative from a pro-EU integration group — European Alternatives. This conversation was heavily political in nature and we ranged across a variety of topics, but one of the interesting takeaways is the idea he proposed that national sovereignty is irrelevant in a globalized society. He reasoned that there are little matters that national politicians can actually impact on the international stage and rather, they are forced to be reactive to
