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  • Think tank review
  • 25. října 2017

Think Tank Review - Issue 50/2017

Welcome to issue 50 of the Think Tank Review compiled by the EU Council Library (click to share on Twitter). It references papers published in June 2017. As usual, we provide the link to the full text and a short abstract.

For this issue, we have chosen as our special focus the ever-debated and increasingly important theme of digitalisation, highlighting articles from think tanks on topics such as the digital single market, artificial intelligence, robotics and ecommerce.

In the first section, on EU Politics and Institutions, our readers will find a few articles on questions related to the future of Europe.

The articles included under the Economic and Financial Affairs section range from publications on the EU budget and the single monetary policy, to the future of the euro and digital currency.

The EU Member States section deals with subjects relevant to the individual countries, but many of these are common to several Member States.

In the EU Policies section there are articles on wage gaps in Europe and the Erasmus+ programme, and several publications on migration and refugees.

We would also like in particular to bring the readers' attention to two other minor trends among the think tanks. The topic of religion and spirituality in connection with politics and identity is well represented, for instance Buddhism and state power in Myanmar as well as Iran's Azerbaijan question in evolution: identity, society, and regional security, and also spirituality as a political instrument: the church, the Kremlin, and the creation of the 'Russian world'. These articles can be found in the particularly substantial Foreign Affairs section of this issue which also includes articles from various think tanks about Russia's Zapad 2017 military exercise which took place in September.

There are also several articles on jihadism, radical Islamism and Islamic State (IS). Among other things they deal with the reintegration of IS children, the impact of prophecies on the future of IS, and the need to combat Islamist extremism online, and there are studies on how and why people are attracted to jihadism and what type of religious, political and ideological publications they use. These articles can be found in the Miscellaneous, EU Member States and Foreign Affairs sections.

Still on the topic of violence and religion or religious extremism, we would also like to mention a recent piece from the London School of Economics and Political Science by Kaja Borchgrevink from the Peace Research Institute Oslo on the importance of religious civil society in peace building.

We are also pleased to note a great variety of languages represented among the articles in this issue:  English, French, Spanish and German but also Danish, Swedish, Greek, Polish, Arabic, and, for the first time, Burmese!

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