Category: Opinion

International migration is the rule rather than the exception

Column by Sara Kalm, senior lecturer in Political Science Migration is not a new phenomenon. In all of history, people have up and left, moving sometimes on their own, more often in groups. During the past few hundred years, this has taken place in relation to the international nation system...

Inga Odenholt, Professor of Infectious Diseases.

Penicillin – an abused miracle cure

Opinion by Inga Odenholt, Professor of Infectious Diseases with a deep committment to the issue of rational use of antibiotics and reduced antibiotic resistance. Today there are bacteria resistant to all known types of antibiotics, and it has become increasingly difficult for the pharmaceutical industry to develop new solutions. Almost...

Africa’s renaissance 

Opinion by Ellen Hillbom and Erik Green, Readers in Economic History with a special interest in African Economic History Among the general public and the researchers, Africa has been described as a continent in permanent poverty with weak economic growth. Today the situation is different. Several African countries are among the international growth-leading economies, foreign...

Archives are not just sleepy storage places  

Opinion by Ulrika Waaranperä, doctoral student in political science at Lund University and Malmö University On 6 June 2013, the then British Foreign Secretary William Hague made an historic statement in which he apologised for the abuses the colonial administration was guilty of in Kenya between 1952 and 1963. The statement was made in conjunction with the payment of damages equivalent to SEK 275 million to 5 228 elderly Kenyans. That the British colonial...

Colonial structures call for responsiveness from the West

Opinion  In 2009 a proposal for stricter legislation against homosexuality was made Uganda, which among other things involved the death penalty. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni justified his acceptance of the law amendment by stating that he was taking a stand against Western social imperialism. The problem is that he had a point. When conducting our Master’s degree projects in Kenya...

The right to my own death

Opinion: Göran Hermerén, Professor emeritus in Medical ethics, Lund university The heading “The right to my own death” immediately raises three questions: is there such a right? What is it based on? Could it come into conflict with other people’s interests or rights? The central ethical research questions in this...

Colours that depict light

Column: Gertrud Sandqvist, Professor of the Theory and History of Ideas in Visual Art at Lund University, 2015 The central perspective was invented some 600 years ago by artists both North and South of the Alps to make angels seem more authentic – a method to create the illusion of depth...

Famine is still a threat

Opinion by Göran Djurfeldt, senior Professor at Department of Sociology 2014 Swedish pension funds should invest in Africa! This was the call of Swedish Minister for Finance Anders Borg in summer 2014. The world’s image of Africa is indeed shifting. Not long ago, the general view was one of pessimism. Africa,...

Marcin de Kaminski wonders who owns knowledge.

Should knowledge be free?

Opinion by Marcin de Kaminski, doctoral student in sociology of law and internet researcher at Lund University 2013 Knowledge is capital. Or is it? One of the major questions of our time and for the future is, or should be, who owns the knowledge with which we surround ourselves. While...