Dimitrios' World

When the angry twenty-four-year-old who tells me that the Social Contract between the state and its citizens is broken, is my son, I take notice and listen. Alejandro is an angry young man representative of many of his generation. He is well educated and travelled, he speaks many foreign languages yet insecurity pervades as to what the world has in store for him and his generation as job security becomes more scarce, as stable political systems try to reinvent themselves to cope with growing governance issues, and as mass protests have become the norm across Europe. He also represents the epitome of European integration and its emphasis on diversity. On the other hand, with a Greek father and a Spanish mother, his two countries have been among the most severely hit by the decade-long economic crisis with the highest rates of youth unemployment in the EU, standing at nearly 40% in Greece and 33% in Spain as per July 2018. The ongoing “yellow vests” protests in France are...

The empowerment of the social capital of the country has become one of the most important aspects arising out of the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey. While the definitions of the term ‘social capital’ are many, I would posit that the World Bank’s is the most inclusive: Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions. Increasing evidence shows that social cohesion is critical for societies to prosper economically and for development to be sustainable. Social capital is not just the sum of the institutions which underpin a society – it is the glue that holds them together. In other world, the social capital refers both to a country’s institutions and their representatives and to its civil society and the interplay between both. It raises the issues of legitimacy, accountability, democracy, education and responsibility by both the institutions and civil society. In the case of Turkey, th...