Jordan acts as a buffer with other Arab nations while they are being destroyed as in the case of Syria (and historically Iraq and Palestine) and takes in refugees from those nations so that they are not stranded at the Israeli border.

New forms of violence have risen out of the vacuum of civil conflict in post-Saddam Iraq. Ten years after the Iraq war, this violent legacy is emerging in the work of the country's artists through film, painting and poetry

The echoes are unmistakable. So if history is repeating itself – is it worse than a waste of time? Or a lot smarter than the commentators suggest?

Away from the traditional circles of power, a new force has been working its way up to the surface of the Algerian political landscape: that of organised youth activism.

Whether or not the Women of the Wall will actually face arrest or detention on April 10 remains to be seen; that they have faced this in the past only to return in greater numbers is a testament to the righteous chutzpah necessary to transform the gendered discrimination at Judaism's holiest site.

In Egypt we have a lot of people who are dirt poor, and a thin stratum that has lavish spending habits. They spend their money on things that are trivial and just plain inconsiderate when it comes to their fellow citizens.

The author in his latest book, Dangerous Liaisons: The Clash between Islamism and Zionism (2013), contends that the antagonism between Islamism and Zionism in the west is a significant threat to integration and social cohesion. More attention should be paid to this ethno-religious political clash that has already seen its first proxy war