The combination of western advance and rebel retreat in northern Mali echoes the initial phase of the anti-Taliban campaign in Afghanistan. Britain's upgraded military commitment makes the parallel even more acute.
Just as Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have been continuously accused of hijacking and jumping on the coattails of the revolution, now the finger is being pointed by activists towards other activists who disagree on what the next course of action should be.
Maybe the forces involved would rather continue an on-going battle against those whose beliefs cannot be supressed by violence.
Young men seem to take particular delight in lighting fireworks and throwing them from their car windows at unsuspecting passersby.
The notion that this episode heralds a real shift in Maghreb-western dynamics is increasingly hard to dismiss.
What the Islamist terrorist threat has become is an incoherent pretext to intervene militarily on the part of the west. The only principled position to adopt therefore is the rejection of both, for the self-determination and sovereignty of the peoples.
The Sudanese Islamic Movement (SIM) has lost much legitimacy with the Sudanese people and its own party officials. How has this come to be and can an Islamic spiritual movement be both political and partisan?
A decade ago, western leaders' excessive reaction and inflated rhetoric served to amplify rather than diminish the power of Islamist groups. The same danger now overhangs Mali, Algeria and beyond.
One of the criticisms made of the emerging economies is that they are using cooperation to gain markets, political influence and access to natural resources. But that is what the countries of the North are also seeking.
The present crisis raises a number of crucial questions, for France, Mali, the EU and our globalised world.
In the latest edition of Textures du temps, a historian’s eye is brought to bear on the discourse prevailing in recent British media coverage of the intervention of Algerian forces in the hostage crisis of In Amenas - the neo-orientalist concepts typically invoked when the subject of Algeria’s his
The festival director of the London Middle East and North Africa Film Festival talks about the place of Pontecorvo’s film within the history of the region’s cinema and about its future.
