Recent events in the Middle East and MENA region, not least the now infamous interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, have shown that the right and wrong dichotomy with good and evil players in a set frame is absolutely and inherently flawed.
War rhetoric in the media this week seemed to imply the impending end of Syria’s Assad regime and the spread of Syria’s civil war into a larger regional conflict, while key players carefully chose their words to emphasise the limits of conflict, and responses to any breach.
Luiza encounters regular violence and intimidation in her work helping women survivors of state-sponsored violence. Living under the Chechen regime, activist women need a combination of self and community care.
Already home to almost two million Palestinians, Jordan has had to take in almost a million Iraqi refugees as an aftermath of the two Gulf wars, the majority of whom have not returned.
The momentum in the United States is shifting towards a larger-scale attack on the Assad regime. But even a limited one will transform the nature of the war, with region-wide consequences.
Soon, military action against the Assad regime by western powers may be all but inevitable. But what kind of action, for what purpose, in the service of what larger strategy?
The al-Qaeda linked “Jabhat al-Nusra” (al-Nusra Front) in Syria, stands accused of instigating a sectarian racist war against civilian Kurds in Syria’s northern Kurdish region, one that is escalating rapidly.
The Syrian civil war is spilling into Lebanon and drawing Beirut’s schizophrenic sectarian identity to the surface.
The trial of the disgraced Chinese politician is hurtling towards its predictable conclusion. But a spectre still haunts the Party, and all those at play in China’s political life. It is the spectre of the Cultural Revolution.
These are democratic protest movements in societies experiencing rapid change where the public’s demand for better services and more democracy at local as well as national levels grow at a faster pace than their governments’ ability to provide.
