Arab Awakening's columnists offer their perspective on what is happening on the ground in the Middle East.
The Egyptian state has fallen prey to the internal struggles of its security apparatus. Repression has become an end in itself rather than a tool for maintaining the regime’s stability.
Armstrong’s encounter with the Middle East was a reflection of the wider socio-political disease of denial and scapegoating in the region—one that just festers with time.
Anna Roussillon’s I am the People intimately documents the Egyptian revolution’s effect on a rural family. At the Open City Documentary Festival on 20 June 2015.
A letter from Tarek to his brother Mahmoud Hussein, jailed in Egypt for 500 days for wearing an anti-torture T-shirt. Sign the petition calling for his release.
Public spaces in Cairo have evaporated in the last decade. Could this be why the social gap has evolved into alarming segregation accompanied with ignorance, ‘othering’ and disdain?
White men in suits support Arab autocrats while the suffering many are vilified as dangerous to the fabric of western societies: external threats or worse, immigrants attempting to infiltrate.
It is time for Arab Gulf countries to stop being on the defensive and to accept their responsibility for what is happening in the region.
Arab autocrats’ power depends on more than physical coercion or the rise of Islamist extremism: it has deeper roots in the role of civil society, orientalism, and identity politics.
The socio-economic gap is widening, and taking an ideological and cultural form. This comes as no surprise, because unity makes people a threat to power.
Neither Fatah nor Hamas are willing to accept power sharing, and the division between them is no longer merely ideological in nature.
In Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Bahrain, it will be very difficult for revolutionary democratic movements to succeed in such a bi-polar order.
