There are multiple reasons for looking beyond Islam for our comprehension of this tumultuous region, to culture, to politics, and also to the history of capitalism, foreign interference and domination – its winners and losers. Our reviewer of Beyond Islam: A New Understanding of the Middle East, b
The Salafi-jihadist movement is losing its recruitment pool in the Arab world. Its latest strategies look elsewhere, and the death of Osama Bin Laden will not affect these plans.
Writing last week on openDemocracy, John Keane suggested we need new words to describe the Arab Spring. Stephen Wheatcroft came across similar calls twenty years ago when analysing the fall of the Soviet regime. Then and now, there was a simple description for the events: democratic revolutions in
The ornate rituals in Westminster Abbey, and Donald Trump’s investigation of President Obama’s birth certificate have something in common that threatens modern power, and it isn’t very modern.
Civilian protection requires simple, straightforward dialogue and negotiation with the people who can control whether other people are safe or not. And it works. As soon as you bring guns, tanks and air support into the picture, you are talking about something which more often than not does not wo
The diplomatic signals point to negotiation with the Taliban as a route to ending the Afghan conflict. But the geopolitical hurdles remain formidable.
A new word is needed to describe these events of recent months. They should be called ‘refolutions’, radical refusals of the old choice between reform and revolution - remarkably sensitive to the grave dangers and high costs of using violent means to get their way
The Canadian Government has obfuscated over the transfer of its Afghan detainees to the brutal and torturing Afghan intelligence services. As Canada approaches election day, Craig Scott asks whether the country’s broken parliamentary and bureaucratic system is capable of responding to the concerns
The idea of solidarity retains its moral force. Yet it is vulnerable to the same manipulations as any category of modern politics. Fred Halliday examines the paths of solidarity under colonialism, communism, and post-1989 democracy; its deformed applications to the Arab-Israeli conflict; two voice
New demands for political reform in the Gulf are meeting a repressive response by regimes especially panicked when pro-democracy protests swell into cross-sectarian movements for meaningful political reform. This brutality polarises opinion between advocates of reform and proponents of repression.
Thanks to the Orwellian double-speak of Indonesian emissions abatement strategy, the proposed solution may in fact be the disaster itself.
