This misguided but determined focus on the ‘continuing’ threat of Sha’ria law in Libya and other North African counterparts is obscuring the real twin issues of freedom of expression and equal rights for all.
What is the basis of the Tuareg-Gaddafi alliance that is playing itself out in the end-game in Libya? And to what extent is our understanding coloured by how we like to think of this tribe of the Sahara, or perhaps how they have been used in other peoples’ narratives – including our own?
For all those who are afraid or suspicious, I invite them to go to the streets of Syria. One main defect with academic writing is that it avoids bombast. Hence, it doesn’t say that those young men and women who have been protesting in the streets of Syria for more than five months are heroes.
Can drawing attention to the regime's excesses force Spain and other countries to put pressure on the Syrian government?
Libyans face the complex challenge of creating a new order and a new society from the rubble of the old. Lessons learned elsewhere on peacebuilding and statebuilding offer a checklist and an evidence-based framework for action.
Extremist Islamists may only be one small part of a wide cross-section of disenfranchised Libyans who could no longer bear the tyranny of Gadaffi, but they pose the question whether reactions to the Arab Revolutions are ever entirely innocent of double standards.
The outcome of the Libyan conflict leaves the Arab world’s wider political momentum to be decided by the interplay between mobilisation and repression, says Mark Taylor.
Syria is hard to categorize in relation to the Arab spring, because of its people’s multifaceted relationship to the Syrian state and current regime, their fear of a fundamentalist takeover, civil war, resistance to foreign-imposed regime change and to military intervention.
The inconsistent reaction of the UN Security Council to the ongoing Syria crisis reveals several major underlying tensions which will not be quickly resolved
Competing regional interests suggest that arriving at a coordinated response to restoring order to Syria and preventing instability in the region is highly improbable.
The Libyan legend was written by civilian Libyans with high expectations of a future free Libya, who have risen up from every corner and carried arms to end one of the world’s totalitarian regimes.
Simple demands have been met with doublespeak and duplicity.
