Shervin Malekzadeh SpongeBob SquarePants showed up on the boulevard halfway to midnight, almost two hours after state officials confirmed Hassan Rouhani as the seventh President of the Islamic Republic…
Farnaz Fassihi Candidates in Iran’s presidential elections have always been strictly vetted, and those deemed insufficiently loyal to the Islamic Revolution were disqualified. Within those limits, contenders held…
Yassamine Mather Iran’s presidential elections will be held on June 18 and so far it is not clear who will be the candidates proposed by the many Islamic…
During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even…
Cihan Tuğal Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world—a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural…
Cihan Tuğal Ten years ago, Erdoğan’s Turkey was hailed in Washington as an example to the Muslim world—a free-market, pro-American Islamic democracy with high growth rates, renowned cultural…
Abdullah Al-Arian Last month, Tunisia’s parliamentary speaker and head of the Ennahda Party, Rached Ghannouchi, came under fire for comments he made following a meeting with the French ambassador. Following a recent string…
Muriam Haleh Davis, Thomas Serres, and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) This collection of texts in English, Arabic and French is a first attempt to gather…
Lessons from the Yellow Vests movement in France Maxime Combes “Democracy is not about Saturday afternoons”, French president Emmanuel Macron said, speaking about the Yellow Vests movement (YVM)…
The protest by the Iranian Writers Association in Exile and Iranian PEN Association in Exile against the arrest and long prison sentence by the Islamic Republic on three…
Djene Rhys, BajalanSara Nur Yildiz, Vazken Khatchig Davidian The outbreak of fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan has thrust the long-running dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh (Mountainous Karabakh, known to Armenians…
Alex MacDonald In the year since Iraqis took to the streets en masse to protest against unemployment, corruption, foreign interference and a creaking political system, the country has…
Julie Simon, Theo Bass, Victoria Boelman, Geoff Mulgan This paper shares lessons from Nesta’s research into some of the pioneering innovations in digital democracy which are taking place…
Mehdi Kia The Covid-19 pandemic has unravelled the close structural links between the climate crisis and the global capitalist mode of production.[1] See John Bellamy Foster and Brett…
Tony Greenstein Israel’s third general election in a year has shown a decisive shift to the Zionist right, but whether it will be sufficient to enable Binyamin Netanyahu…
Arash Davari, Peyman Jafari, Ali Kadivar, Zep Kalb, Arang Keshavarzian, Azam Khatam, Saira Rafiee, and Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi Introduction Much of the discussion about politics in the Islamic Republic…
Phil Hearse The Arab Spring of 2011-13 was drowned in rivers of blood, sometimes after being first diverted by the dead-end of political Islam. But in the last…
Shaazka Beyerle 2019 is being called “the year of protest.” A nexus of corruption, inequality, and unaccountable and unresponsive governments has galvanized citizens across the globe. “People are…
Michael Roberts The New York Times magazine has described Richard Wolff as “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist”. And that is probably not an exaggeration as a description of this emeritus Professor of…
Moshé Machover It is generally accepted – except by people who know better – that there are just two possible resolutions to the Israeli-Palestinian national/colonial conflict: either a…
Frieda Afari Police stations, banks, some public buildings, a few religious seminaries and many posters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been set on fire. Demonstrators have…
An interview with Rosa Burç and Kerem Schamberger The death of Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi isn’t the end of the Syrian bloodbath — even in…
Certainties that had defined Turkish politics for a generation were thrown into doubt by the overwhelming victory Istanbul voters handed the opposition CHP party’s mayoral candidate Ekrem İmamoǧlu…
Madleine Freeman On the fifth day of a series of massive protests in Lebanon, workers from the country’s largest unions have joined over a million protesters in the…
Amira Abo el-Fetouh We may be too optimistic to hope that the massive demonstrations that have spread in all the cities of Lebanon will lead to the collapse…
Moshé Machover I would like to deal with two aspects of Israeli politics: the attitude to Iran and the internal situation. Common to both parts is the intertwining…
ROAR collective Since 2012, with the leading role of women, the people in North and East Syria have been building a social system that enables a peaceful, radical-democratic,…
Meron Rapoport. While political analysts wonder if we have come to the end of the Netanyahu era, little attention is being paid to another major outcome of this…
Bashar al-Assad has started confiscating the homes of Syrians who fled during the Civil War. For decades, his clan has purged the state of all but the most…
Gülistan Gürbey. The Republican People’s Party (CHP) was able to win the mayoral election in Istanbul (31 March and 23 June 2019) and at the same time experienced…
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