Middle East 4 ChangeThe Saudi Arabian Trillions
Saturday, September 2, 2017
Malise Ruthven. Published on London Review of Books volume 39, no 17, September 7, 2017. It made perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s…
The Revolutionary Imagination: Rosa for Our Times
Friday, July 28, 2017
Mark Harris. Posted on Counterpunch on July 21, 2017. “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”—Rosa Luxemburg It was 98 years ago that the brilliant…
The reproduction crisis and the birth of a new “out of law” proletariat (an interview with Silvia Federici)
Tuesday, July 25, 2017
Silvia Federici and Francesca Coin. This post first appeared on Left East on July 10, 2017. Feminist philosopher, political economist, and activist Silvia Federici on the transformation reproductive…
Cholera in Yemen: war, hunger, disease…and heroics
Friday, July 21, 2017
Editorial, Lancet Infectious Diseases, August 2017. The harms done by war are many and complex. Death, injury, and displacement are the most obvious, but infection is also closely…
Proving paternity: A prolonged struggle for thousands of Egyptian mothers
Monday, June 5, 2017
Mai Shams El-Din, Mada. For mothers who choose to file paternity lawsuits, proceedings can take years. “I wrote this post just to say that I will not give…
The Experience of Local Councils in the Syrian Revolution
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Walid Daou Tranlated by Ghassan Makarem Posted on April 4, 2017 on Al Manshur “We are not less that the workers of the Paris Commune… They lasted 70…
To the barricades: Has protesting become too easy?
Friday, May 12, 2017
Isaac Chotiner Slate. Book Review: Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. Interview with author Zenep Tufekc. First posted on Slate May 8, 2017….
Reality and the U.S.-Made Famine in Yemen
Thursday, March 23, 2017
Kathy Kelly. This article was first posted on Counterpunch on March 22, 2017. This week at the Voices for Creative Nonviolence office in Chicago, my colleague Sabia Rigby…
Imperialism in the Twenty First Century: Book Review
Monday, March 13, 2017
Michael Roberts blog. A review of imperialism in the Twenty First century by John Smith, published by Monthly Review Press John Smith’s book is a powerful and searing…
Women: Middle East ranks ‘last’ on gender equality
Wednesday, March 8, 2017
The New Arab. Women in the Middle East have faced patriarchal prejudice and deeply-rooted discrimination in efforts to bridge the gender chasm and improve female participation in public…
Mahalla textile workers call off strike as strike leaders face disciplinary hearings
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Mada Masr, Al Arabiya. Over 2,000 workers from the state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla called off their partial strike on Wednesday. Five of the strike…
Palestinian women in the Occupied Territories: an interview with Laila al-Hamdani
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Libcom.org Interview with Laila al-Hamdani describing the role of women in the Occupied Territories as well as the central role they played during the first intifada. Q. Perhaps…
Our testimony to death
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Doha Hasan, Al-Jumhurya. Somewhere, there are scattered corpses along a road that looks completely destroyed, with blood around orange bags holding still bodies. You see destroyed buildings that…
A Kurdish response to climate change
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Anna Lau, Erdelan Baran, and Melanie Sirinathsingh, Open Democracy UK. For 4000 years since the breakdown of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, almost every major societal collapse has…
Women in Middle East: Region ranks ‘last’ on gender equality
Sunday, November 13, 2016
The New Arab. Women in the Middle East have faced patriarchal prejudice and deeply-rooted discrimination in efforts to bridge the gender chasm and improve female participation in public…
Fight or Flight: The Desperate Plight of Iraq’s “Generation 2000”
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
International Crisis Group, Jadalyya. Beset by political dysfunction, endemic corruption and a jihadist threat, Iraq is squandering its greatest asset: its youth. By failing to provide a vision…
Working class power & feminism: An interview with Alia Amirali
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Links. Sara Jaffri (SJ): How did you get involved in political work, and with what sort of organizing have you been involved? Alia Amirali (AA): I grew up…
Daraya
Tuesday, August 30, 2016
Leyla’s blog. Four years following its liberation, the predominantly agricultural town of Daraya, strategically located near the capital, has fallen to the regime. A deal was reached to…
Book Review: women fight the Islamic state
Monday, August 29, 2016
Janet Biehl, Roar. A Road Unforseen: Women fight the Islamic State, by Meredith Tax. Second Wave feminism, once it erupted in the late 1960s, called out misogyny where…
Food Sovereignty in Rebellion: Decolonization, Autonomy, Gender Equity, and the Zapatista Solution
Monday, August 22, 2016
Levi Gahman, Znet. One of the biggest threats to food security the world currently faces is neoliberalism. It’s logic, which has become status quo over the past 70…
Political Islam, Part 3: How it effects society
Friday, August 19, 2016
Ardeshir Mehrdad, Illustrations by Ardeshir Mohassess. An illegitimate child of advanced capitalism, Political Islam has profound effects on the society that gives birth to it both before and…
A letter in my purse: a poem
Friday, May 20, 2016
Shaimaa El-Sabbagh translated by Maged Zaher Arablit Shaimaa El-Sabbagh, poet and Socialist Popular Alliance Partya ctivist who was shot dead at a rally in Tahrir Square I am not…
A Commune in Rojava?
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Alex de Jong New Politics The siege of Kobani by Islamic State (ISIS) brought worldwide attention to the Syrian Kurdish PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, Democratic Union Party), the…
Towards Progressive Politics in the Middle East
Friday, May 6, 2016
Abbas Shahrabi Farahani & Gilbert Achar Problematica/New Politics Abbas Shahrabi: How do you define “Left” and “Leftist Politics”? What are the main theoretical elements of a leftist politics?…
USA: 8-fold increase in Islamophobic Crime since 2000
Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Juan Cole Informed Comment Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990, and since then the FBI has been issuing annual reports on crimes of bias or…
Political Islam, class and capital Part 1: what are its common features?
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
By Ardeshir Mehrdad Illustration by Ardeshir Mohasses The last three decades have witnessed a relentless growth of Islamist movements, so that today political Islam is an undeniable reality…
Islam and modernism VII – Gellner’s thinly veiled historic idealism
Monday, November 30, 2015
By Mohammad Reza Shalguni Ernest Gellner is one of the most well known figures of modern sociology among Western academic circles and one of the most influential exponents of the…
Islam and Modernism IV – Islam and women
Monday, November 30, 2015
By Mohammad Reza Shalguni How flexible is Islam when it comes to women’s rights? The absence of rights for women in Islamic countries is usually taken as the…