John Bellamy Foster Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2020 Twenty years ago, John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature introduced a new understanding of Karl Marx’s…
Khalida Jarrar is a feminist, human rights activist and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. She lives in Ramallah, but has been held by Israel in administrative…
Najmeh Bozorgmehr This time last year, Mohammad could still just about afford fruit and chicken for his three children. But as US sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic have…
Ramzy Baroud On January 11, the Israeli Lod District Court ruled against a Palestinian film-maker, Mahmoud Bakri, ordering him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who…
Ardeshir Mehrdad Since the beginning of the 1990s, Iranian society has witnessed successive waves of protest movements. One could argue that it has been in a perpetual state…
Mac Skelton Iraq, labeled by TheEconomist this fall as the “most infected Arab state,” has the highest number of COVID-19 cases and the most deaths from the coronavirus…
Ardeshir Mehrdad ME4Change summary of the article: The author analyses the three large waves of urban protests in Iran over the last three decades. The three waves differ…
Perry Anderson Since the turn of the century, the Arab states have come to constitute a zone for Western military intervention without parallel in the post-Cold War world—us…
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. Warning…
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…
Andrew Cockburn The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace by Michael Boyle. Oxford, Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium by Thomas Stubblefield. California, The Kill Chain: Defending America…
Prabir Purkayastha Reflecting on the contributions of Friedrich Engels on his bicentenary brings three issues to mind. The first issue is, how do we read his writings today?…
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)…
This month, Covid-19 vaccines are set to begin rolling out to patients worldwide. Some countries in the Middle East and North Africa have already ordered doses from manufacturers…
Patrick Cockburn I was in Israel on 4 November 1995 when a student named Yigal Amir assassinated the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace…
Sharmila Devi UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East says that a $300 million shortfall is threatening health services. The UN Relief and…
Binoy Kampmark “Making billions from arms exports which fuel the conflict while providing a small fraction of that in aid to Yemen is both immoral and incoherent.” So…
It is possible…It is possible at least sometimes…It is possible especially nowTo ride a horseInside a prison cellAnd run away… It is possible for prison wallsTo disappear,For the…
Jade Saab “A spectre is haunting Europe…” This is how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels opened their Communist Manifesto, written on the eve of several uprisings on the continent…
Robert Fisk, a veteran Middle East correspondent for The Independent and the most celebrated journalist of his era, has died after an illness. He was 74. Fisk was…
Patrick Cockburn Suha Ahmad lives on the outskirts of the port city of Tartus in north-west Syria. Her husband was killed in March while fighting on the government…
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…
Julia Kassem A year after Lebanese ex-Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned amidst anti-government protests that sparked out of IMF austerity measures, the Lebanese government surprisingly is renewing talks…
Elizabeth Tsurkov “They sent us directly to the front lines. The situation is terrible. Terrible. There is fighting every day. We are charged with storming. There is no…
Robin Yassin-Kassab “Syrians. I hated the deceptive simplicity of that word. We were twenty-three million people. Soldiers and fighters. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. The torturer and the victim. How…
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…
Aga Sablinska Iranian filmmaker Khosrow Sinai passed away in August from COVID-19, leaving behind an important and eye-opening document of Polish exodus during the Second World War. His…
Jessica Barnes Water is a prominent topic in discussions about the Middle East. Fishing at the Chebayesh marsh in Dhi Qar province, Iraq, April 2019. Thaier al-Sudani/Reuters Yet…
MEE and agencies Desperate to help his family displaced by Syria’s war, pro-Turkey rebel fighter Abu Ahmad is waiting to be deployed to Azerbaijan, hoping to earn almost 80…
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…
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Ammar Maleki, Tilburg Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s…
translated by Stephen Watts and Ziba Karbassi little morning starare you here withyour star-gaze gone?little wrenare you staying in the busheswhen you go to the skies?little silver coinare…
John Bellamy Foster Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism’s creative destruction of the bases of all social existence. Since the late…
Mike Phipps I Introduction Iraq is back in the news again, partly due to the airing of a five-part BBC documentary. Once Upon a Time in Iraq has…
Bob Dreyfuss Was Donald Trump’s January 3rd drone assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani the first step in turning the simmering Cold War between the United States and…
Bell Trew One of the songs was recorded during an air strike, parts of another by a fleeing refugee aboard a boat. The man behind the album is…
Lucy Garbett In Jerusalem under strict lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the abnormal quiet of the streets is disturbed by the familiar din of business-as-usual drilling and…
Various contributers From deep-rooted racism to the Covid-19 pandemic, from extreme inequality to ecological collapse, our world is facing dire and deeply interconnected emergencies. But as much as…
Yassamine Mather Less than a week after the massive port explosion that cost more than 200 lives, the entire Lebanese government resigned. Of course, long before that, serious…
Robert Fisk Well, we can all agree that the sea took 70 per cent of the blast!” a close Lebanese friend announced to me this week, with intriguing…
Patrick Cockburn The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the…
Multiple Crises, Multiple Obstacles Mel Gurtov COVID-19 and the protests for racial justice have drawn attention away from the mostly bad news about the environment. Yes, the skies…
Ramzy Baroud Protests against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have raged on for weeks, turning violent sometimes. Israelis are furious at their government’s mediocre response to the coronavirus…
Simon Watkins Two key questions logically arise from last week’s announcement from Iran’s Petroleum Ministry that it has awarded a US$1.3 billion development deal to more than double…
Houshang Pezeshgnia, Iranian artist (1917-1972) was one of the first modernist painters in the country. He attended the College of art in Istanbul studying under professor Leopold Louis….
Jeff Mackler That Russia paid the Taliban financial bounties to kill 18 U.S. and “coalition” soldiers in Afghanistan is in dispute to say the least. Both Democrats and…
I will greet the sun again I will greet the sun again,greet the stream that once flowed in me,the clouds that were my unfurling thoughts,the aching growth of…
Kaveh Afrasiabi Earlier this month, authorities in New Delhi were rattled by reports from Iran that India had been expelled from a key investment project in favor of…
Ramzy Baroud In a recent TV discussion, a respected pro-Palestine journalist declared that if any positive change or transformation ever occurs in the tragic Palestinian saga, it would…
Moon of Alabama Recently there have been a number of incidents in Iran where unexplained fires or explosion have destroyed some infrastructure: Since June, fires or explosions have…
Michael Roberts ME4Change has posted this article because the condition of garment workers in the UK city of Leicester is replicated throughout the Middle East and to underline…
Farnaz Fassihi and Steven Lee Myers Iran and China have quietly drafted a sweeping economic and security partnership that would clear the way for billions of dollars of…
12 Webinars, June 20-August 5, 2020 Syria has been the focus of much regional and global attention following the massive eruption of popular revolt in mid-March 2011. The…
Iran is one of the countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). What effects will the realization of the BRI have on the geo economical and…
Salena Fay Tramel It has not been an easy year for Palestinians, if there ever was such a thing. With the turn of a new decade in January,…
Nisan Alıcı, Güley Bor, Güneş Daşlı By December 2012, when the peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to end the decades-long armed…
Moshé Machover Rashid Khalidi ‘The hundred-years war on Palestine: a history of settler-colonial conquest and resistance’ Profile Books, 2020, pp336, £17.99 As part of their professional training, historians…
Greg Burris, The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).* *Book two in the Insubordinate Spaces series edited by George Lipsitz. Jadaliyya (J): What made you…
Arundhati Roy India’s coronavirus lockdown, which began in March, has been one of largest and strictest in the world. It has left tens of millions without work prompting…
Keep calling me! Sweet is your voice. It is the green Growing beyond the companionship of sorrow. In the scopes of this silent era I am lonelier than…
Roba Gaafar As countries around the globe announce their reopening plans and easing of coronavirus lockdown measures, Egypt has witnessed recent a surge in infections, with coronavirus cases…
Esen Uslu Like most governments of the world, Turkey’s was caught unawares by the Corona pandemic. Even in late March it was still hoping that the tourism season…
The Covid-19 pandemic arrived at a moment of multiple crises of the capitalist system: capital accumulation, ecology, governance, and science. The uprising following the murder of George Floyd…
We frequently hear that COVID-19 is the worst pandemic since the influenza of 1918. It is forgotten that another pandemic known as “the third plague” (because it was “the third major bubonic…
Marco Carnelos The impacts of coronavirus have been tremendous everywhere, but in the Middle East, the situation seems to be assuming the features of a perfect storm. In…
Waiting The song I came to singremains unsung to this day.I have spent my days in stringingand in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true,the words…
هدایت سلطان زاده یاد داشتی کوتاه در این زمینه این نوشته حدود سی سال قبل در « راه کارگر تئوریک » شماره ۳ منتشر شده است و بنابراین…
Mike Macnair, Moshé Machover, Yassamine Mather Crisis and need for conflict Mike Macnair What we are seeing today is a situation where the United States is lashing out…
Veysi Dag As the world reels from the COVID-19 pandemic, and states attempt to, more or less successfully, navigate through the crisis, stateless diasporas—particularly the case of Kurds—have demonstrated…
Thomas Vescovi In 1946, the population of Palestine numbered 1.2 million Arabs and around 600,000 Jews. There were more Arabs than Jews in 50 of Palestine’s 60 districts….
مهدی کیا Read Farsi translation of article in pdf format: https://www.rahekargar.net/theoritical_socialism/2020-05-31_206_mehdi-kia.pdf Translated in Farsi from:
Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee Golrokh Iraee’s letter from inside the Varamin-Qarchak prison; the pressures on #Zeynab Jalalian continue. Zeinab Jalalian is one of the longest serving political prisoner in…
Alissa J. Rubin and Farnaz Fassihi After years of increasing tensions that nearly led to war, Iran has moderated its approach to the West, shifting from a policy…
Elaine Graham-Leigh 200th anniversary of his birth, Elaine Graham-Leigh looks at Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State All page references are to the…
Anya Briy The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), commonly known as Rojava, has illuminated the plight of the stateless—even though statelessness in the AANES’s case…
Michael Roberts China’s National Peoples Congress (NPC) opened today, having been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. The NPC is China’s version of a parliament and used by the…
آن سوتر جوانی با چهره استخوانی و ته ريش با پيرهنی جر خورده بر سه پايه ای كنار حوض شكسته سِنج ميزند سَنج دمای پريده از شيشه لب…
Juan Cole This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time…
Romana Rubeo My Beit Daras, My Nakba: Two Palestinian Intellectuals Reminiscing about Their Destroyed Village Dr. Ghada Ageel and Dr. Ramzy Baroud have more in common than their…
Louis Proyect Ever since the civil war began in Syria in early 2011, the left has largely ignored the social and economic circumstances that led to a conflict…
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…
Ramzy Baroud One hundred years ago, representatives from a few powerful countries convened at San Remo, a sleepy town on the Italian Riviera. Together, they sealed the fate…
I speak with Yasser Munif. He is a Sociology Assistant Professor in the institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College where he teaches courses about social movements, the…
Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace Calculation COVID-19, the illness caused by coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the second severe acute respiratory syndrome virus since 2002, is…
Michael T. Klare Energy analysts have long assumed that, given time, growing international concern over climate change would result in a vast restructuring of the global energy enterprise….
“I’m Explaining A Few Things,” “and ever since then fire, gunpowder ever since, and ever since then blood Bandits with airplanes and with Moors, bandits with finger-rings and…
While scholars of the Middle East have long been attentive to problems of land and property, resource extraction and accumulation, and the political nature of knowledge production, it…
Sami Adnan Since October of 2019 a massive revolutionary movement has occupied public squares all over Iraq. Rising alongside a wave of explosive international struggles from Chile, to…
S.C. Molavi and Eyal Weizman Over a dozen states, including Hungary, Ethiopia, Japan, Canada, and Botswana, have recently declared a “state of emergency” giving governments sweeping powers to…
Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade ME4Change is posting this report, despite the fact that it is outside its geographic remit, because it is an interesting example of self-organisation in…
Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag…
The Coronavirus and the Conditions of Palestinian Workers G.N. Nithya “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its…
Emile Badarin The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has obstructed the education of students globally. But this is hardly new to Palestinian students and academics, whose educational life…
John Smith “Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history. $10 trillion of negative rate bonds. This is a supernova that will explode one day,” tweeted Bill…
Golnar Nikpour In late February, amid the catastrophic spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, relatives of several of Iran’s prisoners of conscience…
Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace This article is the Review of the Month for the May 2020 issue. The print version will carry…
Michael Roberts If all country pandemics were the same, then the figure below would be how this pandemic will come to an end. The start-to-peak ratio of Covid-19…
Translated from Farsi by Sheida Dayani Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000) The Secret A secret was with me; I told the mountain. A secret was with me; I told the…
Juan Cole The European Union has activated the Instex trading mechanism for the purpose of sending medicine and medical supplies to Iran to fight the coronavirus outbreak. Instex…
Middle East 4 Change