Tuesday, November 2, 2021
Ramzy Baroud When the news circulated that Morocco’s leading political group, the Development and Justice Party (PJD), has been trounced in the latest elections, held in September, official…
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Monday, August 2, 2021
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…
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Sunday, May 30, 2021
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…
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Sunday, May 9, 2021
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…
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Monday, April 5, 2021
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…
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Friday, February 26, 2021
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…
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Monday, February 15, 2021
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…
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Saturday, December 19, 2020
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…
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Saturday, October 24, 2020
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…
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Monday, September 21, 2020
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…
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Friday, March 13, 2020
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…
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Wednesday, February 5, 2020
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…
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Saturday, December 7, 2019
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…
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Thursday, November 21, 2019
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…
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Sunday, November 17, 2019
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…
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Friday, November 8, 2019
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…
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Thursday, October 24, 2019
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…
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Wednesday, October 23, 2019
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…
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Sunday, October 13, 2019
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…
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Monday, August 26, 2019
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…
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Saturday, July 6, 2019
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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Thursday, June 27, 2019
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman Not so long ago, human rights were seen as a way out of the crises of a divided world. From the late 1970s, almost all political…
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Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Omar Dahi. The question of donor conditionality and how it could be used to influence behavior and promote respect for human rights and political inclusion has increasingly gained…
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Monday, June 3, 2019
L K Sharma. The people accepted electoral authoritarianism for their security. This neutralised warnings by intellectuals and opposition parties that Modi’s India was heading towards fascism. Narendra Modi’s…
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Monday, May 20, 2019
Pat Fry. It was 7 AM April 30th in Caracas when I awoke to hear gun shots outside my hotel. Our group, seven US citizens and one Canadian,…
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Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Richard Falk. Prefatory Note: There are important recent developments in Turkey. An unprecedented decision by the High Electoral Council (HEC) of Turkey to cancel the outcome of the…
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Saturday, April 27, 2019
Moshé Machover. Binyamin (‘Bibi’) Netanyahu’s motive for calling an early election to the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), one year before the end of its term, was purely personal: it…
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Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Jonathan Fenton-Harvey Civil societies and political actors in the Middle East and North Africa have continuously fought for democratic change and positive reforms since the 2011 Arab Spring…
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Sunday, April 21, 2019
Adam Shatz. Israel’s legislative elections on 9 April were a tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s transformation of the political landscape. At no point were they discussed in terms of…
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Sunday, April 14, 2019
On Thursday night, hundreds of people packed into the Old South Church in Boston to hear the world-renowned dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky speak. He looked back at…
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