الأبحاث والتعليقات

Days before the first anniversary of the August 14 violent police crackdown on the Rabaa and Nahda squares in Cairo, Egypt’s High Administrative Court ordered the dissolution of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the liquefaction of its assets.[1] Since the ouster of Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters have faced a state crackdown. Thousands are currently in prison and hundreds have been killed in clashes with security.

Read full article at Foreign Policy.

One hundred and sixty-three years before the Islamic State’s band of thugs rolled into the city, terrorizing the city’s minorities, my Protestant missionary ancestor, his wife, and two children settled in Mosul, a long way from the home they left behind in Utica, New York.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has won the presidential election in Turkey’s first direct presidential election on Sunday, extending his 12-year grip on power. Despite heavy campaigning and the financial support from public funds, he won the election with only 51.95 percent of the vote, slightly higher than the minimum required to win the election.

Read full article at The Washington Post.

Read full article on Foreign Affairs.

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On August 10, Turkish voters will go to the polls to choose a new president for the first time in the country’s history. The following candidates are on the ballot: Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister and leader of the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP); Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, joint candidate for the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Party (MHP); and Selahattin Demirtas, the candidate of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP).

The presidential vacuum in Lebanon since May 24, when president Michel Sleiman’s term ended without the Lebanese parliament having elected a successor, is likely to continue until an electable candidate is found who respects Hezbollah’s military autonomy and does not challenge its Syria policy.

Free media in a democratic society allows people to evaluate and challenge, to scrutinize honestly and debate accurately. But what happens when mainstream media unknowingly fails the public? Marda Dunsky argues that, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a decade-old conflict at the center of U.S. interests in the Middle East, the American mainstream media has failed the public and even perpetuated violence.

On June 29, the al-Qaeda splinter faction known as the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS)[1] declared its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to be the caliph, or successor to the Prophet Mohammed, a post that no one has claimed since 1924.[2]

The terrible war in Gaza, the third and worst of its kind in the last decade, is a product of Palestinian political disarray, Arab disunity, and division in Israel. Washington’s policy of “no direct talks” with Hamas and bitter partisanship between the White House and Congress have also limited effective U.S. intervention.  As such, this latest tragedy is yet another symptom of decades of failure to resolve the larger Israel-Palestine conflict, which, without major policy changes, will surely drag on regardless of the latest cease-fire.

Jordan has survived – and at times even prospered – for decades because of its ability to collect “strategic rents.” Unlike its Saudi neighbor, which has long collected oil rents from the global market for its energy resources, Jordan has sold its geographical location, stable domestic politics, and pro-Western orientation to the United States and its allies on the Arab side of the Gulf.  Considering Jordan’s dearth of other more tangible resources, the path to survival carved by the late King Hussein and his son King Abdullah II was essentially the only one

In this essay, the author argues that the dynamics of contemporary Sunni-Shi‘a relations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world are not fundamentally different from those animating other societal cleavages. The modern Iraqi state’s awkwardness vis-à-vis its Shi‘a population, and indeed other outgroups and minorities, was most directly a product of exclusionary nation-building based on problematic conceptions of “unity” and “pluralism.” Rather than actually fostering unity or respecting and nurturing pluralism (politically or communally), these concepts have often been used to exclude dissenters whose non-conformity was deemed a threat to the body politic.