Assyrians or Syriacs? Middle Eastern Identity Formation through Football in Sweden
It is the last Sunday in May 2009, and people in Södertälje – a small industrial town, half an hour’s drive southwest of the Swedish capital Stockholm – are enjoying the first hot day of the summer. It is also the day of the biggest football match of the year. Later in the afternoon, Södertälje’s two second division rivals, Assyriska FF and Syrianska FC, will clash. In the hours before kick-off, one sees flags and matching shirts everywhere, either in the white and red colors of Assyriska or in the red and yellow representing Syrianska.
A Step on the Path to Peace: How Basketball is Uniting Arab and Jewish Youth in Jerusalem
Basketball is a game where all five players need to share the ball. If it is played with great teamwork, the sum of the parts is greater than the individual. It’s a great forum for building trust. A lot of the game happens with things you can’t see. Communication and trust with teammates is the key. It seems to me that the same can be said of peacemaking.
–R.C. Buford, General Manager of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs[1]
Al-Wihdat: The Pride of the Palestinians in Jordan
“Wahid, itnen, talagha ya Abu Hussein” (One, two, divorce her Abu Hussein), Al-Faisali supporters sing, as their soccer team plays against Al-Wihdat.[1] Al-Faisali is the club associated with ethnic Jordanians, while Al-Wihdat is the club of the Palestinians.
Children can learn many lessons from playing sports: leadership, self-confidence, and the concept of working toward a common goal are a few such lessons. These are all skills that, when applied in life off the field, can augment the potential for success there as well.
Tradition Trumps Sport: A Female Wrestler Retreats
The 20th century has yielded new and expanding arguments for increasing sports opportunities for women and girls. From Title IX to the Women’s Sports Foundation, the importance of women’s access to sports has received a great deal of attention from academia, the media, and the non-profit circuit. While I agree that women should have access, and that our opportunities lag far behind those of men, I do not agree with the social and political promises of change made by some of these programs.
Several months ago on a Tuesday afternoon, a local girls football team was practicing on a dirt field in Sidi Moumen, a notorious 350,000-person shantytown on the outskirts of Casablanca, Morocco. A crowd of boys had gathered along the fence. One of the boys began making comments. “Look at her touch on the ball,” he mumbled to his friend, “where did she learn to play football?” “My five-year old brother has better control,” shot back the other, slapping his friend’s hand and laughing.
Lebanon and Syria: The Challenge of an Evolving Relationship
The Middle East Institute is proud to host Andrew Tabler and Mona Yacoubian for a discussion about the current state of Lebanese-Syrian relations. Bitterly strained by the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Lebanese-Syrian relations started to mend following French mediation leading to the exchange of ambassadors between Beirut and Damascus in 2009. Prime Minister Saad Hariri's visit to Damascus at the end of 2009 marked yet another phase in this evolving relationship.
Iraq has the world’s third-largest oil reserves. However, the development of Iraq’s petroleum sector has been severely hampered by decades of war, sanctions, underinvestment, the exodus of scores of technocrats, and sabotage. Repairing Iraq’s oil infrastructure and expanding exploration, development, and production is of paramount importance to the country’s future. In June 2009, the Iraqi Oil Ministry embarked on an effort to help meet this challenge by offering service contracts to international oil companies (IOCs) in two rounds of tenders.
Since June 2009, the Government of Iraq (GoI) has secured nearly a dozen major oil field technical service agreements with international oil companies (IOCs) after two highly publicized bidding rounds. The deals are seen as the cornerstone of Iraq’s economic development in the coming years. While future oil production has been rather optimistically projected as high as 12 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2020, significant obstacles to the development of the oil and gas industry remain.
The Status of Forces Agreement and Investing in Iraq: Risky Business?
In spite of ongoing security and political instability, Iraq remains one of the most fertile yet volatile regions in the world for emerging business opportunities, specifically in the petroleum industry. Since the completion of the widely successful “surge” and implementation of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), Iraq has experienced slow but steady improvements in security and economic opportunities in the petroleum sector. As a result, there has been an influx of international companies eager to engage Iraq’s ministries for access to these lucrative markets.
The Middle East Institute is proud to host Sean Foley, author of The Arab States: Beyond Oil and Islam (Lynne Rienner, 2010), for a discussion about the politics of the Gulf states and their role in the global economy. In the book, Foley presents a fresh picture of these states as cosmopolitan and tolerant societies that face many of the same socio-economic problems that other states do – including those that lack oil.
