Booyah! Growing Up Amidst Revolution

by Joshua Stacher | published January 10, 2013 - 5:40pm

As any parent can tell you, kids are profoundly shaped by what goes on around them that is outside the parents’ control. Witness the socialization of my daughter, 8, half-Egyptian, half-American and living in Cairo, over the last two years. If nothing else, it’s a window upon how Egypt’s political transformation has been experienced by people younger than the “youth” who are usually credited with driving the whole thing.

Syrian Kurds on the Verge of Crisis

by Sirwan Kajjo | published January 7, 2013 - 6:55pm

With the civil war in Syria past the point of no return, the country’s economy is undergoing unprecedented shrinkage. Inflation is running rampant. Purchasing power is plummeting as the value of the Syrian pound falls against the US dollar.

Damascus and Aleppo, the main economic hubs, are badly affected, but the country’s eastern and northeastern regions are also in dire straits.

The Walls of Tahrir

by Jessica Winegar | published January 6, 2013 - 12:40pm

In recent years, walls have proliferated in Egypt. Some, as Samuli Schielke and I write in the new issue of Middle East Report, are liberally decorated with political graffiti and other, more quotidian types of writing. Whether thus adorned or not, the barriers confront citizens with political and economic power rendered in concrete.

A New Green Zone in Sanaa

by Sheila Carapico | published January 1, 2013 - 6:50pm

Welcome to the Sanaa Sheraton! It’s now officially part of an expanded US Embassy estate that some are calling Yemen’s “Green Zone,” the plush, heavily guarded civilian headquarters for revised twenty-first-century “rules of engagement” in the Yemeni “theater.” It’s a risky place to stay.

Sudanese Echoes

by Khalid Mustafa Medani | published December 19, 2012 - 3:20pm

In Egypt’s constitutional crisis today, there are echoes of the rise of the National Islamic Front (NIF) in Sudan.

Khaled el-Masri and Empire's Oblivion

by Darryl Li | published December 13, 2012 - 6:46pm

Two of today’s headlines together provide a good example of the work of imperial forgetting. On the front page of the New York Times, a story about the depiction of torture in the forthcoming national revenge flick Zero Dark Thirty shows how little debates have advanced over the past decade. “Reasonable” interlocutors in the Beltway remain stuck in the inane exercise of sparring over whether some utterance extracted by waterboarding in 2003 somehow contributed to the chain of events that led to Navy SEALs shooting an unarmed man in the face at point-blank range in 2011.

Why the Anti-Mursi Protesters Are Right

by Ahmad Shokr | published December 7, 2012 - 8:51pm

Perusing US media coverage and analysis of the crisis in Egypt over the last two weeks has been quite disappointing. As the protests against the elected president Muhammad Mursi escalate, the main players in the struggle and the stakes involved are often mischaracterized. Some might ask: Why does this matter?

Israel's "Operation Mow the Lawn"

by Steve Niva | published December 7, 2012 - 4:32pm

One can only imagine the nods of self-satisfaction when an Israel Defense Forces planner came up with “Pillar of Cloud” to name Israel’s subsequent eight-day aerial assault on Gaza. By lifting this metaphor from several well-known passages in the Torah, the IDF sought to portray the operation as a divinely sanctioned mission to clear the skies of Palestinian rockets through an immovable force from above, while also branding its heavily marketed Iron Dome missile defense system. It was a three for one.

Liberalism vs. Democracy in Egypt

by Jason Brownlee | published December 6, 2012 - 8:02pm

President Muhammad Mursi’s Thursday night address did not mollify protesters, but it clarified the stakes in any dialogue between his supporters and the National Salvation Front led by Mohamed ElBaradei, Hamdin Sabbahi and Amr Moussa.

Five Notes on Egypt's Crisis

by Joshua Stacher | published December 6, 2012 - 6:07pm

Hani Shukrallah, the distinguished former editor of al-Ahram Weekly, laments the “decline and fall” of the Society of Muslim Brothers from a partner in a diverse Egyptian nation to a narrowly partisan faction willing to beat up opponents, “the very caricature of itself as painted for years by its bitterest enemies.”