MER Article Letter from Iraqi Kurdistan Landing at the shiny new airport in Erbil, seat of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, I could not help but notice that the cleaning crews are not staffed with locals. The cleaners are from Southeast Asia, giving the impression that Iraqi Kurdistan is blessed with full employme Peri Raouf • 4 min read
MER Article To Protect or to Project? Erstwhile kings of the mountains, Iraq’s Kurdish parties have become kingmakers in Baghdad. No federal government can be established without them—and they know it. Joost Hiltermann • 24 min read
MER Article The Growing Danger of a Nuclear Middle East Every country in the Arab world, it seems, wants a nuclear reactor. In May 2008, a consortium of seven nations, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, announced they had agreed on a plan to boost nuclear power generation in the region. The proclamation is onl Carah Ong • 11 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 2008) Like the Palestinians, the Kurds are routinely described as a “question.” The label refers, in one sense, to their status as a people who sought self-determination in the wake of World War I but whose claim is still unsettled. From the standpoint of the states that divided the population of Kurdista The Editors • 4 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Spring 2008) B’tselem/Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Ghost Town: Israel’s Separation Policy and Forced Eviction of Palestinians from the Center of Hebron (Jerusalem, May 2007). Colla, Elliott. Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). (Author not identified) • 1 min read
MER Article On Women’s Captivity in the Islamic World In the unprecedented flourishing of writings about Islam in the United States in recent years, one category of books—life stories of women—has been the most popular, attracting the attention of politicians, publishers, the media and the reading public alike. In an old narrative frame of captivity re Farzaneh Milani • 25 min read
MER Article A Letter Misaddressed Benazir Bhutto, Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). Kamran Asdar Ali • 6 min read
MER Article Demographic Surprises Foreshadow Change in Neoliberal Egypt In the Egypt of 2008, half the population has known only one president, Husni Mubarak. And the rate of population growth, at its peak when Mubarak assumed office in 1981, has stopped declining as it had been in the 1990s. A new kind of population increase has begun. Such are the lessons of the provi Eric Denis • 11 min read
MER Article Washington's New Arms Bazaar On January 14, 2008, the State Department officially notified Congress of its intent to sell 900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions kits to Saudi Arabia. Though some in Congress balked at transferring such advanced military technology to a country still in a formal state of war with Israel, their protest Sean L. Yom • 24 min read
