MER Article Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution Misagh Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution (Rutgers, 1989). Misagh Parsa’s work successfully lays out the essential factors behind the Iranian revolution and the subsequent triumph of the clergy in establishing a consolidated Islamic state. His text provides a sharp analysis of the soci Mostafa Vaziri • 1 min read
MER Article Choueiri, Arab History and the Nation-State Marxism in the United States developed on the margin of society. Shunned by organized labor, it has confronted this society as an outsider. Until the 1970s, the most successful American Marxist works of scholarship were macro studies by economists, written as if from a distance and emphasizing econo Peter Gran • 3 min read
MER Article Egyptian Political Economy Robert Bianchi, Unruly Corporatism: Associational Life in Twentieth-Century Egypt (Oxford, 1989.) Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, 1988). These two important new books address some of the central questions Roger Owen • 8 min read
MER Article Al Miskin After reporting for years from Beirut and Jerusalem for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman is now featured as that newspaper’s diplomatic correspondent and resident expert on the Middle East, his status enhanced by a cozy tennis court relationship with Secretary of State James Baker. An article in Al Miskin • 4 min read
MER Article Rai Tide Rising Two Algerian rai tunes make the top ten of the Village Voice music critics’s poll in 1989. Rai is now heard daily on college radio from the University of Pennsylvania to Oregon State. Urban dance clubs with “world music” nights feature rai discs along with their usual mix of reggae, salsa, zouk and David McMurray, Ted Swedenburg • 9 min read
MER Article New Soviet Thinking on the Middle East Grigorii Grigorevich Kosach teaches at the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow. Some of his works translated into English include The Comintern and the East (Moscow, 1981), and “Formation of Communist Movements in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in the 1920s and 1930s, ” in The Revolutionary Process in th Garay Menicucci • 6 min read
MER Article America's Egypt Open almost any study of Egypt produced by an American or an international development agency and you are likely to find it starting with the same simple image. The question of Egypt’s economic development is almost invariably introduced as a problem of geography versus demography, pictured by descr Timothy Mitchell • 45 min read
MER Article After the Cold War, Economic War? If the Cold War can be said to have had any virtues, at least it kept the major capitalist powers from each others’ throats. Of course, this peace came at some cost -- repression and manipulation of client states, proxy wars in the Third World, squandering money on weapons of unimaginable horror, an Doug Henwood • 7 min read
MER Article Report from Baghdad Saddam Hussein’s presence is ubiquitous in Baghdad, where he is shown to be all things to all people. Throughout the city there are portraits of him dressed as Bedouin, Kurd, soldier and civilian. In some places he is wearing a white Bahama suit; in others he is in brown Paul Lalor • 7 min read
MER Article "Eventually There Can Only Be an Arab Solution" Amb. ‘Abdallah al-Ashtal is Yemen’s representative to the United Nations. He served as ambassador for the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen from 1971 until May 1990, when he became the representative of the newly unified Republic of Yemen. In March and December 1990, he chaired the UN Security C James Paul • 7 min read
MER Article The Use and Abuse of the UN in the Gulf Crisis Is the United Nations at “a new threshold” in its history as a result of the Security Council actions in the Gulf crisis? This needs careful assessment. There has long been a tendency to veer from indifference to short-term exploitation of the UN and then, if this does not turn out well for the Unit Erskine Childers • 7 min read
MER Article Calculating "Collateral Damage" Early reports of casualties in Iraq provided only a scattershot picture of damage to residential areas and loss of civilian life, not a clear sense of scope or scale. Only on February 11, after four weeks of intense bombing, did Iraqi officials acknowledge that civilian deaths were in the range of 5 Joost Hiltermann • 4 min read
