Middle East Research and Information Project

Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971

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John Chalcraft

John Chalcraft is a Professor of Middle East History and Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

MER Article

Horizontalism in the Egyptian Revolutionary Process

A number of academics, commentators and activists have noted the presence of what one might call “horizontalism” in the Egyptian revolutionary process that started on January 25, 2011: the decentralized or networked form of organizing; the leaderless protest movements; the eschewal of top-down comma

John Chalcraft • 18 min read

MER Article

Internalism of the Left

Isam al-Khafaji, Tormented Births: Passages to Modernity in Europe and the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005). Any book-length comparison of the historical trajectories of Western Europe and the region “extending from Iran in the east to Egypt in the west, and from Turkey in the north to the

John Chalcraft • 8 min read

MER Article

Of Specters and Disciplined Commodities

“Lebanon was built with Syrian muscles,” declared an elderly Lebanese in the early 1990s. He was referring to the hundreds of thousands of semi- and unskilled Syrians who have worked in Lebanon on a temporary basis in construction, agriculture, manufacturing and services since the mid-twentieth cent

John Chalcraft • 15 min read