Current Analysis

“Our Letter to Khatami Was a Farewell”

Saeed Razavi-Faqih is a student at Tarbiat-Modarres University in Tehran and a member of the steering committee of the main national student organization, the Office for the Consolidation of Unity (OCU). Razavi-Faqih has played a key role in the leadership of  Iranian student protests in December 2002 and previously. Kaveh

Kaveh Ehsani • 12 min read

Current Analysis

Occupational Hazards

Reluctantly, some American officials recently began to use a new word when talking about our presence in Iraq: occupation. Even though the Bush administration worked hard to keep this word out of our national vocabulary before and during the war, it has nonetheless started to appear in press briefin

Elliott Colla • 3 min read

Current Analysis

How Yemen's Ruling Party Secured an Electoral Landslide

Yemen's parliamentary elections, held on April 27, 2003, might have set a higher standard for contested elections in the Arab world. Instead, post-election shenanigans and gunfire that disrupted ballot counting in key districts cast doubt on the voting process and the ruling General People's Congres

• 8 min read

MER Article

Unsettling the Authorities

Nowhere has the belittling designation “the Arab street” been more overused than in descriptions of Egypt, the most populous and politically central Arab state. Egypt’s richly textured history of political opposition, one of the lon¬gest in the region, is inevitably reduced to images of livid young men brandishing

Mona El-Ghobashy • 18 min read

MER Article

More Than a Mob

Tens of thousands of Jordanians took to the streets in support of Palestinians during the March and April 2002 Israeli invasions of seven of eight major towns in the West Bank. Remarkable enough for their sheer size (Jordan’s population is just over five million), most of these marches and

Jillian Schwedler • 16 min read

MER Article

From the Editors (Spring 2003)

Yes, Thomas Friedman admitted in early March of 2003, the costs of George W. Bush's increasingly unilateral Iraq adventure are beginning to mount. Friedman, along with ex-National Security Council man Kenneth Pollack, has been a reassuring voice of reason coaxing fellow Establishment liberals into what another New York

The Editors • 8 min read

Current Analysis

Anti-War Thinking: Acknowledge Despair, Highlight Progress on Moral Preemption

It is difficult not to feel despair and powerlessness at this awful juncture. Millions in the world fought with all their hearts and minds to avoid violence in Iraq. Inevitably, when bombs fall, there is a deep and emotional void that is opened. Many will pray. Others will simply reflect. Countless

Desmond Tutu, Ian Urbina • 2 min read

Current Analysis

Protest and Regime Resilience in Iran

The largest pro-reform demonstrations since the summer of 1999 roiled Tehran on December 7-10, as student protesters press ahead with plans to hold campus referendums on the legitimacy of unelected bodies of conservative clergy that wield great power in the country's political system. On December 7, Iranian security

Bijan Khajehpour • 7 min read

Current Analysis

Is the US Ready for Democracy in the Mideast?

Those in favor of an Iraq invasion argue that a regime change will be the first step in bringing democracy to the Middle East. But unnoticed in all the recent national focus on Iraq, recent elections in Morocco, Bahrain, Turkey and Pakistan indicate that democracy, albeit in small increments, has al

Ian Urbina • 3 min read

Current Analysis

The UN Arab Human Development Report

With great fanfare and evident satisfaction, the UN Development Program and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development in June released the "Arab Human Development Report 2002" (AHDR). The Report, authored by a team of Arab scholars and policymakers with an advisory committee of "well-known A

Mark Levine • 8 min read

Current Analysis

Don't Blink

On June 26, Jordan's King Abdallah II issued a royal decree pardoning former parliamentarian Toujan Faisal, who had been sentenced on May 16 to 18 months in jail for "seditious libel" and "spreading information deemed harmful to the reputation of the state." Faisal's release "on humanitarian grounds

Jillian Schwedler • 8 min read

MER Article

The Shrinking Space of Citizenship

On February 14, 2002, the Israeli government sent several light planes to spray 12,000 dunams of crops in the southern Negev region with poisonous chemicals. The destroyed fields had been cultivated for years by Bedouin Arabs, on ancestral lands they claim as their own. The minister responsible for

Oren Yiftachel • 20 min read