MER Article Editor's Picks (Fall 2009) Abufarha, Nasser. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Al-Ali, Naji. A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali (London: Verso, 2009). Al-Haq. Operation Cast Lead: A Statistical Analysis (Ramallah, August 2009). Cai The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article Maasri, Off the Wall Zeina Maasri, Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). Sarah A. Rogers • 3 min read
MER Article Does a Vote Equal a Voice? In a second-floor classroom overlooking a flowering courtyard filled with groups of students sharing textbooks and snacks, a young Yemeni woman in her late teens says simply: “[No political party] cares about us, or about the country.” The “us” to whom she refers are the other young women in the roo Stacey Philbrick Yadav • 15 min read
MER Article Livelihoods Up in Smoke On the streets of Turkish cities, the cigarette packs being traded and tucked into shirt pockets are adorned with the familiar brand names of Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. The ubiquity of foreign brands is remarkable, for Turkey is the world’s leading producer of Oriental tobacco—the s Ebru Kayaalp • 11 min read
MER Article How Lebanon Has Weathered the Storm One would imagine that, of all the countries in the Middle East, Lebanon would be among the hardest hit by the global financial crisis. Famous for its weak central state and ferociously capitalist private sector, Lebanon has the closest thing to a free market in the region. It has a dollar-based eco Nisreen Salti, Aslı Bâli • 9 min read
MER Article Making Big Money on Iraq Kuwait has its diwaniyyas, Yemen its qat chews. But for languorous trade in rumor, gossip and flashes of political insight, there is no substitute for chain-smoking and eating Iraqi masgouf. At one of several Iraqi establishments in Sharjah, a down-market cousin of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates Pete Moore • 18 min read
Current Analysis The Precarious Existence of Dubai's Indian Middle Class Dubai, according to the conventional wisdom, is a bust. The International Monetary Fund predicts that economic growth in the United Arab Emirates as a whole will be lower in 2009 than in the last five years; the Dubai government has borrowed billions of dollars from Abu Dhabi to bail out its banks; Neha Vora • 11 min read
MER Article Remittances and Development The Middle East and North Africa have been hit hard by the global recession. Several of the oil-rich Gulf states are in the midst of an economic contraction, with their famed sovereign wealth funds having lost 27 percent of their value in 2008. The Gulf states, along with the European Union, buy mos Sameera Fazili • 6 min read
MER Article A Tale of Two Kuwaits Elections in Kuwait are usually festive occasions, but in May 2009 Kuwaitis were frustrated. It was the third set of elections in three years, all coming after the emir dissolved the National Assembly because of confrontations between parliamentarians and the cabinet led by the ruling Sabah family. Kristen Smith Diwan • 3 min read
MER Article The Gulf Comes Down to Earth Between the summer of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, oil prices plummeted from a high of $147 per barrel to a low of $33. This extraordinary reversal of fortune announced the end of the second oil boom for the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) -- Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Ar Kristen Smith Diwan, Fareed Mohamedi • 21 min read
MER Article Ahmadinejad's Nuclear Folly The tumult in Iran since the June 12 presidential election is, without a doubt, the most significant sequence of events in the Islamic Republic since the 1979 revolution itself. No other occurrence -- not the Iran-Iraq war, not the 1989 turmoil that sidelined Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, until t Farideh Farhi • 12 min read
