MER Article

Editor's Picks (Fall 2015)

Abulhawa, Susan. The Blue Between Sky and Water (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Agrama, Hussein Ali. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Alajaji, Sylvia Angelique. Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for

(Author not identified) • 2 min read

MER Article

Tolan, Children of the Stone

Sandy Tolan, Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Two stories, two dreams: one realized, the other dashed. A boy born to a fragmented, impoverished refugee family living under harsh military rule is mesmerized by the sound of a violin and vows not

Dan Connell • 8 min read

MER Article

Leadership Gone Awry

In representative democracies, elections allow the peaceful replacement of leaders, infuse government with new blood, legitimize both winners and losers, and restore public faith in democracy. More importantly, “the people’s voice” is cast as the ultimate check on national leaders whose power has gr

Ümit Cizre • 21 min read

MER Article

Water Blues

Two quiet but revealing developments related to Middle East water were announced in the spring and summer of 2015. On February 26, Israeli and Jordanian officials signed an agreement to begin implementation of the long-awaited and controversial Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Project. And, on June

Lizabeth Zack • 12 min read

MER Article

The Invisible Alienation of Tunisian Youth

The mood in Tunisia was tense after Ramadan, a month after 38 tourists were killed in the beach resort of Sousse at the end of June. Key buildings on the capital’s main boulevard, Habib Bourguiba Avenue, including the Ministry of Interior, were surrounded with barbed wire and conspicuous police prot

Benoît Challand • 5 min read

MER Article

“ISIS Is One Piece of the Puzzle”

Yifat Susskind is executive director of MADRE [http://www.madre.org/], an international women’s human rights organization based in New York. Jillian Schwedler spoke with her on October 28, 2015, the week after Yanar Mohammed, head of MADRE’s partner group the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq

Jillian Schwedler • 12 min read

MER Article

Regional Responses to the Rise of ISIS

Regional responses to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, have varied depending on regime perceptions of threat, not only from ISIS itself, but also from other potential rivals, challengers or enemies. Despite the jihadi group’s extensive use of violence in Syria and Iraq and i

Curtis Ryan • 14 min read

MER Article

A Jihadism Anti-Primer

The US national security state has for the past quarter-century been preoccupied with something it has called “jihadism.” From the aftermath of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan through the September 11, 2001 attacks to the rise of the self-declared Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, or ISIS, the spect

Darryl Li • 15 min read

MER Article

Eritrean Afars

Ahmed, a 25-year old Afar who served eight years in the Eritrean infantry, fled his country in 2006. He went first to Djibouti, and then to neighboring Ethiopia but, finding no work and fearing the risks of crossing the Mediterranean Sea, he went back to his first place of refuge. I met him in Djibo

Dan Connell • 14 min read

MER Article

On ISIS

In early June 2014 the world was shocked by news of the fall of Mosul, the third largest city in Iraq, to jihadi militants loyal to something called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. The conquest was rapid—soldiers of the Iraqi army dropped their weapons and fled rather than resist the I

The Editors • 17 min read