MER Article The Yemeni Elections Up Close Candidate registration for Yemen’s first-ever multi-party elections opened on March 29 in a climate of lively polemics against the president’s party, the General People’s Congress (GPC). The GPC’s permanent committee had approved its electoral program on March 27. That same evening it appropriated a Renaud Detalle • 11 min read
MER Article Elections and Mass Politics in Yemen The Yemeni parliamentary election of April 27, 1993 marks a watershed for the Arabian Peninsula. The multi-party contest for 301 constituency-based seats, and the period of unfettered public debate and discussion that preceded it, represents the advent of organized mass politics in a region where political power has long remained Sheila Carapico • 13 min read
MER Article From the Editors (November/December 1993) In the preamble to the agreement signed on September 13, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization “agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict.” This agreement may or may not serve that purpose. Peace and justice advocates should not be under any illusion The Editors • 3 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (November/December 1993) Article 19. “Dismantling Civil Society: Suppression of Freedom of Association in Sudan,” Censorship News 27 (August 1993). Bennis, Phyllis and Michel Moushabeck, eds. Altered States: A Reader in the New World Order (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993). Burgat, François and William Dowell. The Isla The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (September/October 1993) Alcalay, Ammiel. After Jews and Arabs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). B’tselem. The Closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: Human Rights Violations Against Residents of the Occupied Territories (Jerusalem, 1993). Connell, Dan. Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revo The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article Studies of Structural Adjustment Bent Hansen, Egypt and Turkey: The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity and Growth (World Bank, 1991). Heba Handoussa and Gilliam Potter, eds. Employment and Structural Adjustment: Egypt in the 1990s (AUC, 1991). Mustafa Kamil al-Sayyid, “Privatization: The Egyptian Debate,” Cairo Papers in Social Marsha Pripstein Posusney • 6 min read
MER Article Letting the Colonel In from the Cold On the last day of May 1993, some 200 Libyan pilgrims alighted from buses that had just crossed from Egypt into the Israeli-occupied Gaza. Strip on the way to Jerusalem. None of the rhetoric in the statement the pilgrims issued at the end of their stay, duly broadcast by the Libyan “Voice of the Gre Dennis Sammut • 7 min read
MER Article Israel's Economic Strategy for Palestinian Independence A peace agreement between the government of Israel and the PLO has yet to be signed; a Palestinian state has yet to be established. But such details are unimportant to the organizations representing the Israeli bourgeoisie. “It does not matter whether a Palestinian state arises, whether Israel imposes autonomy or Asher Davidi • 6 min read
MER Article Class, State and the Reversal of Egypt's Agrarian Reform On June 24, 1992, the Egyptian People’s Assembly reversed the agrarian relations law, a centerpiece of the 1952 revolution, under which some 1 million families enjoyed quasi-property rights -- secure tenancy at fixed rents -- over more than 1.5 million of Egypt’s 6 million feddans of agricultural Raymond A. Hinnebusch • 10 min read
MER Article Regionalism and Geopolitics in the Maghrib In February 1993, the Arab Maghrib Union (AMU) marked its fourth anniversary. Despite the great hopes that were vested in this regional economic organization, it has not thrived. [1] There have been five summit meetings since the Treaty of Marrakesh was signed to great fanfare, but the heads of stat Robert Mortimer • 8 min read
MER Article The Economic Dimension of Yemeni Unity To the outside world, the unification of the two Yemens in 1990 resembled the German experience in miniature. North Yemen (the Yemen Arab Republic, YAR) was considered a laissez faire market economy, whereas the South (the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, PDRY) was “the communist one.” When, w Sheila Carapico • 17 min read
MER Article Global Economic Integration Conventional definitions imagine world trade as taking places among nations -- international trade, it is called. Convention also holds that everyone is best off when such trade is carried on as freely as possible. Neither the definition nor the polemic of free traders has changed much, except for a Doug Henwood • 7 min read
