MER Article Sudan's Deepening Crisis Conditions that prevail in Sudan today -- environmental degradation, drought and famine, civil war, repression, and sharp deterioration in economic and living conditions for the majority of the population -- reflect a long process of bad leadership in the country since independence in January 1956. A succession of sectarian governments, Benaiah Yongo-Bure • 15 min read
MER Article Sudan: Politics and Society Sudan is a vast country, the largest in Africa and as large as the United States east of the Mississippi river. Its 25 million people are divided among 19 major ethnic groups and 597 subgroups. [1] Arabic is the official language, the mother tongue of the majority of Sudanese; English Martha Wenger • 12 min read
MER Article From the Editors Iraq and Kuwait, on the eastern frontier of the Arab world, represent one face of the region’s future. Sudan, on the southern frontier, represents another. Unlike the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Sabahs, the Khartoum junta led by Omar al-Bashir has experienced neither constraint nor favor from The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Mossad Books Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Every Spy a Prince (Houghton Mifflin, 1990). Victor Ostrovsky and Claire Hoy, By Way of Deception (St. Martin’s Press, 1990). Promoting their book around the US last fall, Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv touted it as the first critical study of Israel’s intelligence establis Jane Hunter • 5 min read
MER Article Binder, Islamic Liberalism Leonard Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago, 1988). Sami Zubaida • 6 min read
MER Article War and Sexuality The Gulf way may ultimately transform Arab politics even more radically than the political-military defeats of 1948 and 1967. Those experiences were the midwives of self-critical reassessments that, while severe, accepted the fundamental legitimacy of Arab nationalism and its political project. In t Joel Beinin • 4 min read
MER Article The More You Watch, the Less You Know The Persian Gulf crisis received massive and sustained coverage in the American media. As numerous critics have pointed out, television network news in particular largely parroted the Bush administration’s line, accepting and passing on its version of reality as the truth. A study released in March Al Miskin • 3 min read
MER Article War and State Power A student of European states finds much to wonder at in the recent Persian Gulf War. [1] Not that the armed, predatory character of Middle Eastern states, the invasion of a rich state’s territory by a financially strapped neighbor or a great power’s massive intervention in a local Charles Tilly • 8 min read
MER Article Women and the Stability of Saudi Arabia On November 6, 1990, some 50 women met in a supermarket parking lot in Riyadh. The women dismissed their drivers and drove their cars in tandem through the streets of Riyadh, defying publicly an unofficial but strictly observed ban on women’s driving. In Saudi Arabia, where women may not travel with Eleanor Abdella Doumato • 10 min read
MER Article Harvest of War It takes two to make a war, and there were indeed two protagonists in making this war. On the one hand, there was the United States, which wanted the war for a number of reasons, primarily global: to consecrate its world hegemony, to liquidate any sequels to bipolarism, to marginalize Europe and Jap Fawwaz Traboulsi • 7 min read
MER Article Oil and the Gulf War No blood for oil! The rallying cry of many of those who took to the streets in protest against the Gulf war is simple. Is it too simple? “Even a dolt understands the principle,” said one unnamed US official, “We need the oil. It’s nice to talk about standing up for freedom, but Kuwait and Saudi Arab Paul Aarts, Michael Renner • 16 min read
