MER Article Why India and Israel Were Not Friends, 1948-1991 P. R. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Vijay Prashad • 4 min read
MER Article Guilty Bystanders The Iran-Iraq war was fought entirely within the boundaries of the two combatant nations, but it was nonetheless a regional war. The war machine of Saddam Hussein’s regime was lubricated with billions of dollars in loans from the Arab oil monarchies, which were anxious to see the revolutionary state Pete Moore • 15 min read
MER Article Bending History A watchword of the Baathist regime during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran was the “spirit of victory.” Preserving this “spirit” (ruh al-nasr) was a major task of the regime’s efficient propaganda machine throughout the fighting. As soon as war broke out in September 1980, the cultural sphere was Sinan Antoon • 8 min read
MER Article The Imam's Blue Boxes A fashionable description of the Islamic Republic of Iran is “garrison state,” a concept that originated in the West in the early 1940s. In a garrison state, the ruling elite is mainly composed of “specialists in violence,” and military bureaucrats dominate the social and civil spheres. In Iran’s ca Kevan Harris • 4 min read
MER Article A War on Multiple Fronts Lasting from 1980 to 1988, the war between Iran and Iraq was the longest inter-state war of the twentieth century. Yet standard narratives of the war, or of Iranian and Iraqi political history, for that matter, barely discuss the war’s legacy for the structure of the two states in question or the wa Arang Keshavarzian, Nida Alahmad • 29 min read
MER Article Deep Traumas, Fresh Ambitions The seeds of future war are sown even as parties fight and, depleted or on the verge of defeat, sue for peace. The outcome is rarely stable and may be barely tolerable to one side or the other. This rule holds true for the two belligerents no less than for their respective sponsors, keen to protect Joost Hiltermann • 19 min read
MER Article Western Sahara's 48 Hours of Rage The first videos posted to YouTube showed a sea of makeshift tents at a desert locale called Gdim Izik, surrounded by scores of men in full riot gear silhouetted in the early morning light. Then came footage of chaos and screams of panic: cars honking, tents on fire, people running, Jacob Mundy • 10 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Winter 2010) Is it happenstance or harmonic convergence that the first reports on the Wikileaks cache of State Department cables hit the newsstands alongside stories about the fresh political salience of “American exceptionalism”? Something about the content of the diplomatic missives and, more to the point, the The Editors • 13 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Fall 2010) Abi-Mershed, Osama. Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Albrecht, Holger. Contentious Politics in the Middle East: Political Opposition Under Authoritarianism (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 201 The Editors • 2 min read
MER Article Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, the Qur’anic scholar and public intellectual whose bravery greatly inspired us at MERIP, passed away on July 5 in Cairo at the age of 66. (Author not identified) • 11 min read
MER Article Enloe, Nimo's War, Emma's War Cynthia Enloe, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). War is usually presented as all about hard power and weaponry. In school, students are taught about generals, battlefields, advances in armaments and innovations in milita Lauren Geiser • 4 min read
MER Article Barfield, Afghanistan Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). B. D. Hopkins • 3 min read
