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
MER Article From the Editors (Fall 2009) “In this world,” wrote the left economist Doug Henwood in these pages in 1993, “the only thing worse than being part of the evolving economic hierarchy is being excluded from it. So far, the Middle East is largely excluded.” Amid the downturn in the global economy inaugurated by the Wall The Editors • 9 min read
MER Article Editor's Picks (Summer 2009) Bakalian, Anny and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). Bashkin, Orit. The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Benedict, Helen. The Lonely The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article The Bitter Harvest Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, is a nervous city. In the past, Quetta was a provincial capital where people were accustomed to taking leisurely walks on Jinnah Road, the main boulevard of the city, gazing at shop windows and haggling over the goods on display. Young Stephen Dedalus • 14 min read
MER Article Struggling for the Rule of Law In March 2007, when President (and General) Pervez Musharraf suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, Pakistani lawyers took to the streets in large numbers. It was a dangerous street where they were met with batons, barbed wire, tear gas, bullets and bombs. If their immediate demand Daud Munir • 12 min read
