MER Article

Uncovering Protection Rackets through Leaktivism

The small Gulf Arab state of Bahrain is using digital-era tools of surveillance, deception and repression to quell popular dissent. But a group of well-meaning tech-savvy geeks are mobilizing new digitally enhanced methods to expose who is behind this repression and how it operates today.

Ala’a Shehabi • 17 min read

MER Article

The Egyptian Revolution’s Fatal Mistake

Early in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, activists and protesters battled their way into state security archives around the country. But the revolutionaries handed over the documents to the army, who later took power. Inside the state security archives were the blueprints for uprooting the police stat

Aly El Raggal • 16 min read

Current Analysis

Disavowing Israeli Apartheid

The decision by the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy’s (IARPP) to hold their annual conference in Tel Aviv, Israel cannot be written off as simply a misunderstanding, ignorance of global issues or unconscious enactment: it's a disavowal of current reality.

Lara Sheehi • 9 min read

Current Analysis

Precarious Teachers Strike for Public Education in Morocco

Over the past three years, striking and demonstrating teachers have mobilized against their new precarious status as contract-labor under government privatization reforms implemented in 2016. The teachers’ struggle is bound up in the broader fight by Moroccan unions against the government’s neoliber

Zakia Salime • 10 min read

Current Analysis

Protesting Politics in Algeria

Since February 22, 2019, Algerians have mounted massive protests in cities across Algeria. While calling for President Bouteflika’s resignation has been a focal point of demonstrations, the protests are more broadly a political contestation against a byzantine, status-quo politics upheld by an elite

Amir Mohamed Aziz • 10 min read

Current Analysis

Making the Economy Political in Jordan’s Tax Revolts

The Jordanian citizenry remain unwilling to pay more taxes. The old system no longer works, but the way forward demands that Jordan’s leaders address the need for substantive reforms in both the economic and political systems that currently govern Jordanian lives. Any new social contract between the

Laith Fakhri Al-Ajlouni, Allison Spencer Hartnett • 9 min read

Current Analysis

The Manufactured Controversy About Ilhan Omar and the Israel Lobby

The firestorm that greeted newly elected Congresswoman (D-MN) Ilhan Omar’s tweets about the Israel lobby’s clout in Congress reveals as much about her critics as it does about the rising tide of progressive politicians who no longer show deference to establishment prohibitions on criticizing Israel.

Joel Beinin, Noura Erakat, Omar Baddar, Mouin Rabbani • 21 min read

Current Analysis

Protesting Clerical Welfarism in Iran’s Pious City

Protests in Iran's holy city of Qom reveal that social fragmentation in Iran runs so deep that even within a community as intimately related to religious learning and the state as Qom, the divisions and boundaries go beyond easy distinctions between regime and opposition, hardliner and reformer or s

Mehdi Faraji • 13 min read