Arab Spring

The Middle East Ranks at the Bottom of Gallup’s Happiness Index, except for Rich Oil States; is the US to Blame?

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The annual Gallup report on happiness by country came out this week. It is based on a three-year average of polling. What struck me in their report is how unhappy the Middle East is. The only Middle Eastern country in the top twenty is Kuwait (for the first time in […]

Arab Spring

Why, Despite the Arab Spring and Mass Protests of the 2010s, People Got the Opposite of What they Wanted

Marc Martorell Junyent

Review of Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023). Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – At the end of 2019, there was no shortage of articles looking retrospectively at the events that had shaped the decade of the 2010s. One of them was aptly titled “A […]

Algeria

A Final Burial for the Arab Spring: Arab League Readmits Syria under al-Assad, as Tensions with Iran Subside

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The foreign ministers of the Arab League states, meeting in Cairo on Sunday, approved the end of Syria’s suspension from membership in that body. Syria was suspended in November 2011 as the Syrian Arab Army was deployed to massacre civilian protesters. The decision was a recognition that the Baath government […]

Arab Spring

The ‘I am Sudan’ Motto and the elusive Transition to Democracy

Middle East Monitor

Dr Mustafa Fetouri MFetouri ( Middle East Monitor ) – On a banner displayed on one of the Sudanese Armed Forces’ Khartoum buildings, a phrase inscribe in red colour, reads “I am Sudan”, summing up the whole recent history of the country and explains much of the current bloody power struggle. This short sentence says […]

Arab Spring

Egypt has 60,000 prisoners like jailed dying Arab Spring Dissident Alaa Abdelfattah

Middle East Monitor

By Osama Gaweesh | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – Egyptian activist and blogger Alaa Abdelfattah wrote a book with the title You have not been defeated yet. He is being held in prison by the Egyptian regime for sharing a post on Facebook documenting the death of another political detainee in Egypt. As […]

Arab Spring

Digital Media and Sudan’s Revolution

Middle East Monitor

By Shafie Khader Saeed | – Industrial revolutions are defined as new scientific and technological breakthroughs and innovative ways of seeing and dealing with the world around us. They lead to a profound change in the economic and social dimensions in favour of improving human life, in addition to developing philosophical concepts and generalisations. It […]

Arab Spring

Ukraine: What the Libya War tells us about Why we Really don’t want a NATO No-Fly Zone

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Tracy Wilkinson at the Los Angeles Times writes about the no-fly zone proposed by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and the flat refusal of the Pentagon to go in that direction. The clamor for a no-fly zone among some in Congress and in US civil society, however, displays a remarkable […]

Arab Spring

What does the future hold for Middle Eastern states?

The Conversation

By Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi | – From independence until the advent of the Arab Spring, Middle Eastern states have suffered due to their constituting principle, a notion that can be traced back to the motivations and arrangements of former colonial powers. Independence may have satisfied the demands of the region’s inhabitants for autonomy, Arabness and […]

Arab Spring

Mideast Regimes met the Arab Spring youth with Iron Fists and Sectarianization, but anti-Corruption Protests Continue

The Conversation

Simon Mabon | – As the popular refrain of “ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam” rang out across the Middle East in the early months of 2011, the nature of political life and relations between rulers and ruled began to fragment. The chant – which roughly translates as “the people want the fall of the regime” – […]