FEATURED
CURRENT ANALYSIS
Remaking AUC in the Corporate Image of US Foreign Policy
Over the past few years, students and staff at the American University in Cairo have joined forces with faculty against the increasingly draconian measures taken by the AUC administration in what amounts to a corporate coup in the service of US foreign policy.
Kushner’s Technocratic Vision and the Unlearned Lessons of Fayyadism
Jared Kushner unveiled the economic side of President Trump’s “deal of the century” for Palestinians in June 2019. In addition to its economic flaws is a technocrat’s aversion to mobilizing the force necessary to confront Israel’s entrenched occupation.
Russia Opens Digital Interference Front in Libya
The Middle East is increasingly awash with fake news and misinformation campaigns. Russia has become a major vector of these disinformation campaigns, affecting virtually every major flashpoint in the Arab world. It just opened a new info-war front in Libya.
CURRENT ISSUE OF MIDDLE EAST REPORT
Return to Revolution
The 2019 uprisings in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq, in addition resurgent protests in Morocco and Jordan—all countries that did not experience revolutionary uprisings in 2011—extend the previous wave of revolt to the rest of the region. Protestors are no longer content with merely toppling their unelected dictators as we saw in 2011: They are demanding a fundamental change of the entire political and economic system. In Iraq and Lebanon they are also rejecting the entire political class and their use of sectarianism to maintain their wealth and rule chanting “All of them means all of them!” MERIP devotes this double issue Return to Revolution to assessing the nature and challenges confronting this new wave of uprisings through the interrelated themes of continuity, entanglement and counterrevolution. Every article in the issue below is available to our subscribers. Please click here to become a subscriber and you can access all the articles with a star on them. The PDF of the issue below is available for download to all our subscribers. Or you may purchase a copy of the PDF for download by clicking on the purchase bar below. NOTE: Due to space and cost restrictions, the articles by Dahlgren (South Yemen); Peled (Religious Zionism) and Shikaki (Neoliberal Oslo) are only available online, not in the PDF.FEATURED PRIMER
One of MERIP’s signature issues over the years has been the question of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict—partly because of its intrinsic interest but largely because so much myth and cant clouds the mainstream media coverage of this subject that independent analysis is particularly necessary. This primer by Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar is a good place to start in understanding what is at stake as events unfold.
(Photo of Israeli separation barrier by Alfonso Moral.)
REVIEWS & RECOMMENDED
Speculating on Climate Change in the UAE
Why did Abu Dhabi build an ambitious eco-utopian planned city called Masdar City and what does it all mean?
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Background to Ongoing Protests in Sudan
Anti-government protests have rocked Sudan since the beginning of 2019, with police crackdowns leaving dozens of dead and many wounded. Large crowds have taken to the streets across the country to denounce a government decision in December to triple the price of bread and to demand the end of President Omar al-Bashir’s regime.The following articles and interviews offer accounts of earlier protests and regime repression as well as an overview of US policy toward Sudan leading up to the secession of South Sudan in 2011.
(Photo of protesters in Khartoum, April 8, 2019 by Lana Haroun.)
