Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
Hakim Addad has been a political activist in Algeria for decades. In this interview with Thomas Serres he discusses the increasing repression of peaceful demonstrators under President Tebboune, the positive role of a new generation of activists in the Hirak movement, his arrests and imprisonment and the challenges of being binational.
With the increasing presence of sub-Saharan African migrants in North Africa over the past decade, public discussions of race and prejudice are losing their taboo. Moroccan writers are encouraging a broader awareness of structural racism by including more Black characters in their novels and by depicting them as complex individuals struggling against inequality.
Marginalized populations in Tunisia, who have little access to economic and political resources, sparked the 2011 protests that ousted the Ben Ali regime. In the following ten years, marginalized people, especially in rural areas, have continued to push for more jobs, better services and social justice. Sami Zemni examines the long-term processes and dynamics of marginalization in Tunisia and shows how the struggle against it is changing the country’s politics.
This issue of Middle East Report on “Maghreb From the Margins” addresses the evolving challenges that the peripheries are posing to power structures in Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia and the Western Sahara.
The North African nation of Mauritania may be peripheral in global affairs, but its robust network of Islamic scholars is central to transnational Islamic movements and ideas. Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem traces the influential political economy of Mauritanian Islamic scholarship that has both bolstered and opposed fundamentalist networks. As Mauritania remains deeply stratified along racial, caste-like and gender lines, its internal hierarchies shape how it impacts global Islamic thought. Forthcoming in MER issue 298 “Maghreb From the Margins.”
Inequality between rural and urban areas of Morocco has been deeply entrenched since the colonial era. But recent government public policies that ostensibly seek to reduce disparities are in fact further marginalizing already impoverished communities. Atia and Samlali’s research reveals what is going wrong and why residents believe that the only way to get essential infrastructure like roads and schools is to protest. Forthcoming in MER issue 298 “Maghreb From the Margins.”
Marginalized populations in Tunisia, who have little access to economic and political resources, sparked the 2011 protests that ousted the Ben Ali regime. In the following ten years, marginalized people, especially in rural areas, have continued to push for more jobs, better services and social justice. Sami Zemni examines the long-term processes and dynamics of marginalization in Tunisia and shows how the struggle against it is changing the country’s politics. Forthcoming in MER issue 298 “Maghreb From the Margins.”
With the increasing presence of sub-Saharan African migrants in North Africa over the past decade, public discussions of race and prejudice are losing their taboo. Moroccan writers are encouraging a broader awareness of structural racism by including more Black characters in their novels and by depicting them as complex individuals struggling against inequality. This article is from the forthcoming MER issue 298 “Maghreb From the Margins.”
On July 24, 2020 the Turkish government opened Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to prayer for the first time in 86 years, reverting the building’s status from museum back to mosque. Blessing and Yaycıoğlu explain the politics behind this decision and explore the ramifications for Hagia Sophia and other monuments with similarly rich and multilayered histories.
MERIP’s coverage of the First Gulf War sought to understand the crisis beyond the battlefield kinetics: from Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait to the US-led Desert Storm military operation liberating Kuwait and looking beyond to the regional aftermath. Our authors and editors offered historically-grounded analysis of the invasion, they measured the nascent waves of misery and violence that would radiate from it and offered clear-eyed commentary on the costs and risks.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s appointment of Melih Bulu as the new rector of Boğaziçi University on January 1, 2021 provoked outrage among students and faculty in Turkey. Alemdaroğlu and Babül explain the anger behind the continuing protests and how Boğaziçi’s struggle fits into a long history of government control over higher education as well as the ruling party’s desire to attain cultural hegemony by cultivating what Erdoğan calls pious, homegrown and national youth.
Hakim Addad has been a political activist in Algeria for decades. In this interview with Thomas Serres he discusses the increasing repression of peaceful demonstrators under President Tebboune, the positive role of a new generation of activists in the Hirak movement, his arrests and imprisonment and the challenges of being binational. Forthcoming in MER 298, “Maghreb From the Margins.”
Although Meir Kahane was assassinated 30 years ago, the violent and hateful legacy of his ideology continues to shape Israeli politics. David Sheen’s in-depth and long-term investigative reporting sheds light on how the intricate web of Kahanist influence is pulling Israel further and further to the far-right. Unabashedly Kahanist politicians have made hateful speech and action toward Palestinians by the government and within society increasingly visible and acceptable.
Revolutions are the singular political events that “confront us directly and inevitability with the problem of beginning,” argued Hannah Arendt. MERIP’s coverage of the uprisings of 2011 struggled intensely with this conundrum while cross-regional mobilizations, alliances and confrontations emerged at a pace that ignited promise for meaningful change. Revisit MERIP’s essential coverage in the wake of the 2011 toppling of Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Husni Mubarak and the massive rallies in Yemen through this selection of key articles.
Anna Simone Reumert reviews Darryl Li’s book The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity, an eye-opening ethnographic history of the experience and fate of foreign fighters acting in the name of global Muslim solidarity in the Bosnian war of the 1990s.
The Sahrawi people have been struggling for self-determination in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara since 1975. Despite years of nonviolent resistance, there has been no significant change in the stalled process of decolonization. Until now. The sudden end to the long-running ceasefire and Trump’s tweet recognizing Moroccan control over Western Sahara and Morocco’s normalization of relations with Israel have suddenly altered the political dynamics. Mark Drury explains what this means for Sahrawi aspirations.
The COVID-19 pandemic could not have come at a worse time for Syria. The country’s health care system has already been devastated by nearly ten years of violent conflict, leaving much of the health infrastructure in ruins and health care workers overwhelmed. The health system is not only decimated, however, it is also fractured into four separate and increasingly disconnected health systems which function within Syria’s national borders.
As social phenomena, epidemics and the responses they generate reveal much about a country’s political economy and a state’s relationship with its citizens. In Egypt, the manner in which President Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi’s regime has approached an epidemic of hepatitis C on the one hand and the arrival of the coronavirus on the other illustrate that the politics of healthcare in Egypt are evolving.
During his tenure at AUB, Ghassan Abu Sittah’s work radically transformed the practice of medicine and surgery. As the chair of the plastic surgery department at AUB Medical Center, he singlehandedly redefined the workload of the hospital from a focus on cosmetic surgery to one on reconstructive surgery, with a focus on physical deformities in children and war injuries. His legacy has become a blueprint for a new generation of physicians that he trained and mentored.
This issue of Middle East Report explores the interactions of the body politic with health and medicine and examines the entanglements of physical bodies in the institutional and political processes that govern them. Articles in this issue explore a range of different landscapes and ecologies of politics and health care. In this way, we aim to bring the questions and problems of health and illness into the analysis of geopolitics and political economy, while situating the Middle East in broader global health conversations.
