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The question that arises today, in light of the current economic and financial crisis, is about the achievements of the transitional governments as to the persistence of “mechanisms of tyranny,” the mechanisms of an authority higher than the state.

some describe the transitional phase policies as a process of the “democratization of corruption.”

Freedom can only be materialized when the mechanisms of tyranny are dismantled, especially the financial mechanisms represented by the control exercised by small influential groups over rentier economic sectors. The latter are sectors where barriers to entry (natural or created) allow a higher than market value to be charged to consumers. Therefore foreign economic sanctions, policies of creating warlords with scopes of influence, and the dominance of specific groups on foreign aid will not bring about freedom, since all this sets the grounds for rentier economies that reinforce tyranny or create alternative tyranny.

The “yes”’ to banning minarets has brought these limits to mind, causing a real shock and deep disappointment for many people. I cannot remember any referendum that has divided our country both politically and ethically in a similar manner.

Democratically reached decisions reflect the will of the people in a given moment, though, not necessarily a superior wisdom or power. Democratic decisions can be wrong, unjust and impractical, violate the country’s constitution and even violate basic human rights. They can even relate to issues for which the democratic system is quite simply inadequate.

The debate about the limits of popular sovereignty will surely go on in Switzerland for some time to come. We need to make sure that the discussion is characterized by clarity of analysis, precision in drawing these borders and public education. An absolutized concept of democracy can threaten freedom and is susceptible to misuse. An enlightened people recognizes and acknowledges the limits of its sovereignty and knows that these limitations are what strengthen democracy and freedom.

The initial impulse behind the uprisings, the very impulse that led Bouazizi to self-immolation, lay in the fact that humiliated peoples, suffering from economic dislocation, political repression, and denial of basic human rights had grown impatient with their status as subjects and had risen, demanding their rights as citizens. Wealth redistribution, social justice, and good governance were as equal for those demonstrating en masse as regaining their lost karama — their dignity

Most of the political and intellectual debates that animated the early stages of the uprisings had their roots in the reformist movements and the intellectual ferments and the drive to modernize Arab societies that began in the first half of the 19th century

The Arab uprisings began as spontaneous protest movements led first by middle-class students and professionals who were then joined by workers and other social groups. The Islamists, skeptical at first, joined later. In a political landscape bereft of organized liberal and secular mass movements or political parties, with only defunct old Arab nationalists and leftists, it was a question of time before the Islamists would control the political square and hijack the uprisings.

tool in the hands of Arab states

a subversive force was seen in the 1970s, when cassette tapes of preachers denouncing governments for tyranny and corruption spread in Egypt and Iran

Arabic satellite news and entertainment media established by Gulf Arab states

Mustafa Edib has been working as a journalist for years and prides himself on fighting for the rights of the marginalized.In 2009, he publicly defended President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) when it faced a closure trial for alleged violation of the state’s secular principles. He has no regrets about helping to preserve a political force that would one day snub out his own voice, “because back then, AKP was being oppressed, and we stand against all types of tyranny”.

the closure of numerous other media outlets has raised concerns about a wider political crackdown on media freedoms

When Edib, the newspaper’s foreign editor, showed up to work on the morning after the seizure, his office resembled a police barracks. He told Middle East Eye that the Internet connection had been disabled and the paper was already prepared, but that he “didn't know where or by whom, quite frankly”.

With each political transition—from the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) to the Transitional Administrative Law—the first wave of Shia diasporic elites (as well as the Kurdish parties) supported and often encouraged the U.S.-UK coalition’s calamitous political decisions. These included “de-Baathification” and the disbanding of the army—two policies that would forever change the course of Iraqi politics. Both policies effectively dismantled existing state institutions and human resources instead of strengthening and building on them. And with the removal of the police force came the loss of law and order that could have prevented the wide-scale looting and violence that began in 2003. More destructive still was the exclusion of thousands of Sunnis from state and society and the resulting unleashing of a resentful public, whose vengeance would later manifest in violent reprisals throughout Iraq’s 2006 civil war and the formation of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

By the time Iraq’s first democratic elections took place in December 2005, Shia political leaders who came to power through the IGC and were supported by the U.S.-UK coalition had already gained a significant advantage, so it was unsurprising that the United Iraqi Alliance, an alliance of Shia political parties, dominated the elections. Iraq’s first democratically elected prime minister was Jaafari, a British Iraqi Dawa Party member. Many more Shia returnees would later assume ministerial and parliamentary positions, including Maliki, whose rule would epitomize the sectarian-diasporic dynamic. This legacy of Shia diasporic transnational networks used for recruiting political staff throughout Iraq’s political system continues to this day

there is no such thing as a homogeneous Shia diaspora; as with any community, there are multiple layers of categorical difference and division. While in the pre-2003 era the Shia diaspora may have been united in their political stance against Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, in the post-2003 era, Iraqi Shia politics has been divided along clerical and political lines, echoing the situation in Iraq and the new power brokers ruling the country

Some have attempted to make the Arab spring ‘unknowable’ as a socio-political phenomenon, all the better to obscure the intentions of its subjects and justify counterrevolution. But the reality is that its aims of establishing freedom and democracy in a region run by decades-old systems of tyranny exists beyond its popularly accepted timeline

In almost every national situation where counterrevolution has triumphed, it has been allowed to do so without any hindrance by the democratic West – in fact, in many cases it’s with direct or indirect support from it

There was never any true support for democracy from those who pretended to be its bastions and patrons, all while powerful foreign anti-democratic forces, such as Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, mobilised viciously on the side of counterrevolution to crush nascent democracy

Iran has a complicated, and at times paranoid, government. Elected parliamentarians give a veneer of democracy but power ultimately resides with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s most powerful security force, answers directly to him. Rival arms of the state, including the security forces, jostle for influence. And the rules are unclear.

I had gone to report on the impact of American-imposed sanctions. Some news stories were claiming that Tehran was on the brink of collapse, but I saw few signs of it. There was no panic buying. The city looked cleaner and more modern than on my visit three years before. It has the best underground in the Middle East, with locally made trains. Parks and museums were abundant and well-tended, pavements were scrubbed and the city’s many flower-beds immaculately maintained.

My captors wore no identifying uniforms, but on the second day the doctor told me that he was an officer in the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guards. Iran’s security agencies are many tentacled. In 1979 the new Islamic Republic retained much of the existing state apparatus, including the army and a good part of the bureaucracy, but it added another tier to keep existing institutions in check, and the parallel systems have competed ever since. The government’s own intelligence ministry would be unlikely to detain a Western journalist whose entry it had approved. My accusers were from its more powerful rival.

it is one of the endless ironies of Turkey that the liberals and democrats who were among the first to oppose the putschists’ sinister attempts to overthrow the A.K.P. government would also become the first to be punished and silenced by that very same government

what we do not know are the effects of the ongoing crackdown on those of us who are “free.” As one commentator wrote on social media, “If all these writers are ‘inside,’ none of the other writers can really said to be ‘outside.’ ”

Since the Arab Spring, I have had many exchanges with writers from “wobbly geographies”—Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, Tunisia. We all know that when you are a novelist from such territories, you do not have the luxury of being apolitical. And although every discipline in the arts is susceptible to degeneration and manipulation under authoritarian regimes, fiction is particularly at risk in such circumstances—prose, rather than poetry. In “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell considered the fates of the two genres under nondemocratic rule. A poet could survive despotism relatively unscathed, unhurt, Orwell thought, but not a prose writer, who could neither control nor limit the range of his thoughts without “killing his inventiveness.” Orwell examined the ways in which literature had withered away in Germany, Italy, and Russia whenever autocracy was on the rise. Then he warned future writers, “Poetry might survive in a totalitarian age, and certain arts or half-arts, such as architecture, might even find tyranny beneficial, but the prose writer would have no choice between silence or death.”

What is the ecumenical frame and how does it revise Orientalist understandings of sectarianism?

My book seeks to offer a critical and empathetic story of coexistence without defensiveness—that is, to write a history that neither glorifies the Arab past nor denigrates the present and that explores the grim significance of sectarian tensions in the modern Middle East without being seduced by their sensationalism

a project of modern coexistence that not only had to be imagined and designed, but also built

By the time Albert Eckstein died in 1950 at the age of 59, he had served as a German soldier in the First World War, suffered exile at the hands the Nazi Party, and helped to lower the rate of child death in Turkey that claimed nearly one in every two children in rural Anatolia during the 1930s.

Covering the period from 1935-39, the Eckstein Albums document a medical survey of maternal fertility and infant mortality in a country that had only come into being just over a decade earlier, following the Ottoman Empire's defeat in the First World War.

the social and economic realities of rural Anatolian villages

On September 11, 2020, the Bahraini regime announced it was normalising relations with the Palestinians’ oppressor – Israel. This brought the people of Bahrain and the people of Palestine ever closer in their experience of subjugation.

Gulf countries already had informal exchanges with Israel, including the purchase of military and surveillance technology to suppress local populations. Their friendly relationships were a badly kept secret. Rather it was the audacity of these ruling elites to make public the relations which go against the will of the majority of people in the Gulf that caused so much public anger.

there have been protests in Bahrain, and even some supporters of the regime have joined the opposition in denouncing the deal

Saied’s so-called emergency measures remain in place, and the U.S. State Department said Wednesday that no further action has been taken. “We are monitoring and engaged,” a State Department spokesperson told Foreign Policy. Some activists and regional experts say more concrete forms of pressure from the United States are needed. They say preserving democracy in Tunisia will be a test of U.S. President Joe Biden’s central commitment to what he has called a “defining question of our time”—that is, “Can democracies come together to deliver real results for our people in a rapidly changing world?” 

Critics like Dunne say the administration has fallen seriously short of what Blinken, in a major March 3 speech, said would be a new U.S. policy to “incentivize democratic behavior” and “encourage others to make key reforms … [and] fight corruption.”

“If this administration wants to be serious about protecting democracy as a broad policy approach, there are really few places more significant.” It wouldn’t cost a lot, Feldman points out. But making clear that Saied’s moves are unacceptable would “show we actually believe in democracy and we’re not being merely situational about it.”