International Politics of the Middle East

floods forced the closure of a motorway to Mecca, stranding pilgrims who were unable to complete their journey.

At least 900 people had to be rescued after being stranded by the floodwaters,

I was thinking that if Arabs are divided as leaders they're at least united as people. I hope I'm still right in this assumption though I'm beginning to have doubts. I've never thought that we could see those political circuses between Arab leaders at their annual summits being reproduced on a macro scale among an Arab population that has for thousands of years shared the same fate and the same dreams.

The Algerian and Egyptian leaderships have played politics through their football teams. They have realized very well that football is one of the shortest cuts to their peoples' hearts and minds.

their people who are made to think their aspirations are being taken care of are in fact falling victim to political manipulation. 

Saudi Arabia has been preparing for the influx of millions of pilgrims. It won't turn away anyone who wants to come to the Hajj, but it is urging other countries not to let children younger than 12, people older than 65 or pregnant women make the pilgrimage.

The kingdom also is using sophisticated technology -- thermal screening equipment at entry points and mobile devices to document suspected cases of the flu.

For those like Fayzah Abu Ayadah, faith outweighs fear. "Even if we die there, it is not important," the Palestinian says. "The important thing is to go for the Hajj."

"I believe both Mousavi and all those who propagated this big lie must face trial in a court of law," said Mohammad Nabi Habibi, secretary-general of the conservative Islamic Coalition Party, the official IRNA news agency reported.

The Houthis, named after the family of their leader, say they are trying to reverse the political, economic and religious marginalisation of the Zaydi Shia community.

About 150 demonstrators gathered on Friday in the Zamalek neighbourhood, where many embassies are located.

What began as a humanitarian project has turned into an insidious form of conversion and riot control which has had many casualties. It has been profoundly anti-democratic in many cases, including in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From the ground, for many of its recipients, the various iterations of this liberal peace project have taken on a colonial appearance. It has become illiberal

local actors are reframing what they require from a viable, just, and durable peace, often quietly and in the margins, drawing on the liberal peace as well as their own customs and interests.

Talk of ‘human security’, ‘responsibility to protect’, ‘do no harm doctrines’ and ‘local ownership’ seems very empty from the perspective of most of the peoples these concepts have been visited upon. This in turn has often elicited from subject communities a 'post-colonial response', criticising peace interventions as self-interested, imperialistic, orientalist, and focusing on the interveners' interests rather than local interests. A local (transnational and transversal) attempt is under way to reclaim political agency and autonomy from the new post-Cold War 'civilising mission', which has over the last twenty years, shown itself unable to provide for basic needs, rights, security (state or human) at levels local actors expect, or to respect or understand local differences and non-liberal, and even non-state patterns of politics. Non-liberal and non-western forms of politics, economics, society, and custom, are clamouring for discursive and material space in many post-conflict zones, with mixed implications for sustainability and for the purpose of achieving a normatively (to liberals at least) and contextually acceptable, locally sustainable peace.

In some cases, as in Kosovo and Timor Leste this has led to a modified form of state emerging, heavily influenced by both liberal norms and local customs, practices, identities, and national agendas. Very difficult issues arise here for 'international planners' of peace and world order, not least in how they respond to such confrontations between very different political systems, customs, and agendas. But, it is also the case that synergies may arise, where these are sensitively handled and properly understood.

peace requires well-being via human needs stemming from rights defined by their contexts, (where context may mean local, customary, state, market, regional or international, not merely the 'local' it is often taken to mean). These contexts are of course connected to the ambit of liberal state and international institutions, but they are not defined by them. As a result, millions of people around the world do not have adequate rights or needs provision, nor proper access to representation, despite the best intentions of liberal peacebuilders.

To achieve this the ethically and methodologically dubious privatisation of security and peacebuilding and its connection to neoliberal marketisation strategies in the context of a classically sovereign state should be abandoned. The privatisation of peacebuilding means that no accountability is possible until after a specific development project has failed, and only then by refusing funding often to those who need it most. Such strategies have attracted to this sector a dangerous fringe of arrogant bureaucrats, 'ambulance chasers' and 'cowboys' rather than imbuing peacebuilding with the dynamics of grounded reconciliation.

democracy is rarely resisted other than by the most extreme of actors, but it is often criticized for being distant in outcome to local communities.

At the moment the impulse appears to be to illiberalise, to postpone democracy, to open markets further, and to depoliticise because a lack of local agency is seen to be the cause of these failures, rather than faulty international analytic and policy approaches and mistaken idealism.