Lebanon
All countries-
The crisis of the Arab nation state
Reconstructed reality
A world war turned the Ottoman Arab provinces into modern nation states a century ago, but today they are being unravelled by many, highly localised wars that have yet to run their course. Their causes long predate the Arab Spring, asserts Yezid Sayigh
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Lebanon: from amnesty to amnesia
Lacking a culture of remembrance
"In Lebanon, repression has become a permanent state of mind," says the journalist and Orientalist Monika Borgmann. With the archive "UMAM Documentation & Research", founded in 2004, she attempts to fill the gaps in the country's collective memory. Interview by Juliane Pfordte
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Life in Lebanon at the beginning of the twentieth century
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Saudi Arabia and Iran
Defeat Islamic State - or become it
The dawn of 2016 has brought a new round of doomsday predictions that Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family cannot sustain its autocratic grip on power. The kingdom, pessimists argue, is caught in a perfect storm with economic problems, social challenges and foreign policy crises all converging at the same time. By James M. Dorsey
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Interview with Leila Alaoui
Morocco's art scene: a coin with two faces
While the Moroccan art scene still suffers from censorship, the main source of new artistic stimulus is the Moroccan diaspora. Melanie Christina Mohr spoke to the Moroccan-French artist Leila Alaoui about transnational perspectives, migration and photography
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Geopolitics in the Middle East
A new century dawns
There is no doubt that the crisis-riven Middle East is beset by some unique challenges. As Jeffrey Sachs argues, however, these are not the Sunni-Shia political divide, the future of Assad or other doctrinal disputes, but rather the unmet need for quality education, job skills, advanced technologies and sustainable development
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Book review ″Beirut Noir″
Chronicling life in the corrupt city
The smoke of abandonment permeates ″Beirut Noir″. In this collection of short stories, we find the remains of the crippled, the lonely, the lost, and the dead. They move – or fail to move – through a landscape violently reshaped by fifteen years of civil war. Many of the characters are stuck in an afterlife of one sort or another. Or, if they′re still alive, time has stopped. Marcia Lynx Qualey read the book
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The Middle East
Preserving the Ottoman mosaic
With the international community striving to end the chaos and conflict racking the Middle East and establish a regional order than can sustain peace and stability, Sweden′s fomer prime minister, Carl Bildt makes a plea for working within the existing framework
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Victims of terror
Do we care about Arab lives?
The world was plunged into mourning following the attacks on Paris – but what about those who were blown up in Lebanon just one day before? The blog penned by Elie Fares hit a nerve
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Book review: ″The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol″ by Elias Khoury
A dizzying sense of displacement
Originally published in Arabic in 2012, ″The Broken Mirrors: Sinalcol″ was only translated into English this year. It contains many of the tropes that Elias Khoury readers will find familiar: shifting perspectives, an unreliable narrator, obscured memories, uncertain truths, and reflections upon narration. Nahrain al-Mousawi has read the book
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Arab reactions to the Paris attacks
Uneasy bedfellows in the fight against IS
Across the Arab world, there has been round condemnation of the attacks in Paris, which are generally viewed as retribution for the West′s engagement with IS in Syria. In this conflict, however, the Arab states don′t make for easy bedfellows. By Christoph Ehrhardt
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The Arab world
(Not) an unlimited book market?
With the increasing efforts to revive the book market in the Arab world by publishers and cultural institutions, intermittently hindered by economic, political and social factors, the limitations of this market are yet to be explored and redefined. By Amira Elmasry