A handful of Jordanian and Yemeni social workers teamed up this past week to learn supportive techniques for helping people recover from trauma. In Yemen, the trauma(s) that made this training necessary are domestic – Yemen has been embroiled in a civil war of sorts in Saada …
Joost Hiltermann (of the International Crisis Group) has a blog post at the New York Review of Books on the current climate in Iraq. The Supreme Court has certified the election results, but the country remains without a government, and it’s …
Hello all,
I’m resuming blogging here at the FPA Middle East blog, after finishing my MA this May. I’m now in Damascus for the next several months, and will be commenting on the news from here.
It’s good to be back! Please get in touch (via the information in the Bio section) …
Those of you interested in learning more about young people in the Middle East may want to check out this new publication from Brookings Press, Generation in Waiting: The Unfulfilled Promise of Young People in the Middle East, by Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef. Both parties have …
The Arab Human Development Report, a publication from the UNDP that consistently draws commentary from anyone and everyone interested in Middle East politics, typically inspires a lot of positive response from the development community. For one, members of the Arab intelligentsia collaborate to write it, …
… to teach people how to behave on the train. The sheer number of people who want to use the Metro, combined with the newness of the project, has meant chaos for the system.
Dubai’s metro rail opened (grandly – how else) today. Construction on the system will continue, but as of today residents and tourists can take the train along Sheikh Zayed road. Yale graduate student Tabitha Decker points out, rightly, that the metro’s significance as evidence of investment in …
Visit http://www.brookings.edu/lang/arabic.aspx to read Brookings’ content in translation. Very exciting.
… not really a new thing, but I guess when you work for a newspaper calling something “new” is the only way to justify publishing it.
In Bahrain, women are employing the Quran to combat patriarchal rule. This sort of Islamic feminism, so called, could …
Yahoo purchased Maktoob.com today. Yahoo expects Maktoob, which began as the first Arabic-language email provider, to permit it access to the Arab market. It hasn’t had terribly good luck expanding into that sector thus far, and acquiring a locally developed business may be a …
David Makovsky summarizes the arguments in the book he and Dennis Ross co-authored at MESH.
Jon Elmer has a piece at IPS about Palestinian women who have spent time in Israeli prisons. Despite the rotten conditions – both because of the total absence of women-specific accommodations as well as the fact that, well, it’s a prison – his interviewee, Khawla al Azraq, …
Foreign Policy published a piece by two academics – one Palestinian, Osama Abu-Irshaid, and one an American Jew with strong ties to Israel, Paul Scham – suggesting that in order to reach any kind of peace agreement with Hamas, negotiating partners (i.e. Israel and the United States) need to accept …
The Economist profiles Fouad Ali el Himma, the former leader of Morocco’s new Authenticity and Modernity Party. It is an anti-Islamist party primarily comprised of those loyal to the King. (The magazine calls its platform “centrist and non-ideological). El Himma leveraged his close relationship with the King …
President of France Nicholas Sarkozy’s new initiative – to outlaw the wearing of a burqa in public in France – has sparked quite a debate over the past week. Adding to it on the New York Times op-ed page is self-identified Muslim feminist Mona …
