There has seemed to be an endless stream of dramatic political developments in Egypt since the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule a year and a...
For months now, speculation by analysts, diplomats, scholars and journalists about the nature of the post-Bashar Assad transition in Syria has been as dynamic...
Syria and Egypt – especially their capital cities Damascus and Cairo – for millennia have influenced events far beyond their borders. Developments...
Amid the many scenarios for Syria are two widely discussed possibilities: that President Bashar Assad will respond to his imminent collapse by retreating with...
A noteworthy but troubling recent development across the Middle East and North Africa has been the quiet resurgence of Al-Qaeda affiliates and Salafist...
Two new men who appeared on the fast-changing stage of Arab politics this week: General Manaf Tlass, who defected from the Syrian regime, and Egypt’s...
This has been a bad publicity week for the Baath Party that ruled Iraq and Syria for much of the past half-century. Consider the two following lead paragraphs...
The accelerating pace of events inside Syria has raised expectations that Bashar Assad’s regime is on the verge of collapsing, though nobody seems to...
It is a bad omen for any government when it sends tanks into its capital city to fire against its own citizens. This the Syrian government will soon discover,...
The sequence of political events in Egypt in the last two weeks has been an important step on the long road to the reconfiguration of governance and politics...
On Monday, I found myself reading about the results of the first post-Gadhafi Libyan parliamentary election. This I did in between visits to the great Piazza...
I have spent the last three days in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, participating in the Presbyterian Church-USA’s consideration of resolutions on Middle...
Egypt and Syria rightly get the lion’s share of attention in the Arab world these days. However, three other important developments in Kuwait, Sudan and...
I was in the United States 16 months ago when an Egyptian national popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak to quit the presidency. And I was in the United...
The ongoing political developments in Syria and Egypt are important for many reasons, including democratic transitions, popular sovereignty, the rule of law,...
The power grab in the past week by the Egyptian military and the lingering Mubarak-era establishment, operating through the Supreme Council of the Armed...
The Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court’s decision Thursday to dissolve the elected parliament and allow former Prime Minister Ahmad Shafiq to contest...
The recent deaths of two Arab media men remind me more than ever of how important for our societies is the capacity of citizens to speak out freely and...
We have learned many things about Syria during the past year, while some other aspects of the situation there remain unclear. The most important thing that we...
Many images from the court verdict session of the Hosni Mubarak trial last Saturday remain vivid, and carry political weight: the strong statement by the...
The conviction and life imprisonment sentences handed down Saturday to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and former Interior Minister Habib Adli mark a...
It must be depressing for Kofi Annan, the United Nations-Arab League envoy to Syria, to hear at every turn that the “Annan plan” for resolving the...
The past year across the Arab world has revealed the variety of ways in which citizens and governments deal with the challenges they face from their own...
Many historic things have happened across the Arab world since December 2010, when Mohammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Sidi Bouzid in rural Tunisia sparked...
One of the important byproducts of the ongoing Arab uprisings, regime changes and national reconfigurations is the increased ability of many people around the...