Review of Ghada Karmi, One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2023). Munich (Special to Informed Comment) – Following the inauguration of a far-right government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in December 2022, the Israeli occupation machinery in Palestine has been turbocharged. In February 2023, the Israeli government approved the […]
How did Turkish President Erdoğan Survive the Strongest Challenge Yet?
Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the elections in Türkiye. Again. In power for two decades, first as prime minister and then as president, Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) secured a relatively comfortable victory over Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu in the runoff election held on May 28. Kılıçdaroğlu, the […]
Is Israel Over-Hyping the Supposed Iran Threat?
Review of Jonathan G. Leslie, Fear and Insecurity: Israel and the Iran Threat Narrative (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “Words have consequences,” writes Jonathan G. Leslie on the last page of his book “Fear and Insecurity: Israel and the Iran Threat Narrative.” He argues that the predominant Israeli […]
Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Review)
Review of Amahl A. Bishara, Crossing A Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2022). Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – In 2003, Amahl A. Bishara, currently an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, arrived in Palestine as a PhD student to conduct fieldwork. After […]
The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan (Review)
Review of Ahmad Shuja Jamal and William Maley, The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan (London: Hurst and Co., 2023). Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment) – The Republic of Afghanistan unraveled quickly after May 2021 when US-led foreign troops prepared to abandon the country. This defied the forecasts of most experts on the capacity […]
A Crucial Year: Turkey at a Turning Point
Reviews of Gönül Tol, Erdoğan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria (London: Hurst and Co., 2022) and Dimitar Bechev, Turkey Under Erdoğan: How a Country Turned from Democracy and the West (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022). Augsburg, Germany (Feature: Special to Informed Comment) – At the beginning of […]
The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam and the Security State, by Rizwaan Sabir (Review)
Review of Rizwaan Sabir, The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and The Security State (London: Pluto Press, 2022.) Greifswald, Germany (Special to Informed Comment) – In May 2008, a post-graduate student of International Relations was arrested for six days after downloading a 140-page document on Al-Qaeda from the US Justice Department website. A copy of the document […]
Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (Review)
Review of Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Yemen in the Shadow of Transition: Pursuing Justice Amid War (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). Greifswald, Germany (Special to Informed Comment) – In a context of war, do accountability and justice need to wait until the end of the conflict? In her well-researched and original book Yemen in the Shadow […]
The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History (Review)
Review of Jeremy Bowen, The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History (London: Picador, 2022). Greifswald, Germany (Special to Informed Comment) – Ali Abdullah Saleh, Bashar al-Assad, Hassan Nasrallah, and Muammar Gaddafi are just some of the prominent figures in contemporary Middle Eastern history that Jeremy Bowen has had the opportunity to interview […]
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