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 […]
Mehran Kamrava, ‘Triumph and Despair: in Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic’ (Review)
Review of Mehran Kamrava, Triumph and Despair: In Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – During the last three months, Iran has been a main focus of international media attention due to the ongoing anti-government protests that erupted after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old […]
Yemen: ‘What Have we Left Behind’ by Bushra Al-Maqtari – “Only victims are real in this war”
Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – Review of Bushra Al-Maqtari, What Have You Left Behind? (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022.) “Only victims are real in this war, victims crushed by violence.”[1] The writer behind this sentence is Bushra Al-Maqtari, a human rights activist, journalist, and novelist. The war she refers to is the ongoing conflict in […]
Review of Amnon Kapeliouk, Not by Omission: The Case of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War
Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – Review of Amnon Kapeliouk, Not by Omission: The Case of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War (London: Verso, 2022). The 1973 Arab-Israeli War is a war with many names. Also known as the Yom Kippur War, the October War, the Fourth Arab-Israeli War, or the Ramadan War, it pitted Israel against […]
America’s Fickle Relationship with the Kurds: Review of “Rethinking State-Non-State Alliances: Change and Continuity in the U.S.-Kurdish Relationship”
Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – Review of Ozum Yesiltas, Rethinking State-Non-State Alliances: Change and Continuity in the U.S.-Kurdish Relationship (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022). The Kurds of Syria and Iraq have been at the forefront of the fight against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Their fight against the radical group brought […]
The US-Iran Conflict: Review of “Republics of Myth”
Barcelona (Special to Informed Comment) – Review of Hussein Banai, Malcolm Byrne, and John Tirman, Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2022.) The enmity between the United States and Iran following the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution constitutes one of the most studied international rivalries. This notwithstanding, the recently […]
“Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia” – A Review
Bonn (Special to Informed Comment) – Review of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia (London: Pluto Press, 2022). “This book might make you uncomfortable, but if you stick with me perhaps you will come to see that a reductive understanding of Islamophobia as just an experience of hate or prejudice at the hands of […]
Russian Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: New Trends, Old Traditions: A Review
Bonn (Special to Informed Comment) – Review of Nikolay Kozhanov (ed.), Russian Foreign Policy Towards the Middle East: New Trends, Old Traditions (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). “Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. […]
Review of Ilham Tohti, We Uyghurs Have No Say: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks
Tuebingen (Special to Ann Arbor) – Review of Ilham Tohti, We Uyghurs Have No Say: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks (London: Verso, 2022). Ilham Tohti, a Chinese intellectual and advocate for the rights of the Uyghurs, the Muslim minority group he belongs to, was jailed in 2014 by the Chinese government. Little has been known about […]
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