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 […]
New Identity: Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy in Turkey (Review)
Review of Filiz Çoban Oran, Religion, Nationalism and Foreign Policy: Discursive Construction of New Turkey’s Identity. London: I.B. Tauris, 2022. Tuebingen (Special to Informed Comment) – In 2009, US President Barack Obama advised Europe to welcome what was then called Turkey into its fold and benefit from the country’s “diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith.” […]
The Geopolitics and Diplomacy of US–Iran Relations by Monshipouri – Review
Book Review – Mahmood Monshipouri, In the Shadow of Mistrust: (London: Hurst and Co., 2022). Bonn (Special to Informed Comment) – Sixteen months have passed since the inauguration of Joseph Biden as the 46th President of the United States. As of now, negotiations to revive the agreement signed in July 2015 between the members of […]
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