Iraqi freedom vs. Iranian domination – or failed state?
For more than a month, Iraq’s protesters have withstood bullets and stun grenades, tear gas and water cannons, as they chanted, danced and called for the ouster of the entire… Read more »
Category: Iraq
New social movement challenging Iraq’s sectarian politics
The largest mass protests to hit Iraq and Lebanon in decades are posing a direct challenge to the influence Iran has gained in both countries as demonstrators seek to overturn… Read more »
Arab Spring 2.0? Understanding the New Wave of Protests
A new wave of protests and demonstrations has erupted across the Middle East and North Africa over the past 9 months, the Wilson Center’s Middle East Program observes. In… Read more »
Explaining the global protest wave
Sixty-three people died over the weekend in a crackdown by security forces against ongoing anti-government protests [HT: CFR], according to the semi-official Iraq High Commission for Human Rights. Iraq is… Read more »
The protests in Lebanon and Iraq are really about…..
In both Iraq and Lebanon’s unfolding protests, people’s demands for accountable governance, economic relief and an end to corruption stand at odds with identity-based sectarian solidarity, argues Bassel F. Salloukh,… Read more »
Iraq’s ‘wobbly democracy faces most dangerous moment yet’
The streets of Baghdad were silent Tuesday after a week of peaceful protests — against corruption, unemployment and lack of basic services — turned deadly. More than 100 people were… Read more »
Iraqi protests signal emergence of ‘new civil society’
Dozens of demonstrators were killed across Iraq on Thursday and Friday as violent protests against government corruption swelled into a mass spontaneous uprising sweeping much of the country, the worst… Read more »
‘Coups and Revolutions’: non-state actors, dysfunctional states impede Arab democracy
The slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi “has become the symbol of our collective moral conscience, the voice for the voiceless in the Middle East,” his fiancée Hatice Cengiz wrote in… Read more »
Another Arab Spring? Not if, but when
The social history of the MENA region is a history of social mobilization and the emergence of civil society. Across the Arab world, ordinary citizens have collectively engaged in resistance,… Read more »
Arab Spring: the sequel?
The mantra of the Arab Spring is back. Protesters in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia and the Palestinian territories [and Sudan] have demanded better governance of late, prompting talk of… Read more »