(An earlier version of this piece appeared in Ahramonline on 7.12.2013) It has been a truism for decades to attribute the drivers of US foreign policy in the Middle East to two realist drivers; free flow of oil from the major Gulf producers and Israel’s security, with the latter seen as part of the US […]
(This was first published in Ahram online on 30.11.2013) Before we jump into the horse-trading that marked the making of the US foreign policy on the Arab Spring in 2011-2013, it helps to scan and present the chief actors in Washington DC, even if quickly. The authority to formulate the US foreign policy ultimately rests […]
(This was first published in Ahram Online on 22 November 2013)I spent a few months this year studying how the US foreign policy machine has been responding to the avalanche of developments in the Middle East since December 2010 when the ostensibly stable region erupted into a turmoil that brought its peoples to the streets […]
First published as a book chapter in Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security by Interlink on December 6, 2018
First published by here by Dejusticia in April 2018 as part of their book Rising to the Populist Challenge: A Playbook for Human Rights Actors Summary:Over the period from 2014 to 2017, the Egyptian government cracked down in an unprecedented fury on human rights defenders in particular and the civil society in General (including political […]
First published by the Century Foundation on April 18, 2017 Summary: Since the mid-1980s, the number of Egyptian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focusing on human rights has grown rapidly. But despite the proliferation of organizations, the human rights movement in Egypt has never been very effective, and is now especially unmoored. This report traces the sources […]
First published in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalysis in September 2016 Abstract: Freedom of expression suffers from a ferocious crackdown in Egypt because of gaping narcissistic injuries to a chauvinist, patriarchal national psyche that has been repackaged in Egypt’s early post colonial years. Decades of cultural and socioeconomic decay has torn Egypt’s stereotypical psyche […]
Politics of Food Aid: From Politicization to Integration Introduction: … at the beginning of the [1990s] … aid agencies tried to recruit states for their cause, by the beginning of the next decade they had discovered that states had already co-opted humanitarianism for their interests (Barnett: 172).