11 December 2018
What the Turkish president’s unlikely alliance with a trans woman tells us about sexual politics in the country.
Commentary
Five years on from the kidnapping of the ‘Douma 4’ activists, Joey Ayoub pays homage to another Damascus suburb symbolic of Syria’s peaceful, democratic revolution.
A searing first-hand account of growing up gay in Syria; a journey from schoolyard bullying to deep religiosity to pseudo-scientific “therapy” to attempted suicide to, eventually, revolution.
In his tenth letter to his missing wife Samira al-Khalil, abducted in Douma in 2013, Yassin al-Haj Saleh recalls their earliest days together.
Introducing Al-Jumhuriya’s new “Gender, Sexuality, and Power” series, Karam Nachar outlines the intellectual and moral ethos of the initiative, and argues for the urgency of placing gender and sexuality at the center of the political conversation in the Middle East and beyond.
The departing UN special envoy to Syria was not merely feckless or naïve about the Assad regime; he was an active facilitator of its survival strategy.
The disappearance and possible murder of the Saudi Arabian writer has struck such a nerve because, for a change, Westerners are able to see themselves in the victim’s shoes.
Though the pro-regime axis has its own reasons for wanting to avoid an Idlib offensive, there is ultimately no reason to think last week's cessation of hostilities has any more chance of holding than its predecessors, argues James Snell.
In an open letter to the United Nations, over 100 prominent writers, academics, and activists say the time has come to consider radical reform of the U.N. Security Council, given its abject failure to protect Syrians from the Bashar al-Assad regime's mass violence.
Jimmy Carter’s proposal to rehabilitate Assad and ignore Syrians’ demands for justice isn't just morally bankrupt in the extreme, it also would fail to produce even the “ugly peace” of his imagination.
The “Syrian Democratic Council”—ostensibly a vehicle for Kurdish-Arab coexistence in former ISIS territories—is increasingly looking to normalize ties with the Assad regime, spelling disaster for the displaced residents of Raqqa and elsewhere, with no apparent opposition from its Western sponsors.
How a late French thinker gave us a framework with which to view Syrians as complex individuals, rather than central-casting actors in our grand-narrative fantasies.