28 January 2019
The linguistic feminist and queer struggle should ultimately focus less on technical grammatical distractions than the empowerment of speech itself, argues Nayla Mansour.
Bashar al-Assad
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 thriving trade in possessions and even infrastructure looted by the Syrian regime isn't just a symptom of economic crisis and a wider moral breakdown following the war; it points to the ever-worsening criminality that awaits the country's future under Assad.
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.
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.
The Assad regime is much more than a mere dictatorship—understanding it, and its horrors, requires updating our conventional thinking about murderous states, argues Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
As then-defense minister, Hafez al-Assad was instrumental in Syria’s loss of the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967. His quest to avert accountability for this defeat was at the heart of the tyranny he instated over the following decades, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh on the June War’s anniversary.
For years, the Syrian regime’s allies in Lebanon have spread crackpot conspiracy theories about plots to prevent the country’s more than 1 million refugees returning. Now they belatedly realize Assad’s own actions may turn their scarecrow into reality.
Al-Jumhuriya talks to journalist Gareth Browne about his week in Syria last month observing a “crazy club” of pro-Assad British parliamentarians and priests.
With over 600,000 Armenians slaughtered on future Syrian territory in 1916, the Armenian Genocide ought to be more than a footnote in Arab history, argues Vicken Cheterian in response to Yassin al-Haj Saleh.
For Syrians, the past is long gone, while the future—a homeland free of Assad—is forbidden, writes Yassin al-Haj Saleh in this reflection on exile, time, and revolution.
Rania Abouzeid’s forthcoming book, No Turning Back: Life, Loss and Hope in Wartime Syria, succeeds in humanizing the individual participants in Syria’s agony—victims as well as villains.