Analyses
Yassin al-Haj Saleh: After Assad, Syria Must Free Itself from Sectarianism
Riccardo Cristiano 12 December 2024
Yassin al-Haj Saleh, born in 1961, is one of Syria’s foremost intellectuals and a long-standing dissident against the Assad regime. He spent sixteen years in prison for “political reasons,” including time in the maximum-security facility of Tadmur, also known as Palmyra. With the onset of the Syrian Spring, he immediately emerged as an opponent of the regime.
  • The Ceasefire is Just a Band-Aid on a Mortal Wound
    Claudia De Martino 24 January 2025
    On January 19, just before President Trump’s inauguration, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into effect. While the agreement will not end the 15-month war on Gaza, it marks a significant breakthrough on one of the war’s key objectives outlined by the Israeli government: the release of the remaining hostages. This objective is also the one that enjoys the strongest public support with 57.5 percent of Israelis in favor. After months of negotiations in Qatar, the deal aims to secure the return of all hostages in three stages.
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    The Citizenship Battle Dividing Catholic America
    Matteo Muzio 22 January 2025
    One of the key points of Donald Trump’s new administration program is its commitment to abolish birthright citizenship (jus soli) on his first day as president, as he has declared repeatedly. This would involve using the executive order tool. It didn’t quite happen that way, but it came very close. The new occupant of the White House has signed an order directing federal agencies to stop accepting citizenship applications within thirty days from the children of people entering the country illegally.  The text suggests an attempt to get around current laws, as it simply ignores the applications without formally abolishing the right itself.
  • Modi’s India as a Foretaste of Trump 2.0
    Chandra Mallampalli 16 January 2025
    January 6 marks the fourth anniversary of an unprecedented attack on the United States Capitol and American democracy. Far more than advancing “the lie” about a stolen 2020 election, the insurrectionists of January 6 presented the world with an alternative understanding of America, one arising from fears of white replacement and steeped in Christian nationalist ideas and imagery. Despite being the only twice impeached U.S. president and a convicted felon, Donald Trump not only won the last election, but also gained majorities in both the Senate and the House and made inroads into Asian, Black, and Latino American communities that typically vote Democrat. These facts should prompt us to reframe January 6 not as a shameful setback for MAGA, but as a catalyst for the movement’s onward march. To what kind of America will Trump 2.0 take us? This is where a comparative lens can be useful.
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    Lebanon’s Solidarity Beyond Politics
    Nicole Hamouche 15 January 2025
    Despite political polarization, the shared experience of closeness in adversity has solidified the foundations of vivre ensemble, a defining aspect of the Lebanese identity, “because Lebanon is the witness of history, because religions are complementary, and because the people are one,” and “our identity, despite our diversity, is Lebanese,” as stated by the newly elected President, Joseph Aoun, in his inaugural speech.
  • Joseph Aoun Takes the Helm in Lebanon: The End of the “Iranian Era”
    Riccardo Cristiano 14 January 2025
    General Joseph Aoun, until now the commander-in-chief of the army, is the new president of Lebanon. This marks the end of a dramatic, thirty-year chapter in the troubled history of this small yet crucial country. After 26 months of a presidential vacuum, his election officially brings to an end the so-called “Iranian” era, during which Hezbollah, the Party of God, not only achieved military success but also made Lebanon the Mediterranean terminal for exporting the Khomeinist revolution.
  • Silence Isn’t Neutral: How Media Coverage Frames Global Crises
    Lucia Palmioli 7 January 2025
    The lack of journalistic coverage during conflicts like the one in Rwanda is not just oversight; it is a form of media framing. Media framing is the act of selecting and organizing information to make sense of events, deciding what to highlight or omit. This inevitable practice in journalism shapes public perception and politics. Some conflicts receive extensive coverage, while others remain in the shadows.
  • Yves Mény on the Long Ascent of the Far Right
    Giancarlo Bosetti , Alessandra Tommasi 24 December 2024
    The recent European elections confirmed a trend that began in the 1990s, showing that support for far-right parties has spread like wildfire across the continent. In France, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National won 31.5 percent of the vote and reached the second round of the national legislative elections, although it ultimately lost. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party came first with 28.8 percent, while the Freedom Party of Austria also topped the polls with 25.4 percent of the preferences. Alternative for Germany achieved a startling result: Germany’s ultra-right party became the second-largest political formation (16 percent) after the CDU and ahead of Olaf Scholz’s SPD. Yves Mény, the first Director of the Robert Schuman Center at the European University Institute, delves into the political dynamics that have contributed to the rise of right-wing parties in Europe.
  • Reconstruction and Distrust: Stories Amid Lebanon’s Ceasefire
    Nicole Hamouche 23 December 2024
    After an initial sense of relief, reactions to the ceasefire among the population vary depending on one’s personal history, background, and level of awareness. If, for a population exhausted by years of repeated violence since the end of the so-called civil war—what stateman and journalist Ghassan Tueni called “the war of others”—the news of a ceasefire was significant, a page of such brutality cannot be turned in just a few days or weeks. Besides the moral damages, the bill of this war includes 4,047 killed and 16,593 injured in Lebanon since October 2023, with over 3,000 deaths in the last two months alone. Around 1.5 million people have been displaced, and destruction is concentrated in the South and in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Hezbollah’s headquarters. This comes on top of the unprecedented financial and economic crisis that has gripped the country for years, compounding the suffering.
  • Traditional Politics are Not Cutting it Anymore: Voters Need Hope
    Ivan Krastev 20 December 2024
    As someone who is not a student of American politics, I tend to relate American political developments to experiences and places that I am more familiar with. From this perspective, I’ll try to make four simple points. For a foreigner, particularly an Eastern European, who carries a significant political history in their personal biography, one of the most striking things that began to unfold in the United States—long before these most recent elections—was the intense conversation about the “last elections.” Specifically, the question of whether these could be the “last elections” in the sense of the political system being in peril. This debate became especially prominent around 2020, when the idea was first articulated.
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