Analyses
Cuba’s Twin Embargoes
Donato Di Santo 2 September 2026
For decades, Latin America’s authoritarian regimes were seen as a right-wing phenomenon, with Cuba as the lone exception — a dictatorship born not from a betrayal of democracy, but of revolution. As Washington’s embargo returns to the headlines, this piece asks what that framing has long obscured: that Cuba has never had just one embargo, but two.
  • Iran: Bazaar Merchants’ Protests Shake the Regime
    Renzo Guolo 5 January 2026
    The protests over Iran’s economic crisis are putting the regime under severe strain. They risk acting as a detonator for an already highly unstable mix: the heavy impact of sanctions, the collapse of the rial to historic lows against the dollar, and an unprecedented energy and water crisis. These factors, compounded by systemic inefficiencies, are driving inflation to around 40 percent year on year. Taking to the streets are Tehran’s bazaar merchants, a group long decisive in determining whether power in Iran holds or collapses.
  • The Fragile Balance between Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Assad Syria
    Emanuele Valenti 2 January 2026
    “They arrived without warning and began killing people based on a single question: ‘Are you Sunni or Alawite?’ If you answered Alawite, you were dead.” Nine months on, Samir, 68, still struggles to talk about what happened last March in Baniyas, a town on Syria’s Mediterranean coast where hundreds of people were killed—almost all from the Alawite community, which until a few months earlier had been the Assads’ core base of support. Across the wider region, at least 1,500 people were killed.
  • Venezuela and the New U.S. National Security Strategy
    Andre Diniz Pagliarini 17 December 2025
    For months, U.S. naval forces have been gathering off Venezuela’s coast. The warships, the bomber flyovers, and the rising volume from Washington are not incidental. The likelihood of an actual intervention is not incidental. It is in line with the administration’s recently presented geopolitical priorities. The new National Security Strategy, released earlier this month, explicitly elevates the Western Hemisphere as a central arena of U.S. national security, linking migration, narcotics trafficking, and regional instability to the defense of the homeland.
  • Pluralism “Anchored in Islam”: A Tribute to Abdulaziz Sachedina
    Mohammed Hashas 15 December 2025
    On December 3, 2025, the international community of Islamic Studies lost one of its most erudite and humane members: Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina. Like many scholars, I first encountered Sachedina through his writings on Islamic pluralism and ethics—fields closely aligned with my own interest in modern and contemporary Islamic thought. His strong conviction that Islamic teachings are and will remain highly relevant for Muslim and non-Muslim societies, if reasonably and honestly contextualized, is evident in his major works. Among these are The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (2000), Islamic Biomedical Ethics (2009), and Islamic Ethics (2022).
  • Kassab: “After Gaza, the West is No Longer the Normative Center”
    Giancarlo Bosetti , Alessandra Tommasi 11 December 2025
    As wars, repression, and social upheavals continue to reshape the Middle East, philosopher Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies argues that the region’s dominant intellectual traditions failed to grasp the needs and priorities of the societies they sought to interpret. For decades, leading Arab thinkers focused on questions of identity and heritage while citizens were confronting repression, economic hardship, and crumbling political structures. The 2011 uprisings exposed how wide this gap had grown—and the devastation of Gaza, Kassab warns, has made it impossible to ignore.
  • Incorporating 2011 into the Syllabus of Arab Intellectual History
    Idriss Jebari 2 December 2025
    For those who teach Arab intellectual history in Western universities, the Arab Spring has hung over the curriculum like the sword of Damocles. What meaning should we ascribe to this event? Does it follow logically from the previous episodes, their ideological themes, and intellectual figures? Or was it a revolutionary break of such magnitude that it risks rendering the whole course obsolete? In the age of “learning aims,” “real-world relevance,” and course evaluations, instructors have had to take a position, despite the ongoing and unresolved nature of the Arab Spring. Some disciplines, such as MENA politics, may have clearer ways of drawing conclusions about its repercussions. What of the Arab intellectual scene?
  • The Possibility of “Soft Universalism”
    Sari Hanafi 1 December 2025
    I read Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab’s essay with great interest, as well as Mohammed Hashas’s thoughtful response. Kassab rightly calls for the emergence of a new contemporary Arab thought—one less culturalist and more attuned to people’s demands for freedom, dignity, accountability of rulers, and social justice.
  • Radical Change beyond the Arab World? A Reply to Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab
    Mohammed Hashas 27 November 2025
    When the “Arab Spring” erupted in December 2010, its aspirations were ambitious: liberty, dignity, and social justice. But the democratic backlash in Tunisia, the coup d’état in Egypt, and civil wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and more recently Sudan, have left little doubt that the Spring devolved into a nightmare, a failure of what began as pacifist demonstrations for change. The Arab monarchies and emirates, meanwhile, absorbed the protests quickly through a mix of measures, from modest constitutional reforms to expanded subsidies for the unemployed and the poor.
  • On a Shifting Intellectual Scene: A Response to Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab
    Harald Viersen 21 November 2025
    In her recent contribution to Reset DOC, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab echoes this sentiment, as she sketches an ambitious and important project to map the changes that the last decade and a half of upheaval in the Arab world has wrought in the intellectual scene. She describes what has been brewing in these circles as “new contemporary” Arab thought, contrasting it to the merely contemporary thought of the period between the 1960s and the beginnings of the Arab Spring in 2011 that she chronicled earlier in her comprehensive survey published in 2010.
  • The Arab Spring as a Turning Point
    Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab 12 November 2025
    Undoubtedly, 2011 was a turning point in the history of the Arab region. The 2011 popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and, to a lesser extent, Morocco, were followed by another wave of such uprisings in Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon in 2019. The genocidal war raging in Gaza since 2023 has taken the region to a yet deeper abyss in existential, moral, political, and economic terms. How have thinkers of the region been interacting with these upheavals? How have these dramatic events impacted the intellectual scene of the region?
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