August-September Edition of The Middle East in London Hits Newsstands
1 August 2011
The August-September edition of The Middle East in London, the bimonthly magazine of the London Middle East Institute, is now out.
The magazine is a leading resource on Middle Eastern communities in London. It includes event, film and book reviews, as well as original articles on cultural, political, economic and other issues that affect these communities.
The summer heat has been beating down harshly on the flowers that blossomed during the Arab Spring. It has had a withering effect on the sense of possibility and empowerment that was generated throughout the region by the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.
In both places, exhilaration has given way to the realisation that the hard part of the struggle to effect real change still lies ahead. The contagion has not stopped spreading, with every Arab country feeling the effects in some way. But the story today is more about the forces of counterrevolution.
Everywhere, it seems, the march of people-power is being impeded by a combination of regime fight-back (employing various means of both coercion and co-optation), social divisions (expertly manipulated by power elites) and foreign or regional interference (whether outwardly humanitarian or nakedly self-interested). A region that looked poised for a remarkable transformation now finds itself caught in the throes of escalated repression, for all the talk of dialogue and reform, and of actual or threatened civil war or external military intervention. And the Western reaction, as Roger Hardy points out in this edition, has been confused and inconsistent.
But as Gilbert Achcar reminds us elsewhere in the magazine, this is a process that will take years to unfold and whose outcomes and consequences are impossible to foretell. Perhaps nowhere more so than in the countries of the Levant, with their intertwined histories, populations and politics, on whose southern tier – Jordan and Palestine – this issue of The Middle East in London focuses.
Here, the Arab Spring has become unavoidably bound up with the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as Mariam Adas illustrates in her article on Jordanian youth. And although a peaceful resolution to that conflict seems ever more elusive, hope springs from various sources: Victor Kattan draws it from the forthcoming bid to secure international recognition of Palestinian statehood; Hilary Wise from shifting public opinion in the West; and Ursula Owen from the sheer resilience of Palestinians living under occupation. How the broader hopes raised by the Arab Spring play out remains to be seen.
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