Analyses
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.
  • United by geography and a long history that, since the end of the Ottoman Empire and especially during the long rule of the Assads, has taken on the characteristics of colonialism and occupation in the name of a “Greater Syria,” Lebanese and Syrians today share the same hope: that tomorrow will be different from today, putting an end to conflicts and reducing them to “wars of the past.” Reality demands this. In 2018, Lebanon’s GDP exceeded 55 billion dollars; today, it barely reaches 20 billion. One hundred thousand Lebanese pounds, which were worth 65 dollars at that time, are now worth just one. In Syria, in 2011, when the brutal repression of anti-government protests began, GDP reached 45 billion dollars; today it is only 9 billion.
  • Besa Ismaili 11 July 2025
    Three decades have passed since the genocide in Srebrenica, three decades since over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were systematically executed, while international forces, under a United Nations mandate, stood by, disabled to act.Though long delayed, the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution recognizing July 11 as the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Srebrenica Genocide marked an important, yet symbolic step toward truth-telling. It seeks to institutionalize memory, counter persistent denial, and affirm the gravity of the atrocity. Yet symbolism alone cannot substitute justice.
  • Hussein Ibish 7 July 2025
    The U.S. has never been short of hideous or harebrained legislation from both liberals and conservatives. But President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Budget Bill,” passed on Thursday by Congress, outdoes anything in living memory. In one gigantic sweep, it enacts at least four major national initiatives, each of which would alone qualify as among the most appalling legislative acts in modern American history.
  • Pegah Zohouri 4 July 2025
    Two weeks after the ceasefire that halted the twelve-day war between Israel and Iran, regional tensions remain high, and domestic reverberations within Iran continue to unfold. While the conflict briefly united a politically fragmented society, it also exposed deep structural fissures. Most Iranians rejected foreign intervention, reaffirming a longstanding scepticism rooted in historical memory and national experience. Although critical of the current system, most of them seemed to agree that meaningful and sustainable transformation could only emerge from within.  
  • It is certainly surprising that, in the middle of major international conflicts (such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the repeated massacres in Gaza, and the Israel–Iran war), the United Nations Security Council has not been able to play the role of mediation that the UN Charter contemplated. The UNSC has gathered daily, and its permanent and elected members have discussed both minor and major crises, but without being able to agree on any Resolution regarding the most important events. By itself, this would not have been a major change: in the Cold War, many UNSC Resolutions were blocked by either the USA or the USSR veto. For far too long, two major blocks operated in opposite directions: on one side, the liberal democracies led by France, the United Kingdom, and, above all, the United States, and on the opposite side, the Soviet Union – and later Russia – supported by China.
  • Ramin Jahanbegloo, one of Iran’s preeminent intellectual figures, attends the conference ‘Peace, Democracy and Human Rights in Asia’ held under the auspices of former Czech president Vaclav Havel on September 11, 2009, in Prague. Other guests of this conference are Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, former President of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Frederik Willem de Klerk, Rabiya Kadeer, head of the World Uighur Congress, Robert Menard of France, former Secretary-General of Reporters Without Bord and others philosophers and disidents.AFP PHOTO MICHAL CIZEK (Photo by MICHAL CIZEK / AFP)
  • “I’m ready to meet anyone, including Zelensky.” Vladimir Putin’s recent statement suggested a openness to renewed negotiations – though only “in the final phase.” But skepticism remains high in Kyiv and across Western capitals. The Kremlin’s latest proposal – disarmament, new elections, and ceding of occupied territories – was flatly rejected by Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia continues to escalate military pressure: just last Tuesday, it launched over 440 drones and 32 missiles in one of the most intense attacks since the war began. Against this backdrop, Reset DOC interviewed historian Yaroslav Hrytsak about Ukraine’s military position, diplomatic deadlock, Western support, and prospects for peace.
  • Hussein Ibish 16 June 2025
    It’s a real-life film noir in the City of Angels. U.S. President Donald Trump is once again hurling Americans through the looking glass, this time – fittingly – in Los Angeles. It feels lifted from 1930s hard-boiled pulp fiction in which nothing is as it appears and everything is the inverse of what powerful men assert. It’s genuinely shocking, while also seemingly inevitable, that U.S. military forces are being deployed to major cities with the express purpose of trying to intimidate, quash, and, ultimately, violently confront Americans who dare raise their voices against Mr. Trump’s policies and practices. It is one of the most significant inflection points since the last election took America on the road away from constitutional democracy and towards the kind of repressive lawlessness this President admires in other leaders and is seeking to emulate in the U.S.
  • “I’m proud to be called a normalizer by the Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliates.” That’s how Dubai-based blogger Loay Alshareef responds to attacks from across the Arab world, where the majority still oppose full recognition of the State of Israel. A practicing Muslim of Saudi origin, Alshareef doesn’t shy away from controversy: he openly defines himself as a “Zionist” and sees the Abraham Accords not as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause, but as a path to peace. On June 11, 2025, the activist and influencer took part in a roundtable discussion in Bologna, Italy, focused on combating antisemitism – an occasion on which Reset DOC spoke with him to share his views on the ongoing war in Gaza.
  • After the publication of Postliberalism: The New Politics of Meaning (2021), by Adrian Pabst, the ranks of those criticizing liberalism and liberal democracies have grown – particularly those who take upon themselves the task of moving beyond a political phase marked by discontent and the erosion of democracy on a global scale. Some authors attempt to give meaning to this “post” by framing it as an alternative to both neoliberalism and populism. These include conservative thinkers (like Patrick Deneen), religious and theologically engaged figures (like John Milbank), and others who push their critique of liberal universalism to the edge of reactionary extremism (like Yoram Hazony), to the point that they appear more anti- than post-liberal. Pabst, a British political philosopher and Catholic, represents a more moderate, reformist version of this trend. He argues that modern liberalism has exhausted its capacity to give meaning to political, social, and economic life – because radical individualism, combined with a socially unbound market and a technocratic state, has reduced the human being to a consumer.
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