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.
  • 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.
  • In a Post-Liberal System, What Fills the Void of Solidarity?
    James D. Hunter 20 December 2024
    The polarization of different common culture is emerging, but tragically, it is not one that fosters unity. Instead, it is a culture of nihilism, driven by a logic of ressentiment—a narrative of injury that seeks revenge through a will to power. This culture’s negations, as Rieff once put it, lead to a nothingness that can be both radical and reactionary at the same time. The challenge of meaningful and effective governance under such conditions is immense, if not impossible. All of this is true in its own right. Add to it the multiple crises of global poverty, rogue states with nuclear weapons, climate change, mass immigration, and an increasingly unstable international order, and the stakes become even higher. My argument is that we are at a moment when the answers to these fundamental questions about the vitality and longevity of liberal democracy can no longer be taken for granted—not because of our polarization, but because we no longer have the cultural resources to navigate what divides us.
  • Disempowered State, Disempowered Citizens
    Michael Sandel 20 December 2024
    The discontent afflicting democracy stems from two main sources. One is a pervasive sense of disempowerment—a feeling among many that their voices no longer matter, that they lack a meaningful role in shaping the forces that govern their lives. In the United States, ahead of this election,  85 percent of Americans told pollsters they believed their voices did not matter to those in power. The other is the widespread sense that the moral fabric of community is unraveling—from family to neighborhood to the nation.
  • Mona Harb on Lebanon’s Fragile Ceasefire and the Road to a New President
    Alessandra Tommasi 17 December 2024
    On November 28, 2024, a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon began, announced by US President Joe Biden as “designed to be permanent.” However, strikes continue to devastate southern Lebanon. Just days ago, Tel Aviv declared a partial troop withdrawal but refrained from a full pullback as part of the truce. Amid this fragile peace, set against Lebanon’s severe economic and political crises, we reached out to Mona Harb, Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut.
  • After the Exodus: The Hong Kong Diaspora Engaging in UK Politics
    Owen Au 3 December 2024
    Hong Kong, once a vibrant city celebrated as an international financial hub, is now witnessing a significant new wave of mass exodus. While official data on the scale of this migration is unavailable, estimates suggest that between 200,000 and 500,000 people have left the city over the past few years. Hong Kong has long been familiar with migration; cross-border employment and split families are nothing new to Hongkongers. However, the mass migration taking place is still something worth a glance at – not only because of the factors driving it but also because, for the first time, it has created a Hong Kong diaspora.
  • The Gaza Massacres: A Suicide for Israel?
    Alessandra Tommasi 22 November 2024
    “The siege. The hunger. Innocent children, the first victims of war. […] Why does God allow harm to be done to children? […] It pairs with another insoluble question: how could God allow the Holocaust? Children were the first to be sent to the gas chambers. The only thing that should be clear to everyone is that a Palestinian child is worth exactly the same as a Jewish child.” From the biblical massacres of the innocent to the war in Gaza. This is how Macellerie – Guerre atroci e paci ambigue (“Slaughterhouses – Atrocious wars and ambiguous peace,” by Siegmund Ginzberg begins, a book that profiles a violent humanity through conflicts and atrocities in history, from the Warring States period in China to today’s wars. Ginzberg, a journalist and essayist born in Turkey to a Jewish family, is not alone in taking a stand in recent weeks. Historian Anna Foa, “a Jew of the diaspora,” explores the “same pain for both sides”—the victims of October 7, the Israeli hostages, and the civilians killed in Gaza—in her book, Il Suicidio di Israele.
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