Analyses
Middle East
The End of the Hezbollah Ambiguity? Lebanon’s Negotiating Moment
Riccardo Cristiano 25 June 2026
Small, economically hollowed out by years of devastating crisis and torn apart by a war that is slowly erasing its southern flank, Lebanon has never mattered more to the world than it does right now. With only weeks left to settle their accounts, the Americans and Iranians opened their Swiss negotiations with a bitter, hours-long quarrel—over Lebanon. Only once Iran had extracted something on the Lebanese front—a tacit acknowledgment of its role as the country’s patron—did the two sides find a way to get to the matters that were really theirs to discuss. Tehran clearly sees Lebanon as an extension of itself: proof of its regional reach, recognition of which it is determined to secure—and to some degree, it has.
  • Between Iran and the West: The Global Making of Marjane Satrapi
    Pegah Zohouri 24 June 2026
    In an age increasingly dominated by simplified narratives about identity and geopolitics, Satrapi insisted on complexity. She reminded readers that a people is never identical to its government, just as a life can never be reduced to a political category. Instead, she sought to humanize Iranians and reclaim the complexity of everyday life. That is why her work continues to resonate today: not because it explains Iran once and for all, but because it demonstrates how individual lives can illuminate history better than ideological certainties ever could. In a world increasingly drawn to black-and-white visions of politics and identity, the artist who drew almost exclusively in black and white devoted her life to revealing the shades of grey.
  • Gaza Stuck in a Limbo of Trump’s New Personalist Global Order
    Claudia De Martino 31 March 2026
    In an article published in January in Foreign Affairs, two researchers analyze the extreme volatility of the current global order, arguing that in the age of personalist politics key foreign policy decisions—especially those involving great powers and nuclear-armed states—depend largely on the whims and obsessions of individual leaders, rather than on stable institutions or long-term strategies. In this new global order, instability is the norm, because decisions no longer correspond to long-term strategic expectations and interests, but are the result of impulsive choices unconstrained by institutional considerations and commitments. This dynamic is illustrated by what is not happening in Gaza, which has officially entered the ‘phase two’ of the twenty-point peace plan launched by US President Donald Trump—a plan that was supposed to ensure the Strip’s demilitarization, a technocratic government, and the long-awaited beginning of reconstruction.
  • New Arab Intellectual Producers Redefining the Vocabulary of Critique
    Alaa Badr 30 March 2026
    Writing about post-revolutionary intellectuals in Egypt and beyond, I once borrowed Zeina Halabi’s notion of the “aftermath.” An aftermath of a Naksa twice removed—first the 1967 defeat, then that of 2011—even if the content of critique differed greatly. Can one extend the definition of the 2011 aftermath to the post-October 7 world? Certainly, if not only due to their belonging to the same historical period, then it is because they share ontological and epistemological roots. The post-October 7 can be described as the aftermath of the aftermath, a time suspended, where the old (tools of critiques and references of universalism) is dead, and the new is stillborn—a present that is perpetually “condemned to become.”
  • War with Pakistan Marks the Taliban’s Weakest Moment Since 2021
    Vittorio Sandalli 27 March 2026
    While international attention is focused on the war with Iran—due to its implications for the global energy market and the threat of a potentially devastating escalation—fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan has resumed with unprecedented intensity in the adjacent region. Such a clash would have been unthinkable when the Taliban returned to power on August 15, 2021, reestablishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, in part thanks to Islamabad’s support.
  • The Paradox of Trump’s War: Against Iran and Common Sense
    Ramin Jahanbegloo 12 March 2026
    What, then, can humanity do in the face of this lack of common sense on both sides? Perhaps the only way to stop this war and the spread of violence across the Middle East is a shared commitment to peace and to the value of human life, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. We need a minimal morality that could inspire opposition to Iranian tyranny, alongside a strong turn toward common sense—on that recalls the American tradition of civic virtue: the dedication of citizens to the common good and placing public duty above self-interest. Believe it or not, Iranian civil society today is closer to some of the values of the American Revolution than some of those who work in Washington, D.C. and wage wars to expand their capacity to make war. If the 2003 war in Iraq was unjust, the war against Iran is a war against common sense—and against the civic virtues of the Iranian people.
  • A U.S. Attack on Iran Would Redefine Global Shiism
    Pasquale Annicchino 24 February 2026
    The recent large-scale deployment of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Europe has led many analysts to question whether a military intervention in Iran is on the horizon—and what its short- and long-term consequences might be. An action capable of bringing about the collapse of the Islamic Republic would open political and religious scenarios with global ramifications.
  • Staying With Uncertainty: Syrian Intellectual Life in Germany
    Anne-Marie McManus 29 January 2026
    In a recent essay published by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations, Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab called on scholars to attend closely to the forms and concerns that shape contemporary Arab thought, locating its newness in the uprisings of 2011 and the ruptures that followed. In his response, included in the broader dossier, Samer Frangie cautioned that the category of “Arab thought” functions as a “historiographical device,” one that has brought together “dispersed, contradictory, and elusive acts of” intellectual production under a shared political horizon. He thus reorients the question towards periodization: is it still meaningful—and for whom—to reinvigorate this category as a way of making sense of the present?
Load more