On 4 August a massive explosion shook Beirut port when a neglected storehouse of ammonium nitrate blew up, catapulting Lebanon onto the front pages of the global media. The volatile chemical was being stored next to the country’s main grain… Continue Reading
On 2 April 2019, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to resign.1 In scarcely more than one month, a massive popular movement that had emerged for the first time on 22 February managed to get rid of the ageing and… Continue Reading
From Algiers to Beirut and Baghdad to Khartoum, it appears that revolution is once again “the choice of the people”—as a slogan echoed by tens of thousands on protests in Sudan puts it.1 Meanwhile, the temperature of social and political… Continue Reading
In March 2011 the Arab Spring arrived in Syria. Syrians had lived under the totalitarianism of the Asad family, first with the father, Hafez al-Asad (1971-2000), followed by the son, Bashaar al-Asad, for 40 years.1 This included a state of… Continue Reading
On 9 November 2014 Palestinian activists in villages near Jerusalem made a symbolic breach in Israel’s apartheid wall, their way of marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.1 The Palestinian Popular Resistance Committees said: “No matter… Continue Reading
The military coup of July 2013 was a serious setback for the revolutionary movement in Egypt.1 For army leader Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi it was an act of rescuing the revolution: for Egypt’s radical activists it was a counter-revolutionary offensive aimed to… Continue Reading
A striking feature of Egypt’s Revolution is the extraordinary number of people engaged in struggles in the streets and workplaces, and in formal and informal organisations. The absolute numbers, together with the proportion of the population involved and the continuity… Continue Reading
For 35 years Egypt was a laboratory for neoliberalism—a local state in which hegemonic world powers and financial institutions played out their strategies for the global economy. It was also a stage on which the United States and its allies… Continue Reading
The Arab revolutions have been a great inspiration for the struggle against capitalism and imperialism across the world. They have inspired and fed into a global mood of alienation and anger against the system as expressed in strikes, occupations and… Continue Reading
“It is midnight in Cairo”, intoned the BBC reporter on the Ten O’ Clock News bulletin, “and still tens of thousands are in Tahrir Square. One chant echoes again and again: ‘Go, go, go’. But this time it is not… Continue Reading