Publications

What does the political participation of women look like within the immense diversity of the Arabic world? This edition of the Heinrich Boell Foundation’s series on Democracy analyzes the historical and current developments of gender relationships, and the role of women in the politics of Egypt, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait.

One of the most important focal points of overlapping and competing interests of both established and emerging powers is the Middle East. This region is an arena where the new rules of the game are being developed and acted out. This publication attempts looking at the effects of the global shift of power on the Middle East to explore the perspectives of the region to become a partner in an emerging multi-polar system, rather than a stomping ground or even a battlefield for the interest and the prestige of others.  With contributions by Azmi Bishara, Parag Khanna, Hermann Schwengel, Vitaly Naumkin, Ibrahim Saif, Yasmeen Tabaa, Sven Behrendt, Mingjiang LI, Praful Bidwai, Ziad Abdel Samad, and Kinda Mohamadieh.

 As the six-year transitional period defined in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement draws to a close, Sudan is sliding into another crisis. The Heinrich Böll Foundation, which has been working both with civil society partners in Sudan and on Sudan-related issues in the German context for several years, has put together this publication in order to reflect on such scenarios. With contributions by Alex de Waal, Atta El-Battahani, Marina Peter, John Yoh, Roland Marchal, and Peter Schumann.

This conference was held on November 2-3, 2007 and tackled the darker side of the environment-conflict-nexus, but also the opportunities for find common ground over environmental issues.

The myth of nuclear power keeps persevering. Therefore the Heinrich Böll Foundation has commissioned renowned international nuclear experts to deliver detailed facts central to the myths of nuclear energy. This overview provides the public with a current, facts rich and nuclear-critical know-how.

From Baghdad, to Istanbul, to Dhaka, violence and grief are devastating. Every location, every city we have lived in, or walked through, or dreamed of, or even never known or heard of seems to be crumbling under the weight of centuries of inequalities and occupations and homegrown oppressions. As new geographies start to emerge, our atlas of the world is shaken by horrid images, to which we become a bit more immune every day. Despite my discomfort with universalizing frameworks, I cannot but recognize that violence, bombings, police brutality, crackdowns, shootings, incarceration, torture, and wars are pervasive, no matter where we go. And we live with the overpowering realization that no place is safe for non-white, working class bodies.“Beyond Victims and Savages: The Complexities of Violence, Resistance, and Pleasure” could not be more timely.

From 1975 to 1990, different factions in Lebanon’s civil conflict flooded the streets with posters to mobilize their constituencies, undermine their enemies, and create public sympathy for their cause. This is how the military performance on the front lines and on demarcation lines was in junction with another kind of conflict rotating around the image and words and the symbolic claiming of territory and land.

This book, written by a woman of the Bedouin community in the Lebanese Bekaa valley, is a compendium of some of the Bedouin tales (Sawalef) orally transmitted in the Abu Eid community. The tales are recounted in Bedouin dialect. By making public some of the oral history of that community, the books sheds light on the life of the marginalized Bedouins of Lebanon.

Homosexuality is a subject that induced the persecution of a lot of individuals and the shed of their blood. The situation in Lebanon is not as dangerous as in other countries in the Arab world for those individuals whose sexual orientation does not comply with that of the majority, but it is not less serious. Threats of death, humiliations, blackmails, attacks, marginalization, discriminations, rejections, depressions, suicide attempts, shame, guilt, emotional life ruined, isolation, are in great majority the load of the openly or clandestinely homosexual persons living in homophobic societies.