Democratisation & Human Rights

"I had an agreement with Khidr that he write me a daily report and as a consequence his letters are a journal of life that we on the outside never lived, a life lived at a temperature warm enough to revive what is human in us. That is the definition of the revolution that we set up as our figurehead, the meaning for whose sake we once gave so much."

When the graffitied slogan Ben Ali Degage (“Ben Ali, get out!”) made its first appearance in Tunisia, Ben Ali himself failed to take it seriously. How could he have known that the Arab Spring had begun and that the people of the Arab world had decided to bring down their regimes? The people rose up, and graffiti came to the public squares to help them as they tried to break apart the foundations of the regimes that ruled them.  

The arts that emerged during the Syrian revolution are unrelated to the “politically committed art” that so dominates our impressions of the 1970s and 1980s in the Arab world. What has emerged, down alleyways and cramped public squares, is a creativity unburdened by ideology, which treats national issues as a tool to obtain freedom and not self-contained and self-sufficient issues of identity.

The global race to develop and acquire the latest war technologies has become central to nations’ goals since the end of the nineteenth century. Concurrent to this competition for the most modern implements of violence, parties in conflicts show no hesitance in resorting to one of the oldest – and most primitive – war weapons: rape. In wars, rape has been used as a tool to go beyond the physical and military defeat of the enemy, to subdue a society politically and morally. Perpetrators of such sexual and gender based atrocities on women, and increasingly on men and young male children, continue to be undeterred in spite of the development and states’ ratification of international instruments and conventions aimed at the protection of civilians during armed conflict. Such violations are now being reported from Syria, a country whose people stood up to a dictatorship that has reigned for over four decades. The present article, written by psycho-therapist Dr. Jamal Khalil Sobh, sheds light on the repeated war crime of rapes of women, including the recent tragic incidents in Syria.

Since March 15, Syrian culture has been steadily revealing itself to the Syrian people, and with it, its torch bearers: the intellectuals themselves. The moment in Old Damascus, which saw a number of young cultural types gather together to protest, marked the moment that we realized that the Syrian intellectual—whether theorist or observer, politician or writer—must assume his rightful place in the street or at least, keep step with it. Did Syrian Intellects succeeded in fulfilling this task?

Padre Paolo D’Oglio wrote that, “Rulers only resort to media misinformation when the people begin to emerge—if only superficially—as a social will within the historical process." How is this reflected in Syria today?

Tradition and Emancipation are two important poles influencing the societal acceptance of women's soccer in Lebanon. in this article, the author examines this influence through a number of interviews, observations and narratives.

This article takes a different approach to electoral law, re-examining the critical questions being asked in an effort to shed light on the challenges confronting the process of reform in general, and electoral reform in particular.