Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Usman Butt
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Why the Assad regime will continue to destabilise Syria
Over the summer of 2019, observers of events in Syria were left bemused by the news that Rami Makhlouf had been placed under house arrest. It simply didn’t make any sense. Makhlouf is President Bashar Al-Assad’s cousin, a member of his regime’s inner sanctum who has been instrumental in keeping…
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Democracy in Lebanon
For the past few weeks, Lebanon has been rocked by anti-government protests calling for a change in the ruling system and an end to corruption, economic decay and political stagnation. Analysts are trying to understand how the country has reached this position. They would do well to read the new…
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Authoritarianism means instability, so Arab regimes need to be challenged
What is the difference between a democratic society and a dictatorship? In a nutshell, a death in a democracy is a personal tragedy, but in a dictatorship it is a political crisis. To grasp this core point is to understand the basic design flaw within autocratic governance; while democracy limits…
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The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History
The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History by Ross Caputi, Richard Hil and Donna Mulhearn makes for chilling reading as it takes us inside the three sieges that the Iraqi city of Fallujah was subjected to following the 2003 US-led invasion. Unlike other accounts of the torment inflicted upon the…
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Assad or We Burn The Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria
It is not usual to begin a book review with a quote from elsewhere, but, “Bad men need nothing more to compress their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing,” as nineteenth century English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill remarked, is the initial feeling that I…
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Our Women on the Ground: A Review
“When ISIS soldiers arrest me and kill me, it will be okay, because while they will cut off my head, I’ll still have dignity, which is better than living in humiliation.” This was the last daring Facebook post of Ruqia Hasan, a citizen journalist based in the Syrian city of…
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Remembering the 1979 Iranian Revolution
On 1 February 1979, Air France flight 4721 landed at Tehran’s Mehrabad International Airport at 09:27. On board were 120 international journalists and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini had been exiled by the Shah’s regime for 15 years, first to Turkey, Iraq and then to France. His return was prompted by…
