Social Justice Lecture

A lecture: the Arab revolutions are a critique-in-practice of neoliberalism—the World Bank forgot about job creation, and "we are ruled by Ali Baba and the forty thieves—and they don't even reach forty."

اليمن في عين العاصفة

Yemen in the Eye of the Storm

Bidayat

The richest Arab states bomb the poorest — the Gulf Initiative destroyed Yemen by pardoning the dictator. Camp David summit: an arms fair, not a diplomatic forum.

النفط في المِخيال العربي تقاسيم على مقام السوائل

Oil in the Arab Imaginary: Variations on the Mode of Liquids

Bidayat

Oil is the devil's urine, said Judge al-Hajari — then drank deeply of it. Variations on the mode of liquids: water, tears, semen, blood, and oil.

البحرين: نصحية الملك ولؤلؤة الشعب

Bahrain: The King's Advice and the People's Pearl

As-Safir

The king justifies emergency because protests "frightened women" — his pearl: advising Assad to listen to his people.

Our Lady of the Rocks

A literary text on Dhofar: a Freudian slip of the camera turned a shepherdess into a madonna — the tubercular woman asks for medicine from strangers who carry everything except what helps, and the unknown name endures across wars and exiles.

Social Justice is back? – Princeton lecture

Is social justice back? Neoliberalism banned it for a quarter century—and the Arab revolutions brought it back with "The people want": a return to the concepts of the national liberation phase.

اليمن: حتى لا تخلف القبيلةُ… القبيلة

Yemen: Lest the Tribe Succeed... the Tribe

As-Safir

As Saleh's rule collapses, Yemen faces the risk of its revolution becoming a mere tribal power struggle, replacing one ruler with another from the same family instead of achieving the people's will.

AHDR: a critique

300 books translated per year is an unreliable figure—and culture is used to mask neoliberal agendas: unemployment cannot be solved by translation but by productive economies. The Alexandria Charter is a shopping list, not a roadmap.

Was the Iraq War Inevitable?

Was the war inevitable? Saddam knew there were no WMD yet procrastinated—and our rulers follow Machiavelli in repression but fail to uncover traps like the fox.