The wave of popular uprisings that spread across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in late 2010 brought together a number of societal actors that have since pushed for a significant transformation of their countries. Civil society movements have been at the forefront of this change. However, they currently struggle to define their role and face many obstacles. This Issue Brief explores th...

Scholarly logic holds that revolutionary movements are unlikely to break out in democracies, where citizens may simply remove unpopular leaders through elections. And yet the twenty-first century has witnessed a global series of uprisings against regimes nominally democratic—in they regularly hold competitive elections—but otherwise deeply broken, run by kleptocratic networks elites who often f...

yahyaal-samawi, iraqi poet, is one of the most prominent figures of resistance literature and contemporary arabic poetry. al-samawi defended his motherland with his poems, and in this course he went through torture, adversary, and moving out of his land. he started writing his resistance poems during ba’athist rule in iraq under saddam. he played an important role in opposing saddamists’ misgui...

he year 2011 was one of remarkable and uneven transition in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Mass uprisings in cities in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya brought about changes in governments; protests have quelled in Bahrain, Syria and Yemen; and cautious reforms were introduced in Saudi Arabia. The situation remains very fluid, but there is a consensus that 2011 ushered in a period of f...