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The nature of Tuesday’s explosion in the port of Beirut and the extent of the damage across the city and beyond is not yet clear. There are plenty of unconfirmed reports and it is hard to take official statements as transparent. That being said, the effects of the explosion were felt across the ..

The municipal system has been a key pillar of debates on administrative decentralization, economic development and political participation in Lebanon. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, activists sought to stop the demolition of the 1924 Barakat Building on the basis that it was a heritage s..

The political economy of Jordan today is characterized by greater degrees of authoritarianism and neoliberalism than was the case in 2010. Yet two trends in knowledge production on Jordan seem to claim otherwise. The first of these trends privileges narrowly defined security concerns. The second..

The victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Rodham Clinton in the US presidential elections has sent a shock wave across the United States, the Americas, and indeed the world. However, the particular reverberations of this shock take on very different manifestations depending on geographic location..

On the morning of Sunday 25 September 2016, a gunman shot Jordanian writer and opposition figure Nahed Hattar outside of the Jordanian Palace of Justice. At the request of Prime Minister Hani al-Mulki, the government accused Hattar of “inciting sectarian strife” and “insulting religion” and issu..

In late July 2015, mounds of garbage began piling up across Beirut and the towns of Mount Lebanon to the capital’s east. While not without precedent in poorer neighborhoods, such heaps of rubbish had never appeared in more affluent areas. By mid-August, Lebanese government officials, businesspeo..

In a matter of days this past month, the Jordanian legislature moved rapidly to substantially concentrate official government power in the institution of the monarch. The cabinet introduced a set of constitutional amendments on 18 April 2016. On 27 April and 2 May, the lower and upper house..

On 24 December 2014, ISIS reported and the US-led coalition confirmed that a Jordanian fighter pilot, Mu‘ath al-Kassasbeh, had crashed in Syria and was now in ISIS custody. On 3 February 2015, ISIS released a video showing its own members murdering the pilot by immolation. The Jordanian regime <..

[What follows are some preliminary findings on the history of the electricity sector of Lebanon in general and that of Beirut in particular. Such research forms part of a broader project on the history of struggles over the political economy of Lebanon, within which the issue of electric publ..

There is no doubt that the toppling of President Mohamed Morsi on 3 July 2013 was a watershed event in Egyptian history. On the one hand, it demonstrated the continued possibility of mass collective action seeking political change through contentious rather than formal political channels. On the..

On 23 January 2013, elections were held for the seventeenth parliament of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. During the past several months, the monarchy and its allies hailed the 2013 parliamentary elections in Jordan as both the symbol and litmus test of the

On Tuesday, 13 November 2012, protesters took to the streets across several cities in Jordan. The immediate spark for the protests was the government’s announcement that it would cut fuel subsidies as a means of addressing its budget deficit and securing a two billion dollar loan from th..

The following is the second and final installement in a two-part interview on the history and politics of the Jordanian regime. The interview was conducted during the first two weeks of August 2012 with Tariq Tell, a Jordanian scholar and..