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Rosie Bsheer
Advocacy, Uprising, and Authoritarianism in Bahrain: An Interview With Ahmed Al-Haddad
![[Ahmed al-Haddad.]](/content_images/3/sm_Ahmed.jpg "[Ahmed al-Haddad.]")
Almost two years after the beginning of the February 14 uprising, the Bahraini regime is still struggling to crush the ongoing political and civil rights movement, all the while working to rehabilitate Bahrain’s “tainted” image. Media blackouts, relentless surveillance and scare tactics, arbitrary detentions, anti-protester violence, and expensive Public Relations campaigns have become daily occurrences. Yet on 20 January 2013, Bahraini authorities met with Amnesty ...
Keep Reading »Saudi Revolutionaries: An Interview
![[Eastern Province Revolution logo]](/content_images/3/sm_cn_thawra.png "[Eastern Province Revolution logo]")
What is happening in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia? The Saudi media empire, coupled with its security apparatus, has to a large extent succeeded in preventing developments in Qatif from reaching the world. The Saudi regime has also resorted to a multipronged counter-revolutionary campaign in the last year in order to suppress the uprising there. Despite attempting to co-opt religious and political figures, exerting economic pressure on civilians, imposing blockades on ...
Keep Reading »ثوار السعودية: مقابلة مع منظمي صفحة ثوار المنطقة الشرقية
ما الذي يحدث في المنطقة الشرقية في الممكلة العربية السعودية؟ لقد نجحت الأمبراطورية الإعلامية التي تمتكلها المملكة، بالتعاون مع جهازها الأمني، في منع وصول أخبار التطورات في القطيف إلى العالم إلى حد بعيد. كما لجأ النظام السعودي إلى حملة مضادة للثورة متعددة الاتجاهات لقمع الانتفاضة في العام الماضي. وعلى الرغم من محاولات شراء شخصيات سياسية ودينية، وممارسة ضغوط اقتصادية على المدنيين، وفرض الحصار على القطيف وجوارها، واستعمال الذخيرة الحية لتفريق المتظاهرين، بقي الثوار في القطيف ...
Keep Reading »Political Imaginaries in Saudi Arabia: Revolutionaries without A Revolution
![[Graffiti on a main street in Qatif. Image by Rosie Bsheer]](/content_images/3/sm_graffitinimr.jpg "[Graffiti on a main street in Qatif. Image by Rosie Bsheer]")
The contemporary Saudi-led counterrevolution, fierce as it has been throughout the Arab world, is perhaps most relentless inside the Kingdom’s own borders. US-trained and armed security forces have been dispatched more thoroughly throughout the country to thwart any potential signs of public gatherings or protests. In the last year alone, at least eight Saudi nationals have been killed for partaking in public protests. This is in addition to the unrelenting police brutality ...
Keep Reading »Is Bahrain Back to Normal?
![[One of the Friday March 25th protests in Bahrain. Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_197524_149809001749112_100001600397940_306991_2568804_n.jpg "[One of the Friday March 25th protests in Bahrain. Image from unknown archive]")
“Your remarkable and unflinching efforts have protected the lives of innocent people, restored order and maintained security and stability across Bahrain,” Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa praised security forces on Friday March 25th for bringing life in Bahrain back to “normal.” As he thanked his dedicated forces for “creating conditions that are favorable for a national dialogue,” riot police were being deployed to put down some twenty-five small, peaceful protests ...
Keep Reading »Saudi Arabia's Week of Shame
![[Image from www.alriyadh.com]](/content_images/3/sm_19-1.jpg "[Image from www.alriyadh.com]")
Since King Abdullah returned to Riyadh last month, members of his ruling family have resorted to myriad political, economic, and personal measures to prevent public expressions of dissent against the Al Saud. The Ministry of Interior issued a statement warning that any act of public protest is prohibited in Saudi Arabia and punishable by law. The country’s senior ulema were quick to legitimize this criminalization of protest with religious justifications, reminding everyone ...
Keep Reading »Agency and Its Discontents: Between Al Saud's Paternalism and the Awakening of Saudi Youth
Public life has been calmer than usual in Saudi Arabia for the last month. Invigorated by the people’s revolutionary movements in Tunisia and Egypt and anxious about the increasing violence in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen, Saudis have been following the news obsessively, perhaps for the first time in a decade. Salon talk has also shifted to serious discussions of the less than ideal role the Saudi government has played in the historic regional developments we are witnessing ...
Keep Reading »Celebrations Shake Saudi Capital
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_President-barack-obama-with-King-Abdullah-of-Saudi-Arabia.jpg "[Image from unknown archive]")
Tonight, We Are All Egyptian. For the first time in decades, Arabs the world over will unite in celebration, not in protest against this imperial war or the next. We will dwell in victory, not in the shadows of yesteryear’s defeats. We will pontificate the future and its many possibilities, not arguments against the mere idea of “what went wrong.” For some time to come, we will see Egyptians for the heroes that they are, and ignore that their laborers will continue to ...
Keep Reading »Saudi Arabia's Silent Protests
![[Saudis protesting their overdue land grants at Shaqra' Municipality. Image taken from www.alriyadh.com]](/content_images/3/sm_SaudisProtestingDelinquentLandGrantatShaqraMunicipality.jpg "[Saudis protesting their overdue land grants at Shaqra' Municipality. Image taken from www.alriyadh.com]")
Riyadh feels a little less stale since the Tunisian people toppled their dictator-president Zine El Abidine Bin Ali on 15 January 2011. In cafes, restaurants, and salons (majalis), friends and colleagues greet me with a smug smile, congratulations, and a ‘u’balna kulna (may we all be next). On my daily afternoon walks, I overhear Saudis of all ages and walks of life analyzing the events that led to the overthrow of the Tunisian regime. Everywhere I go, people are ...
Keep Reading »It’s Not The Morality Police, Stupid
![[Al Hai'a Headquarters in Mecca: Image From occident.blogspot.com]](/content_images/3/sm_Al-HaiaheadquartersinMecca.takenfromoccident.blogspot.comoccident.blogspot.com.jpg "[Al Hai'a Headquarters in Mecca: Image From occident.blogspot.com]")
It is becoming increasingly more common to blame Saudi Arabia’s social, economic, and political ills solely on Wahabiyya and its official enforcers, the Commission for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, also known as al hai’a, al mutawa’a, or simply the morality police. In Washington D.C., London, Beirut, Damascus, or Riyadh, we learn that Saudi Arabia is stuck in the Dark Ages because of the conservatism and “backwardness” of Wahabiyya. That is, until ...
Keep Reading »behind the sun
![[image from google maps]](/content_images/3/sm_map1.jpg "[image from google maps]")
follow me to the land where the sun always shines and homes bleed into each other stars of dust and lust cityscapes of pain and manicured skylines that dance to the rhythm of my fingertips over your skin calloused with yearnings for a past that stalks you for a past that keeps you its prisoner of shame come look and you will find me waiting behind the sun where hope and lust are retired into an afterlife of what ifs where broken souls are left ...
Keep Reading »Bio
Rosie Bsheer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her research centers on the study of historiography, archive theories, and the spatial politics of oil cities. Rosie is Associate Producer of the 2007 Oscar-nominated film “My Country, My Country” and is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya E-zine. She is also co-editor of Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). Her other articles are found here and here.
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