Arab Spring: Unfinished business or tragic legacy?
The uprisings of the Arab Spring seemed to represent a dramatic turning point in history, the sudden collapse of regimes and political systems few expected to be so fragile. But… Read more »
Category: Saudi Arabia
MBS: The dismal consistency of Saudi tyranny
“Were we wrong to have thought that MBS could bring progress to Saudi Arabia?” Ash’s @masoudtarek writes about the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in a new review essay… Read more »
Release Saudi women’s rights advocates on 2nd anniversary of arrests, say NGOs
Today marks two years since Loujain al-Hathloul (below), a prominent human rights activist in Saudi Arabia, was arrested and detained for trying to “destabilize the kingdom” with her fight… Read more »
Course Correction? Saudi Arabia’s export of Salafist ideology
Throughout 2016 and 2017, statements from Riyadh suggested that Saudi Arabia might be on the verge of reorienting its decades-long promotion of Salafism around the world, according to a… Read more »
Jamal Khashoggi – one year on
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder on October 2, 2019, the Project on Middle East Democracy and 12 other human rights and press freedom organizations… Read more »
Saudi crackdown targeting women’s rights activists
One year ago, just as the Saudi government finally ended the ban on women driving, many activists who had campaigned against the ban and for women’s rights more generally were… Read more »
‘Dangerous backsliding’: radicals use Indonesia’s democracy to undermine it
Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo and former military general Prabowo Subianto will face off in a presidential election on Wednesday (Nikkei/CFR), with official results expected take up to a month to… Read more »
Mini-Arab Spring? ‘Khashoggi was right: Arabs still want democracy’
Before his death, the late Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was trying to set up several organizations to promote the cause of democracy in the region — particularly one that aimed, among… Read more »
Middle East’s ‘distasteful theocracies’ under fire for rights abuses
The prominent human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh’s draconian sentence for her peaceful activism shows the threat posed by Iran’s revolutionary courts to human rights work, the Center for Human… Read more »
Saudis and Iran using sectarian non-state actors to shape Middle East
The Saudi-Iran rivalry playing out in the Middle East’s divided societies, such as the ‘proxy arenas’ of Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, and particularly Syria and Yemen, has cultivated sectarian difference that… Read more »