thepoliticalnotebook:

Morning Reading. Human Rights Watch has released its annual World Report. Check out the essays, which cover the revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa, the Soviet bloc twenty years on, human rights and tolerance in Europe, and rights for the disabled, among others. Also check out the individual country chapters.

curiositycounts:

Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Near and Middle East – a map of Arab Spring stereotypes… 

See also: maps of European stereotypes.

ajfaultlines:

In the first of a two-part series, Fault Lines examines how the Obama administration is reacting to the enormous changes taking place across the Middle East. Part one examines the decision to intervene in Libya and what it reveals about US priorities in the region.

foreignaffairsmagazine:

The May/June 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs is now online and will be on newsstands April 26. In this issue:

Lisa Anderson, the president of the American University in Cairo, compares the paths of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.

Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, analyzes the conditions under which revolutions succeed.

Michael Scott Doran, a professor at New York University, warns that Iran will try to manipulate the upheaval in the Middle East to its own advantage.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professor at New York University and the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and Mark Blyth, a professor at Brown University, explain what the recent financial crisis and the revolutions in the Middle East have in common.

Aqil Shah, a postdoctoral fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, suggests that Pakistan will not become a failed state anytime soon.

And Kanan Makiya, a professor at Brandeis University, examines the phenomenon of totalitarian art.

Click here to read these and other articles. Subscribe now for instant access to this issue and more than 50 years of archives online.

thepoliticalnotebook:

On Saturday, Yemen’s state newspaper, Al Jamahiriya, photoshopped a photo of regime supporters to make it look twice as big. Photo caption reads: “On the Friday of Tolerance.” 

From Marwan Almuraisy’s Facebook page (link in Arabic), found via @SultanAlQassemi.

(Source: thepoliticalnotebook)

Meet the U.S. Companies Helping to Censor the Arab World

While the U.S. State Department spends millions of dollars helping people in the Middle East circumvent Web censorship, a handful of California companies are providing autocratic Middle East regimes with the technology to censor the Web, reports The Wall Street Journal. The global Web-security market is a hot industry (valued at $1.8 billion in 2010) and U.S. companies are competing abroad to deliver web-blocking technologies to, in some cases, stridently repressive regimes. Here’s a look at what U.S. companies are up to in the region.

sunfoundation:

The Guardian offers this chart of U.K. arms sales to the Middle East and North Africa. £1 GBP is approximately $1.6 USD.

As uprisings turn to revolutions in the Middle East, Al Jazeera’s New Media team releases a Twitter Dashboard that illustrates what is being tweeted about and where.

Al-Jazeera’s Twitter Dashboard

neighborhoodr-cairo:

Map of education, internet-connectivity and sociopolitical unrest in the #MidEast via @fouad_marei

nationalpost:

Graphic: Who might revolt? Who might fall?
Which domino will fall next? With uprisings sweeping the Middle East, no country in the region can feel safe from the threat of revolution. The Post looks at some of the forces driving the protests — the economy, lifestyle, education, the military, corruption and good governance. And Chip Pitts, a lecturer in human rights law at Stanford Law School, tells the National Post’s  Aileen Donnelly about the chances of revolt — and their success — in other countries in the region. (Graphic by Richard Johnson)
(Text too small? The graphic as a PDF here)