From "Dubai: Conversations in a Crisis" in the FT Magazine www.ft.com/content/c902...

Excellent profile of Iran's Ghalibaf, a repeatedly unsuccessful presidential candidate who "arrived at the center of Iranian power not through electoral victory, but through survival."

"Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war." www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

📢 We are hiring an Assistant Professor in Middle East Politics. Come and work with us in the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University. Details here: durham.taleo.net/careersectio... Closing date: 7 April 2026

Six 36-month postdoctoral positions @durham.ac.uk open for application now. Find more about the expertise of our academic staff members here www.durham.ac.uk/departments/... Our research centres www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Saudi Arabia goes after critics of rising cost of living ft.trib.al/7s5ib7X

My friend Salim Hmimnat and I have a new essay out in The Middle East Journal on the latest developments inside Morocco's Party of Justice and Development. We ask how viable is the Islamist project today. muse.jhu.edu/article/975851 @sgiadurham.bsky.social @imeisdurham.bsky.social

I’ve written a piece on the curious lack of media and political interest in the issues faced by our national @britishlibrary.bsky.social. This is strange given we live in a world where ideas, knowledge and research are a long-term source of innovation and insight www.cityam.com/the-british-...

✨PHD FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES AT DURHAM UNI✨ Funding is available from NINE DTP, China Scholarship Council, and Transformative Humanities. For more info visit our website: www.durham.ac.uk/.../research... Join the Information session on 28th Nov, 12-1pm here: teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-joi...

Petrodollars and the ‘Islamic Bomb’: how a Saudi-Pakistan pact was forged: "the implications were clear: if Israel and the US were reshuffling the Middle East order, Saudi Arabia was keen to shore up an older alliance with a nimble friend." on.ft.com/4pKdPTs

OpenAI will not “embed” its tools in college life, it is already changing the nature of what it means to learn, to read or think critically. It does not embed in the world, it makes the world in its image. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/t...

Medical journals like the Lancet have been publishing articles a/b the Gaza Ministry of Health numbers’ reliability since fall 23. Given scale of destruction & recording methods, they were always undercounts. Outside numbers underestimate civilian death b/c they treat all adult men as combatants.

Who killed Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh – and why? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Congratulations to the outstanding @declanwalsh.bsky.social , whose reporting from Sudan has been essential reading.

On Gaza, from the FT: 'Hundreds leave besieged strip in what diplomats fear is start of Israeli displacement plan spurred by US president' on.ft.com/3RNSoB8

Jordan’s government has banned the Muslim Brotherhood movement, a week after 16 of its members were arrested

Jordan joins regional push to sideline Islamist opposition theconversation.com/jordan-joins...

Evidence of destruction of Palestinian heritage in Gaza: 'Palestinian experts working with British archaeologists estimate that more than two-thirds of heritage, cultural and archaeological sites in Gaza have been damaged, often very badly.'

NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated. The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west). My column: www.ft.com/content/3046...

#BBCNews - Mass trial begins of Tunisian president's opponents www.bbc.com/news/article...

According to this new analysis from Reuters, almost a quarter of those killed in Gaza were under 12. 1,200+ families were completely wiped out, the data showed, including one entire family of 14 people Great work by Sudev Kiyada, Simon Scarr and Nidal al-Mughrabi www.reuters.com/graphics/ISR...

Israel preparing to intervene militarily in Damascus suburbs over a nonexistent threat to Syrian Druze that they haven’t asked for and don’t want as part of effort to expand territorially and destabilize transition. Just terrible on all fronts with almost no attention. apnews.com/article/isra...

“Pepfar has saved more than 26 million lives and prevented roughly 1,000 babies a day from being born with the HIV virus” Superb piece on how cuts to USAID will affect the world’s poorest, focusing on HIV on.ft.com/3QX1HhP

'“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital, who was detained for seven months in Israeli prisons before being released without charge.'

Bashar al-Assad confided in almost no one about his plans to flee Syria as his reign collapsed. Instead, aides, officials and even relatives were deceived or kept in the dark, more than a dozen people with knowledge of the events told @Reuters reut.rs/4iC3xB2 1/8

On unravelling Syria's bureaucracy: 'Asked what this division did exactly, the civil servant answered, “flags”. “There’s a department for flags?” Ghazal asked incredulously. “Yes, when foreign dignitaries come, we put up a lot of flags,” he said. “We hang them from the poles. It’s a big job.”'

Exclusive — A luxury jet, a secret cargo, and the gold rush propelling Africa's biggest war. How a gold trade that Sudanese once hoped would lift their country is turning out to be its downfall. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/w...

A photo I posted of graffiti in Syria in 2014. "One day the war will be over and I will return to my poem" I hope they will return to their poem

Of all the images from Syria, the most moving show the joyful liberation of so many political prisoners, especially from Saydnaya, which Amnesty called a 'human slaughterhouse'. This is the true cost of so-called authoritarian 'stability'. Fierce regimes, but always brittle in the end.

Map of recent opposition advances in Syria from NYT: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/w...

Amnesty International in a new report today finds: 'Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.' www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

About 1 out of 200 people in the US speak Arabic at home. Arabic is more commonly spoken in US homes than German or Italian. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Heart shattering to learn an Israeli drone has targeted and assassinated Mahmoud Almadhoun, one of the founders and chefs behind the Gaza Soup Kitchen. What started as four pots and essential ingredients in Bait Lahia had grown into a remarkable effort to feed 3,000 people daily.

Committee to Project Journalists: 'Palestinian journalists have continued reporting despite killings, injuries, and arbitrary detention at the hands of Israeli forces, none of whom have been held accountable.' Source: cpj.org/2024/11/jour...

Remarkable collapse of Assad forces in Aleppo as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham advances. FT: 'The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said that HTS had taken control of more than half of the city of Aleppo in the just a few hours “without any resistance from regime forces”.'

New mapping of Israeli attacks on Beirut. The mapping done by Beirut Urban Lab shows that Beirut's southern suburbs, Dahiya, have been the target of 186 Israeli announced strikes, demolishing at least 262 buildings between 27 September and 17 November 2024. beiruturbanlab.com/en/Details/2...

"Sector leaders expected more than 100 of the UK’s 140-odd universities to be making redundancies by the start of 2025, in what has been described as a “cataclysmic” situation where “everything is on the table”." www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

okay everybody, I just created a new starter pack on scholars (probably mostly sociologists for now) who work on religion, culture, and/or politics. Please let me know if I missed you or if you want me to add anyone else: go.bsky.app/EAV2G9G

“What is happening now in Gaza is one battle within the larger conflict that has shaped the Israeli-Palestinian relationship since the founding of Israel and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.” Noura Erakat, Josh Paul, Charles O. Blaha, and Luigi Daniele in FA:

The EU belatedly spots the contradictions in its migration policy towards Tunisia.

Call for applications for the Mohamed Ali Foundation residential Fellowship at Durham University to work on the the Abbas Hilmi II Papers next summer. Deadline 1 October 2024.

This is such a thoughtful and well-reported new chapter to a story we wrote two decades ago about the life and death of a stowaway from the wonderful Swat valley in Pakistan.