How would Bashar al Assad want to end the war? He answered this question on the Charlie Rose Show, on 9 September, 2013. Why share this? Many of us will not be inclined to listen to the whole interview, and so I though it would be relevant to hear what Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria,…
What triggered me to write about the psychological effects of civil war, was the quite disturbing news of the Syrian rebel commander cutting out the lungs of a soldier and biting into it. This could be an isolated case of a sick person who would have done the same in a small village – or…
The excerpts below, of an article on the current state of Syria, and the lack any effective action by the international community, by UNHCR High Commissioner António Guterres, is the bleakest depiction of the crisis I have come across so far. The despair in his words can almost be heard… Unfortunately, I or many others,…
Here I wish to offer some theoretical perspectives on the study of revolutions. First of all, I provide a summary from McAdams, Tarrow and Tilly’s book Dynamics of Contention where they attempt to identify recurring mechanisms and processes that play a role in contentious politics by doing a comparative study of a set of historic examples…
I recently read about the tragic developments of the looting and destruction of the cultural heritage in Syria; and it made me think of Robert Fisk’s telling of the plundering and looting in Iraq in the hours after the 2003 US invasion into Baghdad started. I wish to share some excepts from Fisk’s book The…
Thinking politics 