World News Insights: Opinion Articles

The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor is widely hailed as a political setback for President Donald Trump across the global commentariat. European pundits describe it as a sign that populism, triumphant for the past few years, may be peaking out. At first glance pundits may seem…

The Levant, in the broader sense that includes Egypt, is currently moving in several contradictory directions. From the moment that the cessation of hostilities went into effect in Gaza, "corpses" have dominated the headlines. Counting, returning, and examining corpses, verifying the identities…

The stories emerging from El Fasher would make children's hair turn grey. According to the Yale School of Public Health, satellite imagery shows that the massacres are ongoing. The eye-witness accounts of those who managed to escape indicate that a genocide is underway: bodies scattered across the…

Sudan is confronting a grave existential threat: fragmentation and disintegration along ethnic lines. The country’s divisions imperil what remains of Sudan after it had been ravaged by the war and its long history of prior conflicts. Still reeling from the repercussions of partition after the…

Is Iran changing? We might be on the eve of something of the sort. Since the murder of Mahsa Amini in the summer of 2022, overt defiance of the compulsory veil has been increasing. After the recent war, several clips of women challenging this law have gone viral on social media; some of them are…

After Operation Desert Storm ended with the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in February 1991, it seemed that “international coalition” - built around the nucleus of Saudi Arabia, the United States, and the United Kingdom - had successfully stood in the way of the late Iraqi President Saddam…

Lebanese citizens start and end their days with questions of what the future will bring amid political paralysis and economic hardship... and with justified anxiety about the future. Meanwhile, Washington piles on the pressure to push through the “Lebanese part” of its regional effort that…

It was over a swanky lunch in Mayfair in 2013 that a local venture capital investor reality-checked the ambitions of what was once Europe’s most important AI company. In between bites of Cantonese cuisine, the founders of DeepMind were telling their backer about their plans to change the world with…

We were hoping that the ceasefire in Gaza would be consolidated so that the world would have the opportunity to examine the "genocidal war" committed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. We had hoped that some segment of the Israeli public would realize the horrors committed by the army in the…

About 45 years ago, or slightly more, several Gulf activists came together with the idea of creating a forum they called The Gulf Development Forum. Every year, this forum composed of volunteers convenes to address a developmental theme. In the past two years, for instance, the forum met in…

Since the early-mid nineteenth century, with the reforms of Egypt’s Ibrahim Pasha and the Ottomans’ Tanzimat, two broad historical narratives have been wrestling over history and, by extension, reality. However, these two grand narratives have branched off into many sub-narratives, with new…

A country that once took pride in its distinct sectarian diversity, Lebanon now finds itself overwhelmed by an excess of plurality, leading to the conflation of plurality and arithmetic being added to the longstanding conflation of sects and sectarianism. The late Imam Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine…