Suchergebnisse

In recent years, the Middle East's information and communications landscape has changed dramatically. Increasingly, states, businesses, and citizens are capitalizing on the opportunities offered by new information technologies, the fast pace of digital transformations, and enhanced connectivity. These changes are far from turning Middle Eastern nations into network societies, but their impact is significant. The growing adoption of a wide variety of information technologies and new media platforms in everyday life has given rise to complex dynamics that beg for a better understanding. 'Digital Middle East' sheds a critical light on continuing changes that are closely intertwined with the adoption of information and communication technologies in the MENA region.

Quandt reviews 'The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy' by Daniel Pipes. The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, a book by Daniel Pipes, is reviewed.

Violent fragmentation in the Middle East has often been reduced to a consequence of "ancient hatreds" that pit Sunni against Shi'a. One of the more compelling arguments to understand the emergence of sectarian violence was proposed by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel who suggest that the politics of the Middle East has undergone a process of sectarianization. This article builds upon the work of Hashemi and Postel to consider potential mechanisms to challenge this process of sectarianization, to work towards desectarianization. Drawing on interviews conducted across the Middle East and on a number of different disciplines, the article proposes a four-stage framework to facilitate desectarianization.

Islam as a cultural, intellectual, and religious venture appears in the popular imagination as a monolithic entity. Orientalists of the traditional ilk have tended to describe it in essentialist terms, whilst many fundamentalist Muslims themselves promote their construction of a pure and unadulterated Islamic past, to which they strive to return by purging foreign or unauthentic elements from their religion. Next to these attempts, another more traditional view sees the influence between the Western and the Islamic world in linear and teleological terms. Knowledge was transmitted, so to speak

While the Israeli–Palestinian (and Arab) peace process is mired in a complex political crisis, the region is now facing an even more daunting crisis as a result of dramatic hydrological changes. Groundwater extraction rates in the region's coastal and mountain aquifers are not sustainable. Climate change is expected to increase temperatures, reduce rainfall, raise sea level, and generate more severe weather events. Seawater intrusion into the groundwater systems, which are critical to the basic needs of one half of the region's population, is also expected. As the hydrological system changes, population and economic growth will increase the demand for freshwater to meet basic needs, as well as water demand for food production and industry. This is likely to lead to even higher extraction rates along with increased investments into reuse and desalinization.