In the Middle East, Some Human Rights Are More Equal than Others
On September 13, 22-year-old Jina “Mahsa” Amini was detained by Iran’s morality police. The accusation? Wearing her hijab in a way that made some of her hair vi...
Category: Middle East
Our Middle East North Africa desk (MENA) covers the region of the Mediterranean from Morocco up to and including Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Invisible Women: What Happens When the Taliban Take Away Education’s ‘Visibility’ Superpower from Afghan Women
An Unconventional Approach to US & UN Involvement in Afghanistan Kabul, Afghanistan. History repeats itself as on a normal school day, girls are sent back h...
Will Lebanon Truly Overcome its Banking Crisis?
“They want us to fight with the army? We are the army!” Hundreds of Lebanese veterans stormed the parliament, protesting for higher pensions. Lebanese security ...
The Abraham Accords and the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict: Unrelated, Unchanging, Uninterested
Please note: the views expressed within are part of an intellectual exercise and do not necessarily reflect the personal views of the author. It is unlikely tha...
A Bilingual Bourgeois: The Class Politics behind Morocco’s Language Debate
“Je ne connais pas l’arabe”—I don’t speak Arabic. While the former Moroccan education minister didn’t realize it at the time, these seemingly innocuous words wo...
Allies First, Deals Second: An Analysis of the Iran Deal
From the onset of the Biden presidency, the administration has promised the American people a renewed agreement, or “Iran Deal,” to cull nuclear proliferation b...
A Precarious Situation: The Taliban’s Uyghur Dilemma
Since the Taliban’s return to power, the U.S. Federal Reserve has frozen just under $10 billion of Afghanistan’s assets. With a harsh winter about to settle in,...
An Emerging Catastrophe: Implications of Climate Change on the MENA region
In recent years, the state of countries in the Middle East and Northern African (MENA) region have painted a disturbing picture of the world ragged with em...
“Our Art is Global”: Sultan Al-Qassemi on Art and Protest in the Middle East
On February 15th, the Yale Arab Students Association hosted Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, Emirati columnist, researcher and the Founder of Barjeel Art Foundation, to...
Queer Biopolitics in Authoritarian Iran
This piece was published in the Spring Issue Print Edition (Volume 11) As photographer Laurence Rasti depicts above, queer life in Iran is fraught with tension....