With the fall of the al-Asad dynasty in Syria in the early hours of Sunday 8th December 2024, nearly fourteen years after the start of the Arab Spring, a question arises: Has the warning given by Bashshar al-Asad in his speech at Damascus University in the autumn of 2005 come true? Have his departure and the breakdown of al-muqāwamah wa-l-ṣumūd - identified commonly as the strategy of resistance - really brought chaos to the region? If that is not the case, why did the decisive actors keep him in power in Syria for approximatively another 20 years after he made that presentation?

Israelis have shown increasingly hardline, right-wing, nationalist trends in public opinion surveys in recent years, leading to lower support for peace, or faith that any democratic-oriented solution to the conflict is possible. Have October 7 and the war in Gaza changed attitudes? Which trends have displayed continuity, which public attitudes are new, and what kind of future do Israelis support?

Following a democratic transition, new political identities and cleavages can emerge or those repressed under autocracy can re-emerge. In new democracies, groups that were repressed often punish political actors associated with the ancien regime. Examining the first municipal elections after the fall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, we find that tribal identities – marginalized under authoritarian rule – (re)emerged as a politically salient identity. Despite decades of policies designed to suppress tribes, our findings demonstrate that tribal identity influenced recent electoral politics.

Bio:
Richard is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. His research is on contemporary international approaches to peacemaking, and why peace processes fail or succeed, with a particular focus on Yemen, Sudan and South Sudan, and considering other examples.

Jointly convened with South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX).

Genocide in Gaza: Israel's Long War on Palestine

A Times Literary Supplement book of the year 2024.

This book proposes a political history of Muslim universities in post-independence India, from 1947 to the 1990s. Based on a wide range of sources in English and in Urdu, it highlights the central role that these educational institutions played in the debates on national integration, secularism, minority rights and Muslim backwardness. After independence, Muslim universities found themselves at a critical juncture between central state authorities and India's Muslim population.

Drawing on thirty months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts of the South Indian state of Kerala, Plantation Crisis explores the collapse of the plantation system and the abandonment of its workforce during the recent crisis in the Indian tea economy. The colonial era plantation system in India – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation.