Ben Stevenson

Egypt’s leadership carousel

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Recent events seem to show Egypt’s new president has learned little from the past mistakes of Mubarak and Morsi. After the violence between the Muslim Brotherhood and security forces last year, thousands of Brotherhood members were arrested and hundred have been sentenced to death, including the organization’s top leadership last Thursday. The political repression has also expanded to include journalists and the leaders of the April 6 youth movement, which was a driving force in the initial 2011 protests against Mubarak. Continue Reading →

Two years after the Arab Spring

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This Monday marked the second anniversary of the self-immolation of the young Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose act of defiance catalyzed the Tunisian revolution and the end of nearly 55 years of authoritarian rule over the country. Although he was not the first person to take his own life in recent years to protest against the Tunisian government or other regimes in the Arab world, the death of Bouazizi has come to represent the beginning of the political and social transformations impacting the Middle East in various forms from Tunisia to Libya, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Jordan and Bahrain. Continue Reading →