Tag Archives: Middle East

The author has an evening cuppa while searching for a lost convoy of medical supplies – in remote Zibok district (1996). © Sippi Azarbaijani Moghaddam, Author provided Sippi Azarbaijani Moghaddam, University of St Andrews It was April 1995, and I was preparing to travel to Afghanistan for my first volunteer post with a UK charity. I had travelled to London …

Shutterstock Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra The government of Qatar has expressed “regrets” for “any distress or infringement on the personal freedoms” suffered by women subjected to invasive physical searches after the discovery of an abandoned newborn at Doha airport. Among the women taken off a Qatar Airways flight for Sydney for the searches – which extended to passengers on …

Eleanor Scerri, Author provided Julien Louys, Griffith University; Gilbert Price, The University of Queensland; Huw Groucutt, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and Michael Petraglia, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History If you stood in the middle of the Nefud Desert in central Arabia today, you’d be confronted on all sides by enormous sand …

Collection of sediment DNA samples in the Main Chamber of Denisova Cave. Bert Roberts, Author provided Elena Zavala, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Matthias Meyer, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Richard ‘Bert’ Roberts, University of Wollongong, and Zenobia Jacobs, University of Wollongong In the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia lies Denisova Cave. It is the …

Timo A Kivimäki, University of Bath The Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli’s visit to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2017 was a deal maker. There was agreement on a US$20 billion Sino-Saudi investment fund, along with discussions of nuclear energy projects and other economic agreements worth nearly US$70 billion. So what is going on between the two countries? Why …

It is hard to imagine what a partitioned Syria would look like. Reuters/Omar Sanadiki Anthony Billingsley, UNSW Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull recently raised, as part of a political solution to Syria’s ongoing violence, the possibility of partition. In doing so, he joined a significant body of opinion – especially among US neoconservatives – that promote the idea. Partitioning has …

Mohamed-Ali Adraoui, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) Ten years after people rose up against their leaders in country after country around the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunisia to Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, what can we say about how society, politics and religion have changed in the region? To put it mildly, the social, cultural, religious, political …

Flag of Kurdistan on military uniform. Bumble Dee/Shutterstock.com John Broich, Case Western Reserve University Since U.S. troops left their region, roughly 180,000 Kurds of northeastern Syria have been displaced, and over 200 have been killed. Those Kurds, soldiers who’d battled the Islamic State and families, had hoped to secure a future Kurdistan state in areas now targeted by Turkish warplanes …

Popartic/Shutterstock Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi, Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) From independence until the advent of the Arab Spring, Middle Eastern states have suffered due to their constituting principle, a notion that can be traced back to the motivations and arrangements of former colonial powers. Independence may have satisfied the demands of the region’s inhabitants for autonomy, Arabness and …

The Investiture of Zimri Lim Fresco from the palace of Mari gives us an image of royal ideology in the ancient Middle East. Louvre Museum, CC BY-SA Javier Alvarez-Mon, Macquarie University and Yasmina Wicks, Macquarie University Inhabitants of the ancient city-states of the Middle East enjoyed a vibrant social and economic life centred on palace and temple institutions, supported by …