Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Back to the origins and context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which many if not most people, only have a superficial idea about it or a distorted one. I think Volodomyr Ishchenko provides an excellent approach .

 The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellowmen, ‘Do not listen to this imposter. — Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Discourse on the Origin of Inequality  (1754) 

Interesting development in this small country , but the geopolitics of it is of a significance in today’s shifting balance of forces. The defeat of French imperialism in the Sahel is welcomed, but having hopes in the Russian regime although understandable is delusional.  It reminds me of some Jordanian Stalinists who have sided with Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. They too are delusional. Related Mapping the Sahel Friends in state terror

Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East by Adam Hanieh. "Conventional accounts of political economy in the Middle East tend to adopt a similar methodological approach, which begins, typically, with the basic analytical categories of “state” (al-dawla) and “civil society” (al-mujtama’ al-madani). The former is defined as the various political institutions that stand above society and govern a country. The latter is made up of “institutions autonomous from the state which facilitate orderly economic, political and social activity” or, in the words of the Iraqi social scientist Abdul Hussein Shaaban, “the civil space that separates the state from society, which is made up of non-governmental and non-inheritable economic, political, social and cultural institutions that form a bond between the individual and the state.” All societies are said to be characterized by this basic division, which sees the state confronted by an agglomeration of atomized individuals, organiz...