Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Casting doubt on Gaza’s statistics Related

The system of genders within sharia, which included the role of women within families and households, was in many respects flexible. It was shaped simultaneously by religious concepts and the pragmatic needs of society. European colonialism transformed this in two ways. It froze sharia requirements, which had until then been subject to various interpretations in different communities, as a uniform set of unchanging ideas. The rigid separation of women from men who were not  mahram  (not related to them) is one example: what had once been a principled guideline with religious connotations was transformed into a legal dictate enforced by coercion. Colonialism then inscribed those ideas into a static set of civil and criminal codes imposed on local societies and enforced by new courts, military orders and government decisions. What had previously been a pluralistic mix of religious norms and informal practices around gender turned into something radically different: a rigid hiera...

Hacked phones, undercover cops, and conspiracy theory

Lobbying to fire local staff despite Covid-19 protection law

“ The domestication of dissent that NGOs encourage will always lead in a different direction, which is the reaffirmation of the status quo.” NGOism Serves the Status Quo

This is a good take on the political economy of occupation/colonisation. Confronting the Reality of Power in Palestine

A good piece as usual by Joseph Massad. However, I think he is doing a disservice to socialism by calling what existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere before 1990 a ‘socialist world’. Economic democracy is the missing link in the struggle for human rights

By blending historical inquiry with theoretical critique, Whyte’s account clarifies that neoliberal human rights did not emerge “from nowhere” but, rather, flowed from a long-standing, self-conscious, neoliberal tradition of forging rhetorical links between market morals and human rights. The Morals of the Market

Secular liberals destroyed the Arab uprisings. Don’t let it happen again.

 

A long tradition of complicity in crime This article is available in four languages An indispensable’ partner in the  EU ’s strategy in the Middle East and the Mediterranean 

“ The result is a world of two different trust realities. The informed public—wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news—remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population. In a majority of markets, less than half of the mass population trust their institutions to do what is right.”  Where People Are Loosing Faith in Capitalism Edelman Trust Barometer 2020

When Neoliberalism Hijacked Human Rights

A poor conclusion and no alternative, but to implicitly expect the liberal parties to change track. How Europe works to keep Africans in Africa

The Science of (Not) Ending Global Poverty

Extractivism and resistance in North Africa A paper available in Arabic, French and English

"European organizations working on arms control—such as Amnesty International; Action, Sécurité, Ethique Républicaines (ASER); Action des Chrétiens pour l’Abolition de la Torture (ACAT); Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT); and Human Rights Watch—have highlighted that the United States and Europe are supplying arms. Saudi Arabia and the UAE regularly top the table of arms purchases from France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, and Sweden. Several NGOs have unilaterally initiated legal proceedings in national courts and the International Criminal Court, hoping to demonstrate the exporting country’s criminal responsibility, but the law remains hard to interpret." The arms industry is not only part of a maximising profit system, but it is also an arm to protect partners and allies. In his 9th proposition of criticisms of capitalism in Envisioning Real Utopias , Erik Olin Wright states that capitalism "in a world of nationa states, fuels militarism an...

"The professional who moves to a neighbouring city for work is not usually described as a migrant, and neither is the wealthy businessman who acquires new passports as easily as he moves his money around the world. It is most often applied to those people who fall foul of border control at the frontiers of the rich world, whether that’s in Europe, the US, Australia, South Africa or elsewhere. That’s because the terms that surround migration are inextricably bound up with power, as is the way in which our media organisations choose to disseminate them." How the media contributed to "the migrant crisis"

"In the Middle East of the new millennium ...few Arab activists had really strategized for a revolution, even though they might have dreamed about it. The postsocialist neoliberal ideas and practices had structured the conduct of and deradicalized much of the political class. At the same time that marketization caused social exclusion and dissent among the grassroots, it conditioned the activism of groups like yoith, women, and political opposition, including the Islamists. In pre-uprising Yemen, for instance, activism largely meant 'civil society work' in NGOs concerned with human rights, empowerment of women, charity, and development (up from five thousand in 2008 to more than thirteen thousand by 2013). The effect of which has been "depoliticizing activism and deradicalizing the idea of change." —Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries , 2017, p. 174 The NGO-zation of resistance By Arundhati Roy

Excellent! A must read. " ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. They are symptoms of the same fundamental process.’ One clear sign of intellectual infirmity is the desperation with which centrists and liberals, removed from the cockpit of American power, forage for ideas and inspiration on the lumpen right.  What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador,...