Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The great visionary of Arab cinema

Gender and Empire Essential readings I would add to the list: Desiring Arabs by Jospeh Massad

This has been going on for decades. The gender pay gap in Easyjet and British Gas, for example, is above 45%. We should add that in a few workplaces unions are not allowed and that they have done little to fight the injustice because they have been weakened and "neoliberalised", and parliament knows about it. But it seems that at universities unions have been passive or complicit. One can only wonder how many of these employees, workers, students, professors believe in "liberating" other women in far away countries. I've often heard white students in their teens studying in two elite universities, who want "to help and empower" women in Africa and the Middle East! Cultural arrogance has blinded them from seeing what is around them and how capitalism works. Big university gender pay gap revealed See also You are not only exploited, you are more exploited than others Ethnic academic minority pay

A Hundred Netanyahus

Interesting. The approach to the subject though goes with the FT's line: championing entrepreneurship.  To be able to access the article, you should google the title below. The other side of Chinese investment in Africa

Comedy and Dissent in the Algerian Popular Protests

Egypt's crackdown on workers' rights

What is all the fuss about? Some "democrats" complaning about transparency? The SAS has been involved in operations for decades. It has been "liberating people" and secure defense for "our regional partners." Just watch any documentary and you will how "the heroes" of SAS and how they defend 'our country' in far away countries and restore "peace" and "stability". 'Serious' questions over SAS involvement in Yemen

"Developing", "underdeveloped" or "uneven development"? The following was written in 1973, but I think it is still something that should make us think of its argument and how (ir)/relevant it is today. "In some quarters, it has often been thought wise to substitute the term ‘developing’ for ‘underdeveloped’. One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally or in any other respect. Actually, if ‘underdevelopment’ were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the U.S.A, which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder. However, on the economic level, it is best to remain with the word ‘underdeveloped’ rather than ‘developing’, because the latter creat...

Music عمر خيرت - ليلة القبض على فاطمة

Postcolonialism or neocolonialism? An example from Tunisia

"Assad's loyalists are turning on the government"

The People's Republic of Walmart ?

When I asked two students doing Gender Studies at LSE last year, one of them was doing an MA, and three students at UCL studying something similar, none of them could name an Arab feminist or author. " The results indicated a grim reality . Non-Africa based scholars represented between 73.2 and 100 per cent of cited authors in surveyed reading lists. Out of the 274 assigned readings for a Development Studies course at a leading British university, only one reading was from an author based at an African institution. The narrow dissemination of research from African institutions in ‘prestigious’ journals confines the repertoire of methodological tools that are available in research and limits learning and teaching. It also allows dominant approaches and paradigms in some disciplines to remain unchallenged. For instance, in the fields of economics, and particularly in US universities, orthodox paradigms became hegemonic to the extent of excluding different views, especially those...

"Britain is a racist country, and prejudice exists within all parties. Labour has attempted to deal with antisemitism in its ranks, not always successfully or adeptly. The Conservatives have ignored the problem. It is not whataboutery to argue that no political party should harbor racists of any hue. But the Conservatives have been able to ignore their own issues and problems because Islamophobia is more broadly acceptable among the public and the media class." The Tories' Islamophobia problem

The Arab uprisings: an appraisal Comparing the Arab uprisings with the revolutions of the 1970s like the ones in Yemen, Nicaragua and Iran, social theorist Asef Bayat, pinpoints some crucial differences between them. The Arab revolutions, he rightly, argues, lacked an intellectual anchor. In contrast also to the ideas and visions behind the English revolution, the American revolution, the French revolution, and more recently, the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Arab uprisings lacked  leadership strategies.  Moreover, the Arab revolutions lacked that radicalism that marked the twentieth-century revolutions: anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, social justice, etc. Instead, the prevailing voices from Tunisia to Yemen, from Libya to Syria, were the voices of legal reform, accountability and human rights. The predominant secular and Islamist currents took the free market and neoliberal capitalism for granted and uncritically.  Property relations and structure of powe...

"The case would help shatter the nation’s two-party system, transform how the public viewed the people running the country and, eventually, bring down a government." Spain's Watergate

Sixteen years after the  United States  invaded  Iraq  and left a trail of  destruction and  chaos in the country and the region, one aspect of the war remains criminally underexamined: why was it fought in the first place? What did the Bush administration hope to get out of the war? ," asks Ahsen I Butt. Butt has tried to re-examine the motives of the U.S. in invading Iraq: " Put simply, the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to (re)establish American standing as the world's leading power." He has hit the nail once or twice, but he has not explored what this re-establishment of "the world's leading power" consists of. Nor does he he provide the historical conjuncture and context: the domestic sociology in the U.S., the continuation of 1991 invasion and the collapse of the Soviet Union and "globalisation".  Reviewing Andrew Bacevich's American Empire , Peter Gowan draws a much better picture of the motives behind the invasion of 200...

While the British and their allies supported the royalist North, the new government of South Yemen embarked on a programme of nationalisation, introduced central planning, put limits on housing ownership and rent, and implemented a land reform. By 1973, the GDP of South Yemen increased by 25 percent.  And despite the conservative environment and resistance, women became legally equal to men, polygamy, child marriage and arranged marriage were all banned by law. Equal rights in divorce were also sanctioned. The Republic also secularised education and sharia law was replaced by a state legal code. Sources: Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring ,  2017, p. 5.  Maxine Molyneux, Aida Yafai, Aisha Mohsen and Noor Ba'aba, Women and Revolution in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen , Feminist Review, issue 1, 1979, pp.4-20.

Canada and Israel "Rather than pressure corporations to act more ethically – a concept that often seems in direct conflict with their bottom-line imperative of making a profit – campaigners might work for deeper reforms, such as public control or ownership of enterprises like Bombardier. Or, perhaps more radically, look to indigenous society itself for ideas on how to curb the capitalist profit motive." Bombardier Abroad: Patterns of Dispossession