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Posted on December 21, 2013 Leave a Comment
Hello everybody, and merry Christmas. Before we start, apologies for the lack of serious blogging; my writing has moved to Prospect of late. Still, I haven’t been writing enough, and I intend to rectify this over the Christmas break and into next term (when the writing will probably be of essays and sets of notes, […]
Posted on June 18, 2013 Leave a Comment
Sometimes there is a problem to which no one has an answer, to which there is no answer. So it seems with the Syrian crisis – the ‘worst war of our time’ as one Newsnight reporter put it yesterday. Sorry Obama, Cameron and Hollande, for all your good intentions you’ll just have to wait this […]
Posted on April 7, 2013 Leave a Comment
10 months ago I wrote that a massacre in Houla, a small town in Syria, would act as a turning point in that country’s civil war. With the slaughtering of women and children, I thought, the world would not stand on the side-lines and let more deaths pile on top of these. At the time, the […]
Posted on July 18, 2012 Leave a Comment
Democracy is an illusive thing. A pure form of it has not existed since the glory days of ancient Athens – and even then women and slaves were excluded from the metaphorical electoral roll. The modern world’s democratic bastion – America – does not elect its President via direct universal suffrage, but a complicated electoral […]
Posted on June 24, 2012 Leave a Comment
So the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi has beaten Ahmed Shafiq in Egypt’s Presidential elections. After decades of being forced underground during the years of the old regime, the Brothers have gained power in the first democratic elections in Egypt’s history. This is, obviously, a victory for freedom – the people gathered in Cairo’s now-infamous Tahrir […]
Posted on January 6, 2012 Leave a Comment
Welcome to my 2012 predictions post, where I’m going to detail how and why I think things are going to go this year. I’d love to get some debate going, so please comment to tell me why I am wrong – there’s nothing better than an argument. The Arab springI think 2012 will see a […]
Posted on December 31, 2011 Leave a Comment
It’s been quite the year. Let me take you back in time and show you how the world changed – mostly for the better. January and February saw most of Europe glued to its television screens as people in the Arab world joined together in open rebellion against the despots who have ruled the Magreb […]
Posted on December 19, 2011 Leave a Comment
I was expecting a quiet start to my Christmas holidays, but this weekend a lot of blog-worthy stuff has flashed across my telly. Therefore I find myself back at the keys, having thought I had time for a break. A tropical storm caused flash floods in the Philippines, which devastated coastal towns and killed 650 […]
Posted on December 4, 2011 Leave a Comment
The world was enthralled last December when democracy reared its head in the Middle East for the first time. It was like watching a film crescendo during January and February when the Presidents of Tunisia and Egypt were literally swept away by the full force of popular opinion. All the good news made us heady as events spread […]
Posted on November 7, 2011 Leave a Comment
The Arab spring has just witnessed its first true success in the country where the protests started in December last year – Tunisia has held its first elections after 23 years of dictatorship under the now-ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. There were worries that the elections would be mired by violence or vote-fixing, but […]
Lucy Webster 