Tharwa Editorial
Several months have passed now since the official launch of the Tharwa Project Website, and the Tharwa Team is fast approaching the end of the Site’s trial period. The trial period was intended to help us further define the particular mission of the Website, taking visitors’ comments, interests and queries into account. Continue reading “Where are we now? A few observations on Tharwa’s progress”
Tharwa Editorial / Also published in the Daily Star under the title: “Prepare for when the Arab bottle breaks.”
When you are stuck in the neck of a bottle, it doesn’t matter how far you are from the bottom, or how close you come to the edge of freedom. There are no points of no return. As you struggle to free yourself, you can as easily fail and fall as succeed and climb out of the top. For those stuck in the neck, though, the option of not doing anything, of accepting their bondage, seems like the safest bet. But what happens when they realize that an overwhelming force may threaten to break the bottle? What is the safest bet then? Continue reading “Stuck in the Bottleneck”
Special to The Daily Star
And so it finally happened. American sanctions against Syria are now official. Though everybody knows that America’s bark here was worse than its bite and that the sanctions have no real teeth, they do come both as a warning and as a potential prelude for a more serious assault on Syria’s regime and, perhaps, sovereignty. But, are the authorities in Damascus aware of this? More importantly, can they adapt? Continue reading “Misreading the Sanctions Message”
Life in Syria has never been simple. The realities, meticulously hidden under a veneer of homogeneity, have always been too complex for even the most discerning of scholars. The peaceful coexistence between the country’s myriad ethnic, religious, and tribal groups is the result of a complex layer of concessions, compromises, tacit agreements, and other pragmatic arrangements perfected over the centuries.
The Ammar Abdulhamid Archive 