Middle East & North Africa

“The Libyan revolution is the most successful of the failed and the most failed of the successful revolutions,” says Ghady Kafala and writes about trying to position oneself in a thoroughly ambivalent situation.

In February 2011, a protest movement built in Iraq but it was not until the October 2019 protests that the country marked a turning point, writes Ahmed Saadawi. In his essay, he examines the interaction/interplay between progressive and populist forces, starting with the protests against Saddam Hussein in Southern Iraq in 1991 until the recent uprisings.

On February 10, 2019, Bouteflika announced his fifth presidential candidacy, and six days later protests erupted in Algeria: the Revolution of Smiles. The protagonists of Salah Badis' short story meet in front of a dysfunctional ATM in one of Algiers' richest neighborhoods, and a conversation between strangers unfolds.

In the face of the terrible war and famine in Yemen, Bushra al-Maktari struggles to recall the hopeful beginnings of the revolution. Still, her spiritual retrospective zooms in on a concept that is also central to the Yemeni revolution: dignity.

January 25th marks the beginning of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, which has been followed by a counter-revolution that continues to this day. More and more political and cultural actors end up in prison or flee into exile. As part of our series “Reminiscence of the future”, Alia Mossallam illuminates the inner spaces of the revolution, where fear and courage, kindness and monstrosity are inherently close to one another.

There are great hopes pinned to the Moroccan energy transition – not just in the North African kingdom itself, but also in Europe and Germany.

Landingpage of Scrollytelling Project.

Our trilingual scroll story project: Three stories from Egypt, Syria and Tunisia show that 10 years after they began, the revolutions continue - despite the immense strain and sometimes violent setbacks from the old forces. After all, giving up means dying. 

Tunisia is often deemed the main success story of the “Arab Spring” after long-term dictator Ben Ali was ousted ten years ago. But in the first contribution of our series “Reminiscence of the future”, Rim Benrjeb writes about a revolutionary spirit that is in danger of falling asleep, patriarchal and state violence, and the impossibility of discussing all of this with one's own father.

What happened to the Israeli Peace Camp? Is the two-state solution dead? Where is the Israeli left? This special project introduces an ambitious attempt to answer these big questions by shedding light on some of the key dynamics and developments within Israeli society and especially within the Israeli left.