Search

Since protest movements had swept the Middle East and North Africa regions in early 2011, new politics have emerged, creating unimagined spaces, ways of existence and knowing the world, and more importantly, new subcultures of othering. This article critically examines revolutionary subcultures of non-comradeship, figurations of 'non-authentic revolutionaries' and ways of revolutionary othering by focusing on the term ' Ramadyeen ' as a reference coined by Syrian revolutionaries to describe individuals whose politics are 'not revolutionary enough'. Written from the positionality of a scholar-activist who participated in the protest movement, this text employs anti-sectarian feminist politics to reflect on how ' Ramadyeen ' was mobilized to erase and decrease voices of nuances and criticism of dominant revolutionary demands, specifically around humanitarian intervention, militarization and sanctions against Syria. Therefore, this article locates ' Ramadayeen ' as a keyword of counter-cultures targeting 'un-revolutionary' people and political positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President George W. Bush and his administration presented a variety of justifications for the 2003 Iraq war. Academic literature and journalism about the communication campaign emphasized two reasons: Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program and links to terrorism. Drawing on the first systematic content analysis of the administration's official speeches and statements, this study recounts a more complex, changing campaign with surprising findings. Other justifications, such as international law, human rights, and freedom, were at times more common than the most recalled reasons. This article also explores individual officials' arguments and changes over time in response to key events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the potential applicability of a humanitarian intervention international legal exception to a Middle Eastern refugee crisis involving nations such as Iraq and Syria as of 2015, and it mentions the author's claim that the international community should intervene against the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group. According to the article, States that are unwilling or unable to address humanitarian problems should be subject to external intervention by other nations.

This study examines the coverage of terrorism in two leading Arab news websites, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya from 11 September 2009 to 10 September 2010. It finds that the stereotype that ‘the terrorist is a Muslim’ continues in terrorism coverage, despite the fact that some terrorists are non-Muslims. However, the two sites manage to send out the message that ‘the majority of terrorism victims are Muslims.’ In addition, the findings reveal that too much media focus is placed on disseminating and supporting official positions and decisions, and humanitarian sufferings from terrorism are seldom brought to the attention of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental health professionals from North America and Europe have become common participants in postconflict and disaster relief efforts outside of North America and Europe. Consistent with their training, these practitioners focus primarily on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as their primary diagnostic concern. Most research that has accompanied humanitarian aid efforts has likewise originated in North America and Europe, has focused on PTSD, and in turn has reinforced practitioners' assumptions about the universality of the diagnosis. In contrast, studies that have attempted to identify how local populations conceptualize posttrauma reactions portray a wide range of psychological states. We review this emic literature in order to examine differences and commonalities across local posttraumatic cultural concepts of distress (CCDs). We focus on symptoms to describe these constructs - i.e., using the dominant neo-Kraepelinian approach used in North American and European psychiatry - as opposed to focusing on explanatory models in order to examine whether positive comparisons of PTSD to CCDs meet criteria for face validity. Hierarchical clustering (Ward's method) of symptoms within CCDs provides a portrait of the emic literature characterized by traumatic multifinality with several common themes. Global variety within the literature suggests that few disaster-affected populations have mental health nosologies that include PTSD-like syndromes. One reason for this seems to be the almost complete absence of avoidance as pathology. Many nosologies contain depression-like disorders. Relief efforts would benefit from mental health practitioners getting specific training in culture-bound posttrauma constructs when entering settings beyond the boundaries of the culture of their training and practice., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)