Robin Andersen, "The Complicit Lens: US Media...

Zeina Al-Azmeh’s Syrian Intellectuals in Exile: The Dilemmas of Revolution and the Cost of Leaving (Cambridge UP, 2026) captures a group of intellectuals forced to leave Syria, primarily after the events of 2011. Having wound up in either Paris or Berlin these intellectuals are f ...  Show more

Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of ...  Show more

Professor Samer Abboud from Villanova University is an expert on Syrian politics. He joins us to discuss the intricacies of Syria's political history from 1946 to the present, including the impact of French colonial rule, frequent coups, the United Arab Republic, the rise and ...

ANOTHER EMERGENCY EPISODE Things are, as ever, moving at lightning speed in the Middle East, as last weekend on December 8th, Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian regime fell. After 13 years of civil war, and more than 50 years of his family’s rule, in an extraordinary turn of events r ...  Show more

When Bashar al Assad’s government fell just a couple of days ago, after a two week whirlwind campaign by opposition forces which surprised the entire world, it signalled the end of more than 54 years of rule by the Assad family and it’s the so called Ba’th-party. While it has bee ...  Show more

In the month since Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by a coalition of rebel forces, thousands of political prisoners have been released while many more remain missing, assumed lost to the regime. The most powerful group among the rebels, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) ...  Show more