A Siege of Salt and Sand starts off solemnly with a quote from Aboul Qacem Echebbi, the young Tunisian poet who wrote the final two verses of the Tunisian national anthem. Echebbi’s foreboding quote addressed “To the Tyrants of the World” (McNeil, 2014) becomes prophetic after watching the documentary all the way through. The disastrousContinue reading “Review of “A Siege of Salt and Sand””
Author Archives: owentulloss
Reflecting on Michael L. Ross’ Article “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?”
Guiding Question: If oil rents produce peculiarly damaging political and social outcomes in MENA, is this due to the unusual size of those rents or to the interaction of those rents with other factors? Oil rents (a country’s oil revenues) have two main monetary variables; the value of crude oil production at world prices minusContinue reading “Reflecting on Michael L. Ross’ Article “Does Oil Hinder Democracy?””
Reflecting on Lisa Anderson’s article Searching Where the Light Shines
Ghassan Salamé is a Paris-based Lebanese academic. He served as the Lebanese Minister of Culture from 2000 to 2003. He was the Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs and professor of International Relations at Sciences Po.
Authoritarianism in the MENA 