Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Muhammad Hussein
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Propaganda, kebabs, and international sex scandals: Turkey’s soft power at play
As the call to prayer echoed throughout the vast valley that encompasses the city of Bolu, I thought to myself how 1,000 people from all around the world being mixed up, separated into groups of around 20, assigned roommates at random, made to learn Turkish and live by a...
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Is Turkey’s destiny in Syria that of a saviour or a tyrant?
Turkey has thought long and hard about intervention in neighbouring countries. Throughout the first five years of the conflict on its southern border in Syria, for example, it was cautious about direct intervention, and it was right to be so. In a conflict tainted by the involvement of the...
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Is the UAE the Gulf's 'Little Sparta' or a mercenary outpost?
Gone are the days when an innocent little cluster of Emirates lay on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula with a flourishing economy, an open-for-business attitude and the only thing tainting its name being the abuse and exploitation of its South Asian labourers. One thing that it was...
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Vision 2023: Turkey and the post-Ottoman anniversary
A century after the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic, the country is looking to celebrate its hundredth birthday in a way that has become popular throughout the Middle East today. Turkey’s ambitious Vision 2023 aims to put the country in the world’s top ten economies within the next...
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The Kurdistan referendum is the prelude to a new, as yet nameless, Sykes-Picot
“We flew over the making of a new country which one day, if the Kurds weren’t betrayed again – as I rather thought they might be – would be a nation called Kurdistan. The first break-up of Iraq.” Those were the words of Robert Fisk, the renowned, award-winning British journalist...
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Daesh is not dead and buried; it is another tool in the war on terror
As the pick-up trucks and black-clad soldiers of Daesh overran the city of Raqqa in northern Syria and declared the establishment of a new ‘Caliphate’ in 2014, the world watched in astonishment. Some were taken in by the emergence of this shadowy group, seeing it as the new saviour...
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The US has set the stage for a new Gulf War
Not all incidents in international relations are cataclysmic or game-changing; most are simply another thread woven into the web of history. The blockade imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia – along with the UAE, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain – on 5 June, however, was. Cutting off all diplomatic ties...
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The myth of Trump’s war on Iran
Iran: The great Islamic Republic, a state that has defied the West, the guardian of the Islamic world, the helper of the Arab world, and the saviour of Palestine. Or is it? Ever since Iran’s “Islamic” revolution in 1979, the relationship between the West – the US in particular...
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Where is the outcry over Israel’s ‘Trojan Horse’ in Britain?
Put yourself in the shoes of a country, economically rich, culturally diverse, and relatively stable in terms of government. Now imagine that a senior diplomat of a foreign country conspired with like-minded individuals to interfere in your affairs and influence who runs your government. Along with that, imagine that...
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The European clique and the Turks
The Republic of Turkey has for over half a century been enduring a crisis of identities and a struggle of political association between Asia and Europe, the two continents it has both influenced and partly ruled back in its Ottoman era a mere century ago. Indeed, the general impact...