Despite public promises to the contrary, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia continue to be ruled autocratically even as their civil societies aspire to greater public space. Rather than promoting concrete steps towards democratization including institutionalizing freedom of speech, association, and pluralistic political practices, the three states of the Maghrib are pursuing survivalist strategies leading to a robust authoritarianism that seems unlikely to be overturned anytime soon.

Iran’s military has tried to develop concepts for warfighting suitable for deterring the United States while dealing with a complex security environment and numerous constraints on its military power. The military’s key task has been to align doctrine with service capabilities. This article examines the path of Iran’s doctrinal developments and highlights the advantages and problems in Iran’s approach and its seeming over-reliance on missile-based deterrence and the threat of unconventional and proxy war.

Recent attempts to abolish the Personal Status Law, in force since 1959, with the intent of placing family matters in the hands of religious authorities, caused an uproar among Iraqi women’s rights activists. This article seeks to place the protest in its historical context by tracing women’s participation in shaping the Personal Status Law - touching upon both their achievements and disappointments.

In June 2004, the United States signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Morocco. FTAs are typically thought of as economic agreements, but the agreement with Morocco has an explicit security component. Indeed, US officials have cast the agreement as an opportunity to support a close ally in the region, and its signing coincides with Morocco’s denomination as a non-NATO ally of the US. Yet even if the FTA achieves its stated economic goals — a very tall and ambitious order — it remains to be seen whether or not the benefits will extend to a society divided by enormous social cleavages.

Arab and Israeli revisionist historiography has taken the events in the town of Lydda (Lod, al-Lud) during the 1948 Palestine War (Israeli War of Independence) as an example of Israel’s premeditated expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948, coupled with a massacre of civilian Arabs by the Israeli forces. Using newly released documents, the article explains the origins of these claims. It concludes that the expulsion was not pre-meditated but a consequence of a complex and ill-conducted battle, nor is there any direct evidence that a massacre took place.