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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
At dawn on December 9, 2024, hundreds of Syrian refugees gathered at Turkey’s Cilvegözü and Öncüpınar border crossings into northern Syria to return home following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government. Wrapped in blankets and clutching their children and possessions, they waited in anticipation, some having camped overnight by the barriers. Turkish government and pro-government media quickly hailed these scenes as a humanitarian milestone after a 13-year war.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
In January, I returned to Damascus after 14 years in exile. The last time I had stood in the city’s streets, towering statues of Hafez al-Asad and Bashar al-Asad loomed over the squares. Following the collapse of Bashar Al-Asad’s rule in December of 2024, those statues now lay in fragments—some torn down, others left to decay. Turning a corner, I caught sight of a new Ministry of Defense recruitment banner hanging in the Umayyad Square.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
Middle East Report, “New Gender Frontlines,” Spring 2025, No. 314, Vol.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
On March 3, 2025, MERIP and the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies partnered with Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies to host a roundtable on the past, present and future of feminist approaches to Middle East and North African Studies. The event brought together scholars and former MERIP contributors who have played pivotal roles in shaping the multi-disciplinary field of women’s and gender studies within studies of the region.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
In December 2023, an Israeli missile struck Gaza’s largest fertility clinic, Al Basma IVF Centre. The single explosion destroyed more than 4,000 embryos and over 1,000 vials of sperm and unfertilized eggs.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
Sami Zubaida, an exceptional scholar of Middle Eastern political sociology, law and culinary culture, passed away in London on April 6, 2025. Born to an Iraqi Jewish family, Sami left Iraq to pursue higher education in the United Kingdom. He received his BA degree from the University of Hull and his MA degree from the University of Leicester. In 1972, he co-founded the Department of Politics and Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London, where he served as a Reader and later Emeritus Professor.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
Compared to women in the United States and most European countries, Arab women are highly represented in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and related computing fields. In fact, six of the ten countries with the highest rates of women studying ICT are in the Arab world, according to UNESCO data.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
Nearly a year after the eruption of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests across Iran in September 2022, Sedigheh Vasmaghi, a renowned theologian, former politician and poet, publicly removed her hijab in a self-published video. The act was a forceful symbol of her support for the movement and condemnation of the Iranian regime. “We cannot remain silent against the killing of women and girls like Mahsa (Jina Amini) or Armita (Geravand) who were killed merely because of their hijab,” she says.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
MER issue 314 examines gender in a present shaped by transnational war-making, displacement and the violent reassertion of borders, from Turkey to Palestine to Sudan. In Sudan, the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces entered its third year in April 2025. The conflict—which has triggered the world’s worst displacement crisis, nearly 13 million people—has its roots in the failed political transition following the overthrow of long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
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1 week ago | 
merip.org | Marya Hannun
In 2016, Gol Agha, a ball boy and worker at a private tennis club in Tajrish—an affluent neighborhood in northern Tehran—went to an administrative office in Karaj to receive a headcount slip. There, Gol Agha was told by employees at the registration desk that the headcount slip could open avenues for permanent residency and work permits.