Introducing a new program! "Short videos long on ideas" - This is part 1 of a 3-part interview with Prof. Joel Beinin.

Seeing the peace prize go to an organization that actually seems to have kept the peace is cheering news in a month that witnessed the military of one former Nobel laureate destroying a hospital run by another winner.

Washington's support for Yemen's former dictatorship — and of Saudi efforts to sideline the country's nonviolent pro-democracy movement — helped create the current crisis.

The chaos unleashed by the Arab Spring “regime changes” in Libya and Syria (and a counterrevolution in Egypt) has spread violence across the Mideast. A lone bright spot has been Tunisia.

When the Gulf monarchies’ exceptionalism inevitably runs out of steam, and it will, their populations will be well placed to take their part in the bigger, regionwide shift in the political order.

The vaunted American “democracy project” in the region is in tatters. Recently, where the United States has intervened -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya -- it hasn’t worked out so well.