Articles

The ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran, along with the struggle over the Gulf’s strategic waterways, has once again brought to the fore the question of militias as actors operating in the Middle East outside the framework of the state and international relations. The world had expected the war against Iran to mark a turning point: striking the center of regional patronage was supposed to weaken the “militia” model, pave the way for the return of the state and political settlements, and perhaps bring an entire chapter in the region’s history to a close. Yet what is happening so far appears to point in the opposite direction. The war has not ended the age of militias. It has brought them back into diplomatic calculations themselves.

Marked by shifting flashpoints of tension, the regional crisis continues to escalate without, however, crossing a point of no return. The standoff over the Strait of Hormuz now appears to have taken a back seat as the world focuses on tensions in the Red Sea, and more particularly on the renewed military conflict between Yemen’s Houthis and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh on Wednesday accused the Iran-backed group of attempting to strike Mecca with a drone, which the kingdom considers a “red line.” According to the Saudi-led military coalition, cited by AFP, the drone was destroyed south of the city by Saudi air defenses just before “entering the prohibited airspace over Mecca.”

In 1998, my students asked me a question that, at the time, seemed too broad to have a clear answer: What is the future of the Middle East? I told them that I believed the Middle East would evolve into something resembling a large corporation, with the United States as its board of directors, and that the fundamental conflict of the future would no longer be limited to the one between the Arabs and Israel, but would also revolve around the question of who would take over the executive leadership of this regional enterprise. I added that the main contenders in this struggle would essentially be Israel, Iran, and Turkey.

This is the third and final essay in a three-part series on the manifesto, both as a form of writing and as a way of intervening in the world. The first returned to the history of proclamation and to the authority it grants the person who speaks. The second lingered on the tensions carried by the pronoun “we,” and on what is at stake when a manifesto speaks in the name of a group. This third essay returns to the question that set the whole journey in motion, and to Irene Vallejo’s book, to ask something else: what does a text do when it calls itself a manifesto, and how far can the gestures held within that word reach?

The abolition of the death penalty in Lebanon is not the result of steps taken in 2026. It is the culmination of a long political and legal process, marked by successive initiatives, deadlocks and years of debate. Two figures in particular led this fight: former Justice Minister Ibrahim Najjar and former MP and Lebanese Forces executive council member Élie Keyrouz. For Najjar, it all began in 2008, when he was appointed justice minister. As for Keyrouz, his campaign notably took shape through a bill he submitted in 2012. It would be 14 years before Lebanon finally abolished capital punishment. Much would change between these two milestones, in 2008 and 2012, but their convictions would remain unchanged.

What if Woody Allen had been present this year at the commemoration of the fall of the Twin Towers? He would have thought, watched and listened. He would have observed Bill Clinton, who once heralded the Third Way for the new millennium, while George W. Bush’s eyes might have closed upon the spectacle of the invasion of Iraq, and Obama, the dark-skinned savior, shifted from one policy to another with an ease that matched his physical agility. Beside him, Joe Biden might have been sleeping standing up, his face marked by sadness, age and boredom, like a copy that no longer resembled the original.