Profile avatar
rpmccarthy.bsky.social
Associate Professor, Middle East Politics, Durham University Author: Inside Tunisia's al-Nahda: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/universitypress/subjects/politics-international-relations/middle-east-gov www.rorymccarthy.com
13 posts 733 followers 701 following
Regular Contributor
Posts 22 Comments 3

“Pepfar has saved more than 26 million lives and prevented roughly 1,000 babies a day from being born with the HIV virus” Superb piece on how cuts to USAID will affect the world’s poorest, focusing on HIV on.ft.com/3QX1HhP

submitted 2 days ago • 9 comments

'“Frankly, no matter how much I talk about what I experienced in detention, it is only a fraction of what truly happened,” said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, director of al-Shifa hospital, who was detained for seven months in Israeli prisons before being released without charge.'

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Bashar al-Assad confided in almost no one about his plans to flee Syria as his reign collapsed. Instead, aides, officials and even relatives were deceived or kept in the dark, more than a dozen people with knowledge of the events told @Reuters reut.rs/4iC3xB2 1/8

submitted 78 days ago • 11 comments

On unravelling Syria's bureaucracy: 'Asked what this division did exactly, the civil servant answered, “flags”. “There’s a department for flags?” Ghazal asked incredulously. “Yes, when foreign dignitaries come, we put up a lot of flags,” he said. “We hang them from the poles. It’s a big job.”'

submitted 79 days ago • 0 comments

Exclusive — A luxury jet, a secret cargo, and the gold rush propelling Africa's biggest war. How a gold trade that Sudanese once hoped would lift their country is turning out to be its downfall. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/w...

submitted 79 days ago • 11 comments

A photo I posted of graffiti in Syria in 2014. "One day the war will be over and I will return to my poem" I hope they will return to their poem

submitted 83 days ago • 50 comments

Of all the images from Syria, the most moving show the joyful liberation of so many political prisoners, especially from Saydnaya, which Amnesty called a 'human slaughterhouse'. This is the true cost of so-called authoritarian 'stability'. Fierce regimes, but always brittle in the end.

submitted 82 days ago • 0 comments

Map of recent opposition advances in Syria from NYT: www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/w...

submitted 86 days ago • 0 comments

Amnesty International in a new report today finds: 'Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.' www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

submitted 86 days ago • 0 comments

Like many other European social democratic parties, Labour is moving right on immigration, certainly driven by the recent success of Reform. We have researched this question for years now. There is an abundance of evidence of why this isn't a good strategy. A thread summarizing some of our research

submitted 89 days ago • 20 comments

About 1 out of 200 people in the US speak Arabic at home. Arabic is more commonly spoken in US homes than German or Italian. www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

submitted 89 days ago • 6 comments

Heart shattering to learn an Israeli drone has targeted and assassinated Mahmoud Almadhoun, one of the founders and chefs behind the Gaza Soup Kitchen. What started as four pots and essential ingredients in Bait Lahia had grown into a remarkable effort to feed 3,000 people daily.

submitted 90 days ago • 62 comments

Committee to Project Journalists: 'Palestinian journalists have continued reporting despite killings, injuries, and arbitrary detention at the hands of Israeli forces, none of whom have been held accountable.' Source: cpj.org/2024/11/jour...

submitted 91 days ago • 1 comment

Remarkable collapse of Assad forces in Aleppo as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham advances. FT: 'The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based monitoring group, said that HTS had taken control of more than half of the city of Aleppo in the just a few hours “without any resistance from regime forces”.'

submitted 91 days ago • 0 comments

New mapping of Israeli attacks on Beirut. The mapping done by Beirut Urban Lab shows that Beirut's southern suburbs, Dahiya, have been the target of 186 Israeli announced strikes, demolishing at least 262 buildings between 27 September and 17 November 2024. beiruturbanlab.com/en/Details/2...

submitted 99 days ago • 2 comments

"Sector leaders expected more than 100 of the UK’s 140-odd universities to be making redundancies by the start of 2025, in what has been described as a “cataclysmic” situation where “everything is on the table”." www.timeshighereducation.com/news/univers...

submitted 100 days ago • 6 comments

okay everybody, I just created a new starter pack on scholars (probably mostly sociologists for now) who work on religion, culture, and/or politics. Please let me know if I missed you or if you want me to add anyone else: go.bsky.app/EAV2G9G

submitted 100 days ago • 68 comments

“What is happening now in Gaza is one battle within the larger conflict that has shaped the Israeli-Palestinian relationship since the founding of Israel and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.” Noura Erakat, Josh Paul, Charles O. Blaha, and Luigi Daniele in FA:

submitted 102 days ago • 1 comment

So to help out @abuaardvark.bsky.social transfer the menasky list into sth more accessible, I created a SWANA starter pack. Please help me complete it (will create pt. II once this pack is full) go.bsky.app/CyUi3Ms

submitted 101 days ago • 31 comments

The EU belatedly spots the contradictions in its migration policy towards Tunisia.

submitted 169 days ago • 0 comments

Call for applications for the Mohamed Ali Foundation residential Fellowship at Durham University to work on the the Abbas Hilmi II Papers next summer. Deadline 1 October 2024.

submitted 170 days ago • 0 comments

This is such a thoughtful and well-reported new chapter to a story we wrote two decades ago about the life and death of a stowaway from the wonderful Swat valley in Pakistan.

submitted 174 days ago • 1 comment