Empowered through education: a word with a Saudi feminist
When it comes to Saudi Arabia and the role of women, for some the glass is half-empty, for others it is half full. While some deplore that Saudi Arabia only ranks 130th out of 142 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2014, others highlight that the Kingdom was in fact one of the countries that improved the most in that report.
For Aisha Bint Abdullah (an alias), Saudi Arabia has rapidly developed socially and culturally in the last 10 to 20 years. “Although from the outside it seems that nothing has changed,” Aisha told me via email, “I can tell you that there have been many changes that have influenced the role of women in Saudi society in a positive way.”
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The refugees next door: Christian Iraqis in Erbil
In recent months, international attention has turned toward Europe’s place in the on-going refugee crises, which is now being described as the world’s worst since World War II. For Iraq’s Christians, a community nearly as old as the religion itself, exile from their homes has not taken them across the globe, but to another part of their own country. Unfortunately, their displacement may be no less permanent than that suffered by those fleeing the region entirely.
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Saudi Arabia's Yemen gambit
Although the Yemen conflict looks more successful from a Saudi perspective than it did a few months ago, it is still a stalemate. A de facto southern entity had arguably been in existence since Yemeni unification in 1990, but the Saudi-led war in Yemen has deepened the dissolution of what remains of the Yemeni state and, in effect, created two capitals. The nominal Yemeni president, Abd Rabu Mansour Hadi, who had been heading a government in exile from Saudi Arabia, has been in Aden since Eid al-Adha in late September 2015. It remains to be seen whether Hadi has enough Saudi support and loyal armed men to remain in the south for much longer.
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