And the events at SOAS just keep coming! Last night I went to a really interesting book launch for a publication called Towards Socially Just Development in the MENA Region. You can actually download the publication as a pdf here.
It was a really interesting event, and it had my old professor Gilbert Achcar talking about his contribution to the publication.
I still have to read the book, but according to the blurb, it explains that economic policies adopted by most MENA countries over the last decades contributed to social injustice, inequality, marginalization, poverty, and unemployment (neo-liberalism policies predominately). Add to that political repression and authoritarianism, all these factors contributed to the Arab Spring. In the years after the Arab Spring, however, socio-economic injustice has continued to grow, but it has been more ignored than other issues.
I’m looking forward to reading the book – it should be really interesting, because social justice isn’t an aspect of the region that gets a lot of attention, and we should be striving to create more socially just conditions, not just in the Middle East, but also in the West as well (where neo-liberalism has also eaten its way into our institutions).
megldavenport 