Nowhere in the world is university education expanding as rapidly as in the six-member state of the Gulf Cooperation Council. In two generations the region has gone from having the Middle East's least educated population to boasting a younger generation whose educational achievements are approaching Oraginisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) standards. This unique study, with contributions by key decision makers, charts this dramatic development, exploring the challenge...

The Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia and its five smaller neighbours: the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain) have long been governed by highly autocratic and seemingly anachronistic regimes. Yet despite bloody conflicts on their doorsteps, fast-growing populations, and powerful modernising and globalising forces impacting on their largely conservative societies, they have demonstrated remarkable resilience. Obituaries for these traditional monarchies have frequently been ...

For more than a century successive US and UK governments have sought to thwart nationalist, socialist and pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. Through the Cold War, the ‘War on Terror’ and the present era defined by the Islamic State, the Western powers have repeatedly manipulated the region’s most powerful actors to ensure the security of their own interests and, in doing so, have given rise to religious politics, sectarian war, bloody counter-revolutions and now one of the most br...

The Man Who Snorted The World is the darkly comic tale of Chester, a lost, tired and broken man, whose shut-in world is transformed by a mysterious package from an old friend, the charismatic and crazy Jimmy. Its contents are a letter and a small bag of powder. Failing to heed the warning and resist the temptation, with his life in crisis, he snorts a line of the unknown substance. Its power is beyond his imagining and this one action kick starts a whole chain of events that threaten to de...

The Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia and its five smaller neighbours: the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain) have long been governed by highly autocratic and seemingly anachronistic regimes. Yet despite bloody conflicts on their doorsteps, fast-growing populations, and powerful modernising and globalising forces impacting on their largely conservative societies, they have demonstrated remarkable resilience. Obituaries for these traditional monarchies have frequently been ...

This publication characterizes the environmental burden of disease in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), measured by the excess number of deaths and illnesses in the population due to exposure to environmental hazards. The robust methods used in this risk analysis can be applied to any country or region. This publication documents the systematic, multi-step process used to identify environmental priorities and the detailed methods used to quantify the disease burden attributable to each risk....

Beginning in December 2010 popular revolt swept through the Middle East, shocking the world and ushering in a period of unprecedented unrest. Protestors took to the streets to demand greater freedom, democracy, human rights, social justice, and regime change. What caused these uprisings? What is their significance? And what are their likely consequences? In an engaging question-and-answer format, The Arab Uprisings explores all aspects of the revolutionary protests that have rocked the Mid...

When it invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the United States sought to do something previous foreign powers had never attempted: to create an Afghani state where none existed. More than a decade on, the new regime in Kabul remains plagued by illegitimacy and ineffectiveness. What happened? As Thomas Barfield shows, the history of previous efforts to build governments in Afghanistan does much to explain the difficulties besetting this newest experiment.Princeton Shorts are brief selection...

Malalai Joya has been called "the bravest woman in Afghanistan." At a constitutional assembly in Kabul in 2003, she stood up and denounced her country's powerful NATO-backed warlords. She was twenty-five years old. Two years later, she became the youngest person elected to Afghanistan's new Parliament. In 2007, she was suspended from Parliament for her persistent criticism of the warlords and drug barons and their cronies. She has survived four assassination attempts to da...

Hurt people hurt people.Say there was a novel in which Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic and Lolita was a photographer’s assistant and, somehow, they met in Bright Lights, Big City. He’s blinded by love. She by ambition. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is an honest, hilarious, and heartrending novel, but above all, a very realistic account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have done to us.

Today, one out of every six children suffers from some form of neurodevelopmental abnormality. The causes are mostly unknown. Some environmental chemicals are known to cause brain damage and many more are suspected of it, but few have been tested for such effects. Philippe Grandjean provides an authoritative and engaging analysis of how environmental hazards can damage brain development and what we can do about it. The brain's development is uniquely sensitive to toxic chemicals, and even ...

The problems in the Middle East run deeper than dictatorship. Inspired by the popular uprisings that overthrew the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, Arabs across the Middle East are demanding change. But achieving real freedom will involve more than the removal of a few dictators. Looking beyond the turmoil reported on our TV screens, Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker examines the 'freedom deficit' that affects Arabs in their daily lives: their struggles against corruption, discrimination ...