The birthplace and former stronghold of the late Muammar Qadhafi, the coastal city of Sirte, was stigmatised and marginalised following the fall of the regime in October 2011. However, since 2019 it has again become the epicentre of Libya’s domestic and international conflict. How can this sudde...
Interest in the Gulf had further grown during the Arab Spring, when many questions were raised about the impact on the political sustainability of the authoritarian Gulf monarchies of the revolutionary wave that swept over the Arab world. Attention on the Gulf countries increased even more in th...
China has sought to demonstrate that its authoritarian political system has been more efficient at dealing with the coronavirus crisis than Western liberal democratic systems. This Brief examines the validity of this hypothesis, and concludes that pre-dispositional factors – notably the demograp...
The ‘European’ was a central figure of colonial history, occupying a pivotal position in the social hierarchy. Colonial rulers tended to (self-)identify as ‘European’, rather than as ‘White’ or by national denominators such as ‘Dutch’ or ‘British’. This thesis examines various groups of colonial...
