Gilbert Achcar was one of the speakers at last month’s conference (mentioned in an earlier post) Syria – Correcting the Narrative, Building Solidarity. This video is from a few weeks earlier. From the YouTube description:
Gilbert Achcar, author of The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising and Professor of Development and International Relations at SOAS, sat down with Danny Postel, Associate Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver for a discussion of the Syrian Civil War in the context of the Arab Uprisings.He talks here about the nature of the Syrian regime and why it wasn’t susceptible to overthrow by peaceful protest in the same way as those in Tunisia and Egypt. He also explains why Syria’s regime can’t counter Islamist extremism, how in fact it fosters such extremism and depends on it to survive. On Syrians working for a democratic and peaceful alternative, those activists squeezed between the regime and Islamist extremists, Gilbert Achcar says the first condition required for them to thrive is for the regime to be brought to an end.
The interview was filmed at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver on May 12, 2014.
Read more at PULSE.
