The Power of the Body: Analyzing the Logic of Law and Social Change in the Arab Spring

Under conditions of extreme social and political injustice—when human rights are most threatened—rational arguments rooted in the language of human rights are often unlikely to spur reform or to ensure government adherence to citizens’ rights. When those entrusted with securing human dignity, rights, and freedoms fail to do so, and when other actors—such as human rights activists, international institutions, and social movements—fail to engage the levers of power to eliminate injustice, then oppressed and even quotidian actors may resort to non-traditional tactics of resistance. One example of these radical modes is the use of the corporeal body as a means of protest. The use of the human body to make political argument may catalyze legal, social, and cultural change where rational arguments fail. This Article examines the power of the human body in spurring political and legal action. It analyzes the 2010 self-immolation of Tarek Mohammad Bouazizi in Tunisia, which sparked an unprecedented wave of protests across Arab countries, leading to what came to be known as the “Arab Spring.” It suggests that when human rights-based arguments are exhausted, space is created for alternative strategies of resistance. Mobilized and deployed as tools of resistance, human bodies become the argument

A Comparative study between Ireland\u27s economic model and Jordan\u27s current reforms: What are the characteristics Jordan can emulate?

Jordan is a beautiful country with a rich assortment of historical, religious and geographical tourist attractions. It is both a modern and moderate nation with a hospitable people. Sandwiched in a turbulent region, Jordan must overcome these challenges while moving its economic transformation forward. Some commentators point out that Jordan can learn a great deal from countries like Ireland, who have successfully transformed their economies into globally competitive ones. By identifying and understanding the fundamental characteristics of the Irish model, Jordan would be in a better position to emulate the Irish model while maintaining its uniqueness and character. This body of work shows that in many ways Jordan has already begun emulating Ireland\u27s model for success. While at first slow, the transformation in the last few years has been at a remarkable pace by any standards. Should Jordan continue its momentum on this course, it will not be long before other countries look to Jordan to emulate. There is still much to be done and the lessons from the Irish model continue if Jordan is to become a competitive player in the global community

Plural Belonging: The Samaritans\u27 Negotiation of Space in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Created in 1993 in accordance with the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accords, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has grappled with the administration and maintenance of a vortex of highly fragmented legal and judicial systems. These fractured frameworks are the result of centuries-old colonial and military administrations that have exercised jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). A self-governing entity whose sovereignty has been undermined since its inception, the PA idealizes a democratic modus-operandi for the nation’s future, while actively participating in and benefiting from an overarching network of laws, court systems, and regulatory frameworks designed to discriminate against and abuse their subjects. Palestinian subjects as a whole struggle to gain access to the majority of their fundamental rights within these interweaving legal and judicial systems. Minority communities and vulnerable populations in particular have been harshly affected by these systems’ shortcomings and castigate the PA for its reluctance to incite meaningful change

Beirut’s Civil War Hotel District: Preserving the World’s First High-Rise Urban Battlefield

My thesis aims at preserving a historic event in Beirut through the proposal of a historic district. The event in question is the Battle of the Hotels, a 5-month urban battle that took place within and around the historic luxury hotel district in the Minet El Husn neighborhood of Beirut at the beginning of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The battle opposed the left-wing pro-Palestinian Lebanese National Movement against the right-wing Christian-nationalist Phalanges Party. The battle is worth commemorating, and therefore preserving, for its instrumental role in shaping the urban rift that divided the city of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, violently affecting the lives of all Lebanese citizens for a period of 13 years. Lebanese society shares a violent history that could, if considered a common heritage, be part of its postwar nation-building identity and inspire socio-political reform. The Battle of the Hotels’ significance also lies in its status as the first high-rise urban battle in the world. As a global historic event, the battle deserves to be commemorated as a peace-building historic district, protesting urban warfare and civil war as the current most common methods for conducting war. The American practice of mapping Civil War battlefields as part of preserving national military parks was relevant to me for its potential efficacy in representing battles to fellow citizens without the vilification of a particular faction, and the use of similar symbols to qualify military events, movements and positions related to both factions. Mapping is also interesting for its spatial visualization qualities, as it offers the option to compare historic and current urban configurations. In order to determine the boundaries of a potential Battle of the Hotels Historic District, I gathered and listed the chronological events of the battle from several sources and positioned them on a map of Beirut. The urban battlefield map I created contains new kinds of symbols specifically related to urban battlefields. Beyond its symbolic meanings, the battle of the hotels was first and foremost an architectural and geographical phenomenon, fueled by the spatial qualities the buildings in Beirut offered and the military strategies envisioned within and around them. The transformation of urban areas into historic objects requires new experimental preservation methodologies in Lebanon, not only because the country lacks traditional historic districting laws, but also because the current "postmemory" generation, which has been de-schooled in the history of the civil war, does not yet recognize its possible historical significance. They do not know that the Battle of the Hotels is the first high-rise urban battlefield in the world or the event that directly led to the East-West division of Beirut during the civil war. I therefore propose a new method for setting into motion the creation of a historic district by drawing and carving the map of the district directly on the places from which the militias fought and the public spaces in the city that witnessed the events. The balconies of the Holiday Inn, once sandbagged for sniper posts, now become viewing posts for a generation to confront and historically contextualize its "postmemory" condition

The concepts of al-halal and al-haram in the Arab-Muslim culture : a translational and lexicographical study

This paper aims at providing sufficient definitions of the concepts of al-Halal and al-Haram in the Arab-Muslim culture, illustrating how they are treated in some bilingual Arabic-English dictionaries since they often tend to be provided with inaccurate, lacking and sometimes simply incorrect definitions. Moreover, the paper investigates how these concepts are linguistically reflected through proverbs, collocations, frequent expressions, and connotations. These concepts are deeply rooted in the Arab-Muslim tradition and history, affecting the Arabs' way of thinking and acting. Therefore, accurate definitions of these concepts may help understand the Arab-Muslim identity that is vaguely or poorly understood by non-speakers of Arabic. Furthermore, to non-speakers of Arabic, these notions are often misunderstood, inadequately explained, and inaccurately translated into other languages

FastPacket: Towards Pre-trained Packets Embedding based on FastText for next-generation NIDS

New Attacks are increasingly used by attackers everyday but many of them are not detected by Intrusion Detection Systems as most IDS ignore raw packet information and only care about some basic statistical information extracted from PCAP files. Using networking programs to extract fixed statistical features from packets is good, but may not enough to detect nowadays challenges. We think that it is time to utilize big data and deep learning for automatic dynamic feature extraction from packets. It is time to get inspired by deep learning pre-trained models in computer vision and natural language processing, so security deep learning solutions will have its pre-trained models on big datasets to be used in future researches. In this paper, we proposed a new approach for embedding packets based on character-level embeddings, inspired by FastText success on text data. We called this approach FastPacket. Results are measured on subsets of CIC-IDS-2017 dataset, but we expect promising results on big data pre-trained models. We suggest building pre-trained FastPacket on MAWI big dataset and make it available to community, similar to FastText. To be able to outperform currently used NIDS, to start a new era of packet-level NIDS that can better detect complex attacks.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2209.1396

The Relationship Between Learning Organization and Job Satisfaction: Case Study of Palestinian Municipalities

This study aims to test the relationship between learning organization and job satisfaction from the perspective of the staff of Tulkarem Municipality – Palestine. The study uses seven independent variables: continuous learning, inquiry and dialog, team learning, embedded system, empowerment, system connection, strategic leadership, and their effect on job satisfaction. the study uses a survey in regards to test the hypotheses and answer the study questions, as this kind of data collations are more convenient from others methods. The findings from multiple regression tests show there is a statistically significant impact of strategic leadership and continuous learning on job satisfaction.  The recommendations are that managers could build programs and systems to encourage learning at all levels. Keywords: Continuous learning, Team learning, Embedded system, System connection, Strategic leadership DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-20-08 Publication date:October 31st 202