Between the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, I keep finding a lot of information to help me understand what's going on in Egypt right now. For example, the Fares Center put out an occasional paper, "The United States and the Middle East: What Comes Next after Iraq?", which was the report on a March 2008 conference at the center. That report includes a summary of the remarks of Mona Eltahawy, In which she reported that the reality in Egypt was one of the internal rather than external pressure, discussed how the growing Egyptian support for the Muslim brotherhood is not ideological, and talked about how the young culture of social networking -- Facebook, YouTube, and blogs -- is critical to developing an environment of free speech and democratic reform in Egypt.
The students of the Fletcher School have also written a lot that can help me understand the world around me. We've got a growing collection of Masters theses from the students of the Fletcher School. Right now it's mostly theses from the Master of the Arts in Law and Diplomacy program, but more are coming into our collection. There's not a lot in there about the current Egyptian and Tunisian situations per se, but there's plenty about democratization and the Middle East. And there's one fascinating article called "Azerbaijan and Israel: Oil, Islam and Strawberries. Pragmatism in Foreign Policy Between Unlikely Allies". YOU GUYS. If it were not for me trying to find interesting material for y'all, I would never have learned about the joint Azerbaijan-Israel strawberry farms using the world's most technologically sophisticated strawberry growing techniques.