Shahmahmood Miakhel

Hafsa Halawa, Shahla Al-Kli, and Yesar Al-Maleki join host Alistair Taylor to discuss the challenges facing Iraq’s new prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, from COVID-19 and the fall of oil prices, to long-standing issues in governance and foreign relations.

Arguably the time is now ripe to begin accumulating such nuances in regard to Turkey. The difficulties of dealing with Turkey and President Recep Erdogan are incontestable and well-known. Nevertheless, Turkey’s geopolitical significance is equally indisputable and far-reaching.  Many of the major issues in European security – migration, Libya’s civil war, confronting Syria’s civil war (the equivalent in our time of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s), stabilizing the Balkans, defending the Black Sea, European energy security, and in particular accessing the energy in the Eastern Mediterranean – would benefit from the restoration of a true and ongoing strategic dialogue with Turkey. Indeed, neither we nor Turkey can make progress on them without such a dialogue.

What is the future of legitimacy in Yemen? The question of what would happen if President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi were to die has been an unspoken concern for the past several years. It is important to address the question of legitimacy after Hadi because the constitutional rules on how to transfer his authority to a successor and how to avoid a presidential vacuum are impractical given the ongoing conflict.

On May 12, 2020, MEI hosted Dr. Mohammed Shtayyeh, Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, for a roundtable discussion on the many crises facing Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority.

While COVID-19 and historically low oil prices are disrupting the Gulf’s political economy, the pandemic has demonstrated the region’s tech resilience.

The nascent research on political Salafism suggests that it can often be much more pragmatic, flexible, and malleable than both the quietist and the jihadist Salafist strand and can sometimes show a certain openness to other political actors and ideologies. The case of the Tunisian al-Karama Coalition (Dignity Coalition) indicates that the new (tactical) openness of some politicized Salafists can also extend to populism. In this article, the authors locate the rise of al-Karama within the context of Tunisia’s successful but still incomplete and “bumpy democratic transition.”

Unfortunately, many distinguished Arab writers are unknown to the majority of Iranian readers and their works are not available in Persian. Arab literature has largely been neglected in the Iranian literary translation market.

Azerbaijan will soon celebrate 30 years since its independence and sovereignty was restored. However, the country’s foreign policy priorities have stayed largely the same since the early 1990s. That is, the restoration of territorial integrity, strengthening the country’s independence, and the development of strong regional economic partnerships.

China and the Middle East have long-standing historical ties that have grown significantly closer in recent years, driven by rising levels of trade and investment, as well as a burgeoning political relationship. However, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which spread from China to the region and the rest of the world, has ushered in a complex new dynamic in relations between the two sides.

Six scholars from across MEI take a closer look at the challenges facing Iraq’s new prime minister, from the protest movement and Baghdad-Erbil relations to the balancing act between Washington and Tehran.

Washington must decide if it will grant concessions that al-Kadhimi can use to convince Tehran to accept a sustained U.S. military presence.

There are early signs that it may be possible to turn the page in the difficult relationship between Erbil and Baghdad