Research & Commentary Results

The Arab region’s diverse collection of 22 countries has one thing in common: Women continue to experience a backlash against their own long-overdue rights and fundamental freedoms. A combination of patriarchal structures, prolonged insecurities, and protracted crises means that this region ranks the lowest in the world in terms of women’s rights, with a gender gap that needs 153 years to close. No Arab country is even among the top 100 on this list.

No one should deny the primacy of security concerns in the Middle East given the number of conflicts, of displaced people and refugees, and of implicated regional and international powers. What should inform future strategies and action plans, however, is the equal importance of maximization of well-being, liberty, and dignity for all.

The last year and a half has been tough on the world. The COVID-19 pandemic affected all aspects of life. We have done what we can to keep the disease at bay, and respected each other by following hygiene and physical distancing rules. Yet for much of the world’s poor — including the 82.4 million displaced people globally — the lockdowns were catastrophic, plunging millions into poverty, risking eviction and forced into overcrowded shelters. If you are living hand-to-mouth, only able to buy food and pay rent based on what you have earned that day, staying at home is impossible. And for refugees and other forcibly displaced persons fleeing persecution and conflict, keeping safe at home is not even an option.

Projecting the Middle East into the future, climate change tops the challenges facing the region. With rising temperatures, higher sea levels, desertification, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, climate impacts are widely felt in everyday lives. To be sure, conditions vary given geographic diversity, but while heat stresses may be more extreme in the Arab Gulf, food and water security undermine long-term livability throughout the Middle East.

The most immediate threat posed by climate change to the Middle East, one that will be in the forefront of climate adaptation efforts within the next five years, is extreme heat. Average global temperatures have been projected to increase up to 1.5°C by 2030.

The latest study released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a body of scientists assembled by the United Nations — delivered a sobering message: The devastating impacts of climate change are now unavoidable.

The Middle East is at the center of our global energy transition and we can expect the next five to ten years to be a period of difficult transformation, but also unique opportunity for oil and gas producers.

The strong and coordinated policy actions to save lives and support the recovery in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will hopefully put the health crisis behind us in a few years. Meanwhile, this crisis has posed major challenges to the region’s economies that have embarked on a long and divergent path to recovery and highlighted the limitations of the current growth model. But it also provides a rare opportunity in the quest to move to a new development model to enhance growth and accelerate the transition toward a more sustainable and inclusive path.

The rapid collapse of the U.S.-supported Afghan government after the withdrawal of U.S. troops raised a number of questions about America’s credibility and reputation in the eyes of its allies, especially those who had participated in and contributed to the 20-year war. Analysts and commentators have focused on how NATO member states or the European Union now perceive the U.S., but it is also important to consider the perspective of non-state groups or individuals who served or could serve as local partners for the U.S. government and military.

Not unlike during the lost decade of the 1980s, all Arab states are, to various degrees, in some form of deep crisis: weakened by fiscal deficits, losing their capacity to deliver services, unable to tax fragile economies, and facing the threat of social unrest. COVID-19 has revealed most of these weaknesses further.

Everybody wants development, nobody wants to change. This adage, variants of which have been attributed to many authors, is certainly true for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Although foresight on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is having a heyday today, this was far from always the case. A survey shows that in the early 2000s, a mere 14 foresight studies on the region came out — more than half of which were undertaken in the United States, and a quarter in Europe.

The world is changing and priorities are changing with it. The 2020 global pandemic has reshaped our evaluation of risks and rewards. The capacity of governments to manage crises and safeguard the well-being of populations has become the new metric by which citizens measure their success. The potential for global phenomena outside the management capacity of any governing institution to produce political and economic upheaval has become a reality.

Amid the troubling imagery of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan, teetering governments in Lebanon and Iraq, and ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya, it is hard to defend the view that the future of the Middle East will be better than the present. Pessimism about the region’s future has become accepted as a truism among those of us who observe and analyze this troubled part of the world. But pessimistic projections that the region will remain mired in its current state of turmoil cloud our ability to properly analyze the future as much as, or even more than, naïve and gratuitous optimism.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA), for a variety of reasons, are unrivaled in their need for bold, creative thinking about their future.