How a new exhibition by a Kuwaiti artist sheds light on the Gulf’s disappearing modern architecture
Inside the Khaleeji Art Museum’s Architecture of Memory, which showcases the work of Dana Al Rashid.
Inside the Khaleeji Art Museum’s Architecture of Memory, which showcases the work of Dana Al Rashid.
اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.
We rarely miss an opportunity to criticize our Gulf Arab partners — sometimes rightly so — for not doing enough to safeguard collective interests. But one must acknowledge that on Afghanistan, and especially our just-completed exit from the country, most of our Gulf Arab partners absolutely shined. They deserve a ton of credit for the role they played in our large, challenging, and deadly evacuation — a role which was nothing short of indispensable.
On Sept. 15, 2020, Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid al-Zayani, then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then-U.S. President Donald Trump met on the South Lawn of the White House to sign the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between the two Gulf Arab states and Israel. Morocco followed suit several months later, signing a similar agreement with Israel on Dec. 22, and a week and a half after that, on Jan. 6, 2021, Sudan and Israel also agreed to normalize relations. A year on, these accords have had a significant, if not yet fully realized, impact on the Middle East, affecting everything from geopolitics and economics to tourism and people-to-people (P2P) ties, and they also reflect the changing dynamics in the region and beyond, particularly with the U.S. and China.
اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.
اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.
Oil and gas have long dominated trade and investment flows between Singapore and the Gulf. In the wake of two new projects — one in Singapore and the other in the United Arab Emirates — unveiled last month, this article considers whether Singapore and the Gulf are on the cusp of a new level and type of economic relations.
تحليل إقليمي متخصص من قبل باحثي ومساهمي معهد الشرق الأوسط.
Some international concern has been voiced about the future prospects of the Abraham Accords under Israel’s new government. This stems from the perception that the normalization agreements Israel signed in 2020 with the UAE and Bahrain were the personal achievements of two former leaders — Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu — and would not have happened without them. The question thus arises of whether the agreements can survive their departure from power. Not only will the Abraham Accords survive, they will now be able to flourish and reach new heights. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s statement that his first visit abroad will be to the UAE is a good indicator.
The recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, and especially the events that preceded it in Jerusalem, were the first significant test of the Arab-Israeli normalization agreements signed in 2020. Saved by Hamas’ intervention, the four normalizing Arab governments were nevertheless forced to address the consequences of their agreement in the face of popular discontent with the situation at home as well as criticism from other Arab and Muslim states over their relative silence. How they respond to the evolving Israeli-Palestinian tension going forward will be critical not only in regard to their own relations with Israel but also in terms of the future path of Arab-Israeli normalization.
Around the world, leaders are scrambling to define their strategy for dealing with the inevitable U.S.-China cold war to come, and the Gulf is no exception. Considering the different objectives and perspectives that the region has in regard to the two superpowers, any misstep in forming alliances could be detrimental to its future.
Kuwait is stuck in a major predicament. The government continues to engage in significant deficit spending, even as its readily available funds dwindle, while political gridlock limits the government’s ability to replace those shrinking financial resources.
When it comes to the Persian Gulf, saving the environment might seem like it would be the last item on the to-do lists of the region’s Iranian and Arab rivals. It is an urgent matter, however — and one that could help turn these foes into friends. The United States can play an important role in this: It has helped the region to resolve conflicts over water in the past, and it could do so again.
This paper looks at the political implications of the relationship between Shi’a in the Gulf states and Iranian marj‘as, the historical background to these ties, and Gulf states’ concerns surrounding the outflow to Iran of religious taxes. In some Gulf countries, these issues are tied to concerns about the loyalty of Shi’a to the nation. The authors argue that the emergence of a marj‘a who would be based in one of the Gulf states could quell these concerns.The authors identify potential marj‘as from the region and steps that Gulf states must take so that their Shi’a citizens will shift their allegiance from foreign-based marj‘as to domestically based ones.