In this week’s Monday Briefing, MEI experts Charles Lister, Alex Vatanka, Randa Slim, and Marvin G. Weinbaum provide analysis on the US’s silence amid the Assad regime’s expansion, the Iranian president’s trip to Europe, the uptick in violence after Iraq’s elections, and the upcoming Pakistani parliamentary elections.
The importance of understanding Middle Eastern arts and culture
Middle East policy is most commonly viewed through a security or geopolitical lens, but arts and culture is the human lens into the region. MEI Vice President Kate Seelye and Lyne Sneige, director of MEI’s Arts & Culture program, join Paul Salem to discuss the importance of culture as a tool for enriching policy discourse.
The fighter jet that could break US-Turkey defense relations
On Jun. 18, the U.S. Senate voted for the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which proposes blocking the delivery of F-35 combat aircraft to Turkey and advises the removal of Turkey from the 20-year-old international program for joint production of F-35s. This motion was preceded by a May 25 vote in the U.S.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Turkey’s Middle Corridor: “Win-Win Cooperation”?
The launching of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Middle Corridor have provided wider scope and greater potential for China, now the world’s second-largest economy and Turkey, a G20 member, to develop more extensive bilateral trade and investment ties and further advance their respective regional and global aspirations. This article examines the headway that China and Turkey have made and the roadblocks that they have encountered in enhancing their economic relations.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed victory in critical presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday. The vote grants him five more years in office as well as unprecedented powers in a powerful presidential system. His critics had hoped that this time they had a real shot at defeating the strongman. The notoriously fractured opposition had united to deny the ruling party a parliamentary majority. The main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), had fielded a firebrand candidate who was determined to reach out well beyond the party’s secularist, nationalist base.
As international companies leave Iran under U.S. pressure, the Iranian government is scrambling to salvage as much foreign investment as possible. The top leadership in Tehran believes the solution is to engage with Russia, China, and the “east” to replace the West’s hesitant commitment to the Iranian market. But this eastward approach is a pipe dream, and there is plenty of history to prove it.
Vibrant art scene inspires cooperation, competition in Gulf
The countries of the Middle East are using art to remodel their national identities. Billions of dollars have been spent on colossal building efforts and massive acquisition programs in an effort to expand the cultural sector in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf. Art acquisition now appears to be part of a geopolitical strategy by Gulf countries to use their hydrocarbon money to purchase cultural clout and establish themselves as international cultural centers.
Returning to Tunisia for the first time in six years after facing charges of blasphemy for the making of “Laicite Inshallah,” her 2011 film about religious hypocrisy and government complicity with Islamist elements during and after President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime, veteran filmmaker Nadia el-Fani experienced an emotional moment.
Standing on the stage at the Carthage Film Festival’s November 2017 screening of her film, “It Doesn’t Even Hurt,” which depicts her simultaneous battles with breast cancer and death threats from Islamist extremists, she began to weep.
Nowhere in the world are women more unequal than in the Middle East and North Africa, but there have been signs of progress in the region and several key reforms took place in 2017, such as Saudi Arabia’s decision to lift the ban on women driving. Manal Omar, founder of Across Red Lines, and Hala Aldosari, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, join guest host Kate Seelye to discuss these reforms and whether they signal real change in attitudes toward women’s rights in the region.
Fittingly for someone who divides her time between two river cities, DC-born, Baghdad-bred, and now London-based filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi says she is a woman who “lives on a bridge.”
“I’ve been a stranger everywhere I’ve lived,” says Pachachi, now 70, whose documentaries have captured life in Gazan refugee camps, downtown Beirut and medieval Cairo. “I’ve moved around my whole life, but I can adapt and fit in wherever I am.”
In the Crowded Arena of Tuareg Rockers, Mdou Moctar Stands Tall
Mdou Moctar recently finished his first U.S. tour. In his three October performances in Washington, he set out to do a lot. Pickless, his kinetic guitar licks bounced around the stage, bringing his audience thousands of miles away to the Sahara desert. His calm, welcoming voice sang about the struggles and hopes of his divided homeland.
November 29, 2017- Syrian protest art served as a critical form of non-violent expression during the uprisings against the Assad government starting in 2011. Recognizing the work’s historic significance, the British Museum recently acquired a collection of posters, prints drawings and photographs produced during the conflict, and turned them into a unique exhibit, “Living Histories.”
It was a magical moment to come after so many years of anticipation, when the platform below the Louvre Abu Dhabi was carefully flooded with sea water from the surrounding Gulf.
The view from El Gouna, the luxury Red Sea resort constructed in the late 1980s by Egyptian business tycoon Samih Sawiris, can be misleading. The plush yachts, pricey food menus and grand parties present an alternative reality to the financially-strapped, religiously conservative one of the capital. In other words, El Gouna is not Egypt. The industry’s muted, skeptic reaction to the establishment of an international film festival in Hurghada’s most affluent town this year was thus quite expected.
