الأبحاث والتعليقات

اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.

The starkness of reaching 8 billion in global population, as the U.N.’s report announced last week, makes it easy to think the numerical increase is the only story, but no trend can be considered in isolation. Three factors, none of which are MENA demographic trends, will be significant determinants of whether the region will be able to realize a hoped-for “demographic dividend.”

As the U.N. Human Rights Council convenes in Geneva this week, it may be tempting to just focus on the rights of women and girls and make demands of the regime that Tehran will inevitably ignore. But instead, the HRC members should focus on how the international community can give the protesters a much-needed psychological and political boost.

Sudan is geostrategically important to U.S. interests in both Africa and the Middle East. The country’s military rulers, Lt.-Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy Lt.-Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as “Hemedti”), are banking on that fact as they seek to press the Biden administration to focus its Sudan policy on stability, rather than supporting calls for democracy.

Over the years, recognition of clear, long-term, and structural developments in how the Jewish Israeli electorate votes has been neglected, glossed over, or lost behind reactions to electoral cycles. And the pro/anti-Netanyahu paradigm — which routinely serves as a crude substitute for “right” versus “left” — has helped delay a reckoning and a fork in the road for a host of constituencies.

On Sept. 30, 2013, then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced what he termed a “democratization package,” which lifted the decades-old ban on women wearing headscarves in many state institutions. A month later, when four female MPs wearing headscarves walked into the Turkish parliament, many thought the long-running controversy on the issue was finally over. But the headscarf recently returned to the center of the Turkish political debate when the leader of the main secularist opposition party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, announced that he would introduce legislation to protect that right.

على الرغم من التوثيق الجيد لاضطهاد الدولة السورية وعنفها ضد السكان من خلال الكم الهائل من شهادات الضحايا طوال النزاع المسلح الذي استمر أكثر من ١١ عامًا في عموم البلد، يبقى المنطق خلف هذا العنف مفهوماً بشكل أقل – من هم المستهدفين من قبل النظام وما هي الأضرار الناتجة هذا الاستهداف؟ ولماذا يستمر العنف والاضطهاد ضد بعض الجماعات حتى بعد انخفاض الأعمال العدائية المباشرة، أو حتى بعد لجوء هذه الجماعات خارج البلاد؟

The Syrian state’s persecution of the population has been well documented throughout the country’s more than 11-year conflict. Less well understood is the logic behind the violence — who the regime targets and why they inflict such harm. Why do violence and persecution continue against some groups, even after a reduction in immediate conflict hostilities or when they now live as refugees outside of the country?

اقرأ تقرير MEI الأسبوعي الذي يتضمن تحليلات الخبراء للتطورات الإقليمية الرئيسية للأسبوع المقبل.

MEI’s Center for Strategy and Emerging Technology participated in the second annual Global Cybersecurity Forum in Riyadh this past week. Here are our reflections on the conference, the conversations we had there, and the GCF’s overall agenda.

Cholera continues to sweep through Syria and Lebanon at an alarming pace, leaving thousands sick and hundreds dead in its wake, with only a small fraction of cases officially registered in databases.

Since winning the Israeli elections on Nov. 1, Benjamin Netanyahu leads a bloc that is ideologically homogeneous in ways never before seen, with a majority of religious nationalists and ultra-Orthodox parties set to enter government and likely to work cohesively for the next four years, unlike in the past.

Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has given rise to speculation that it might fully withdraw from Syria, creating a power vacuum that could ignite new fighting. Yet these fears are likely misplaced and a deeper examination of the current state of Syria reveals unique opportunities for engagement from the international community.

The Ukraine grain export deal, which Turkey helped mediate over the summer, was saved last week to much fanfare; but the central unaddressed issue remains lifting Russia’s illegal blockade of Ukrainian ports, so Ukraine can freely trade with the world.

If the West is committed to not repeat the mistakes of the past, it can forge a third way that honors the protestors and rejects the tyrants in Tehran.