This summer, brutally hot temperatures, deepening water scarcity, and spiking fertilizer costs have put North Africa’s agricultural sector under intense pressure. Host Alistair Taylor is joined by Mohammed Mahmoud, CEO and founder of the Climate and Water Initiative and lead for Middle East Climate and Water Policy at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, to unpack the region’s food and water security challenges. Drawing on Mahmoud’s new report card on agricultural sustainability in North Africa, they explore the diverging picture across the region, why some countries have weathered the strain better than others, and what it will take to build a more resilient and secure food system.
After over a decade of division between rival factions in eastern and western Libya, the Trump administration has put forward a plan to unite the two sides through a power-sharing agreement. Hosts Alistair Taylor and Matthew Czekaj are joined by MEI Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow Jonathan M. Winer to unpack the details of this proposal and its potential consequences for the Libyan people. Winer, who served as United States Special Envoy for Libya, offers analysis of the plan’s viability, the response of various actors on the ground, and whether it can stabilize the country and help resolve its deep-seated challenges.
Libya’s Fragile Equilibrium: Succession Risk and Energy Stability
Libya’s stability has taken on renewed strategic importance as the impact of the US and Israeli war with Iran reverberates through global energy markets. Sustaining existing Libyan oil production depends on a governing arrangement capable of keeping ports open, pipelines flowing, and revenues distributed without triggering conflict.
The new wave of normalization in Turkey’s Middle East foreign policy
In the past several weeks, news has been coming out of Ankara regularly about normalization in relations with countries with which Turkey has had problematic relationships for some time.
Jonathan Winer and Mirette Mabrouk join host Alistair Taylor to discuss Libya’s new interim government, the complex regional and international dynamics at play, and what Libya’s future might look like.
Planning for the day 10 years after the fall of Gadhafi
Five years ago, President Barack Obama characterized the failure “to plan for the day after” the U.S. intervention in Libya as his worst foreign policy mistake. Certainly, the aftermath of the decision to provide support for the Feb. 17, 2011 uprising, which ended 42 years of Moammar Gadhafi’s erratic and dictatorial rule, hasn’t been happy. Libya’s past decade has featured recurrent civil war, state collapse, terrorism, militias, and warlords, together with competing foreign interventions despite the continuing U.N. arms embargo.
رئيس جديد للحكومة الليبية، ولكن تاريخ عائلته زاخر بالغموض والتعقيدات كمثل حال البلد نفسه
“يَدعي عبد الحميد الدبيبة أنه شعبوي وصل لمنصب سياسي لأنه أتى من خارج الأوساط السياسية، وأن مؤهلاته هي وعوده القائمة على ما أسماه تجفيف مستنقع الفساد. ولكن الحقيقة أن هذه مجرد شعارات.
The oldest peer-reviewed publication dedicated to the study of the modern Middle East, MEI’s flagship journal covers politics, society, and culture in the region.
