Research & Commentary Results

As environmental challenges become a priority for countries across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, this creates new opportunities for regional environmental cooperation, including between Israel and its neighbors. Despite being limited in scope and facing several key obstacles, regional cooperative endeavors are taking place, including on both the bilateral and multilateral levels, and efforts to sustain and expand them are underway. This new report, written under the auspices of the Israel Climate Forum, addresses the importance of regional environmental cooperation in the Middle East and Mediterranean, examines the scope of such cooperation between Israel and its neighbors, and spells out opportunities, obstacles, and recommendations for increased coordination and joint action, including the role the U.S. and Europe can play.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.

Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.

According to multiple media reports, Taliban anti-narcotics units have managed to effect a drastic reduction in opium cultivation in Afghanistan. Assisted by armed Taliban soldiers, stick-wielding personnel are hopping from one opium-growing field to another, destroying standing crops in a large number of provinces. Overseen by international media, such operations may have resulted in an almost 80 percent reduction in opium cultivation this year in the country, which not long ago accounted for 85 percent of the world’s opium.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.

For the second time in three months, Egyptians have expressed their dissatisfaction — albeit largely symbolically and on a limited scale — with the government’s tight control over nearly all public freedoms. The Engineers’ Syndicate’s vote against a government-selected candidate to head the organization may be pointing to growing public dissatisfaction with the authorities’ policies, both on the economic and political fronts.

The likelihood of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan successfully extricating himself from his entwined battle with the Army now appears to be nearly impossible. He has crossed too many red lines for the military establishment to give him slack. The developing situation ahead of the October elections looks set to culminate with Khan imprisoned and stripped of his political party.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.

Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.

An ongoing power struggle for the position of ambassador at the Afghan embassy in New Delhi underlines India’s diplomatic quandary about the nature of its engagement with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.

Rather than addressing the critical gaps in Somalia’s security, President Hassan Sheikh has chosen to prioritize nation-building over state-building, diverting scarce resources needed to stabilize areas liberated from al-Shabaab. The Biden administration has enabled President Sheikh’s nation-building project through its partner-led, U.S.-enabled approach.

International leaders are struggling to manage a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan; they are torn between their commitment to alleviate Afghans’ suffering and their reluctance to legitimize a Taliban government that violates its people’s basic rights. Helping Afghans but not their new “de facto authorities” is a difficult balance for a diverse group of international actors with often divergent long-term interests.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.

Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.