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.
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.
The Biden administration has been trying to diplomatically reengage with China, although so far with little response from Beijing. Any broad reengagement would necessarily include reengagement in the Middle East and North Africa. Both sides have a long list of common interests in the Middle East; the areas where their interests diverge relate mainly to suspicions of the other side’s long-term strategy and global ambitions. How can Washington and Beijing build on common interests in the region while addressing their long-term concerns, reducing some of them and accommodating robust competition or even sharp adversarial attitudes in other areas?
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Over the last two decades, the Mediterranean has become an important region. Many scholars, policymakers and analysts have mostly referred to this region from a nexus of security, geopolitics and traditional energy politics. With the war in Ukraine, the relevance of this whole region has increased along the same line. The Mediterranean today is home to some of the most enduring conflicts in the world. New energy resources are being discovered in disputed areas in an environment of intense geopolitical competition over regional leadership and energy routes within and beyond the region.
What happens when a petrostate loses its oil rents? While the oil market continues to go through boom-and-bust cycles, cases such as Iraq provide evidence of how the rapid loss of oil revenues—traumatic decarbonization—may affect the politics and stability of these petrostates. In Iraq, multiple shocks to oil revenues from 2014 through 2020 fundamentally altered the organization and concentration of political power in Iraq with destabilizing and democratic consequences.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Ten of the most important or far-reaching events and trends that dominated the MENA region in 2022.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Today’s two-part episode is a study in contrasts. On one hand, the Partnership for Peace Fund strives to create a social and economic environment in which sustainable peace can become possible. On the other, hard political realities and gridlock undermine cooperation at every turn.
It appears that calm has returned to Iraq after the reported intervention of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country’s chief and widely respected Shia cleric. In recent weeks, violence had occurred in and near parliament, which has been unable to implement last October’s election results. The clashes involved demonstrators and armed forces loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, the leading candidate in the elections, and militias loyal to a loose array of rival Shia political parties calling themselves the Coordination Framework.
Followers of Iraqi Shi’a cleric and political leader Muqtada al-Sadr and those of the Iran-aligned Coordination Framework clashed in downtown Baghdad on Aug. 29. Iraqis spent that evening wondering whether the country was descending into an intra-Shi’a civil war.
During two days of meetings in May 2022, members of the Middle East Dialogue, convened by MEI, met in Istanbul, Turkey to discuss pressing issues relating to: i) the effects of the war in Ukraine on the MENA region; ii) current and future projections regarding Gulf relations with Iran, amid the stalemate over a revival of the 2015 JCPOA; iii) the future pathways and security framework for the MENA region; and iv) the Baghdad Declaration of Good Neighborhood Principles for the Middle East. This meeting brought together policymakers, academics, and experts from across the MENA region. This report provides an analytical understanding of the issues discussed and recommendations shared during the meeting.