Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Nearly five months on, Sudan’s war between its army and largest paramilitary force has destroyed much of Khartoum, the adjacent cities of Bahri and Omdurman, as well as key towns in Darfur. The warring forces have killed thousands of civilians, destroyed critical infrastructure, and forced a staggering 4.9 million people to flee their homes. The U.N. is providing important humanitarian assistance, but it should be doing far more, especially to advance accountability and improve coordination in the messy diplomatic arena. Both the high-level week in New York and the Human Rights Council session in Geneva present opportunities that it should not squander.
Pakistan’s intensifying economic, political, and security instability is not good news for China’s strategic investments. So, what are Beijing’s options?
Expert regional analysis by MEI scholars and contributors.
Turkey and Egypt, two influential regional players with a complex history of cooperation and conflict, are now working on mending their ruptured ties. As officials navigate this process, it is essential to identify practical steps to capitalize on the diplomatic breakthrough. Sustainable peace can only be ensured by shifting the focus from political ideology to shared interests. One way to do that is by creating an inclusive, multi-track process that involves state institutions, businesses, NGOs, academics, and the grassroots.
After the conclusion of the 16-month rule of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), the appointment of a new caretaker government has created uncertainty. This raises doubts about whether Pakistan will smoothly transition to another democratic government or if the caretaker setup will exceed its constitutional mandate.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
Two years on from the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, Afghanistan’s neighbors are increasingly concerned that their return to power has emboldened terrorist groups and networks, which are using the hospitable environment to regroup, rearm, and recruit substantially. The main question now for Afghanistan’s neighbors in the region, and the international community more broadly, is just how reliable the Taliban’s counterterrorism assurances to other states really are.
A brutal heat wave tormenting Egypt since mid-July, resulting in lengthy and repeated power cuts, has turned into a political liability for President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi ahead of his expected campaign to run for a third, six-year term early next year.
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.
After 500 days of coping with the debilitating impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Egypt’s economy is faltering. At the core of the crisis is its fragile food security. Now, the Egyptian economy is fast approaching a tipping point and Cairo has no alternative but to boost its domestic agrifood production. In addition to building out its infrastructure, Egypt must also adopt cutting-edge agritech solutions to improve the water-use efficiency of the crops themselves.
While some analysts attribute Egypt’s realignment toward Turkey, Qatar, and Iran to a change in the foreign policies of its influential allies, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, it can be argued that Egypt’s shift is primarily motivated by its domestic dynamics and its unfulfilled foreign policy objectives between 2014 and 2018. Egypt’s realignment, in that sense, seeks to achieve multiple unmet domestic and regional aims.
Read MEI’s weekly briefing featuring expert analysis of key regional developments for the week ahead.
For resource-rich countries such as Gulf oil and natural gas producers, sovereign wealth funds have emerged as promising tools to save for future generations, mitigate the effects of outsized economic shocks, and/or be deployed as reserve investment and strategic development funds to spend on human, natural, social, and physical capital.