The Arab Uprisings moved the EU to learn lessons from past mistakes and re-define its approach to development, democracy, and security. Reality, however, has fallen short of this aim. Analysis of the revised Neighbourhood Policy suggests it changed little, falling back on pre-Uprisings conceptions and discarding approaches which were more inclusive, organic, and better suited […]
Following the end of the Cold War, a great deal of attention focused on the concept of civil society and its potential to contribute to the process of democratization in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Civil society—generally understood as the zone of voluntary associative life beyond family and clan affiliations but separate from […]
While the Arab spring has not resulted in a democratic wave across the MENA region, it has opened up public discussion and generated new debates about citizenship. Despite the failure or atrophy of many reform projects (our purpose here is not a general explanation for this), the burst of civic energy in 2011 and 2012 […]
In the devastated landscape of what has rather hastily been called the Arab Spring, Tunisia is an exception. This country, which in January 2011 triggered the movement of Arab revolts against dictatorshipand for freedom, has certainly undergone a long and fragile political transition, but it has managed – four years, three political assassination and six […]
The Arab Spring and its truncated aftermath raise many important questions about political reform. Citizenship and rights, in particular, form an important area of concern in light of the obstacles to wholesale democratization and to the reform of formal institutional structures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). As most regimes have pushed back […]
Since the uprisings of what has been popularly termed the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011, a number of youth training programmes have been instigated by European and US cultural institutions to build local capacity and respond to growing demands among young people in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region to engage in new forms […]
The Mediterranean region has always been marked by intense migration flows. Over the last few years, political instability in Middle East and North Africa countries, coupled with longstanding demographic and economic trends, have caused a sudden upsurge of migrants reaching Europe’s shores. Despite scattered shows of solidarity, however, the European response has proven slow and […]
The global refugee crisis has become increasingly complex as, for most of the displaced, the circumstances of their displacement severely constrain opportunities to move beyond the confines of refugee status. It is increasingly clear that the traditional approaches to addressing these issues – the “durable solutions” of resettlement, repatriation, and local integration – are insufficient to overcome […]
In reaction to recurrent tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea, the European Union (EU) has adopted a series of measures seeking to improve the protection of migrants trying to reach the borders of the EU by sea and to share responsibility among countries involved by increasing cooperation with transit countries. This study focuses on the existing […]
Long before Europe was hit by its worst-ever “refugee crisis” this summer, Libya was already one of the main gateways into Europe for refugees and other migrants. It is more transit than source country – despite two civil wars since 2011, few Libyans made their way to Europe. But tens of thousands of migrants from […]
The current refugee crisis receives different levels of attention and urgency on the two continents. While migration and the refugee crisis are high up on the European agenda, it has not received a comparable level of attention in Africa. Participants have pointed out that this at times impedes finding common ground between the EU and […]
As we have seen at various points in history, skilled migrants can have a substantial impact on the host economy through innovation and productivity growth, even when arriving in large numbers. These effects are beyond the direct contribution of the skilled migrants themselves. One important channel of impact is indirect, through the transfer of knowledge […]
Since a long time foreign fighters from all over the world – from North Africa to Central Asia, and from North America to China – have poured to Iraq and Syria to join the ranks of the Islamic State group. However, in hindsight, available data show that the majority of these fighters come from a […]
The Islamic State (or ISIS) has recruited an estimated 20,000 fighters since 2011. As I explore in a new Brookings paper, a major reason for this level of recruiting success has been the group’s savvy use of propaganda and social media. Counter-messaging efforts, meanwhile, have been largely ineffective—in part because they are dwarfed by the […]
Civilian unrest in Syria started in March 2011 and quickly became an internationalized proxy war, with the involvement of France, Iran, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and other actors, as well as the rise of a transnational terrorist movement, the self-proclaimed Islamic State. The war has been fought at the price of massive loss of […]
The recent escalation in fighting between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) threatens to worsen regional instability and set back the fight against Islamic State (IS). Over the summer, the two-year-old ceasefire between Turkey and the PKK broke down, throwing the peace process in this long-running conflict into doubt at a particularly dangerous time. […]
On 26 June, the Iraqi government declared Fallujah, a city just west of Baghdad, fully liberated after more than two years of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) control. The Iraqi army played a key role in the effort, but it could not have won without the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) – an umbrella of Iraqi militiamen who are […]
The Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) is undergoing profound transformations. Longterm structural changes of a socio-economic and demographic nature combine with the dynamics triggered by regime change and/or the armed conflicts which ensued from the 2011 uprisings. Together, they are producing major effects at the transnational, national and local levels. The pre-2011 regional […]
