Category: Middle East/North Africa

No avoiding Mideast’s underlying issues of governance, corruption and repression

     

The next U.S. administration will inherit problems associated with the Middle East that are vastly more challenging than any in a generation as the old order has given way to… Read more »

The truth about Egypt’s revolution?

     

In “Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days,” Eric Trager upends the standard pat narrative of Egypt’s Jasmine Revolution, notes Oren Kessler, deputy director… Read more »

Protect civilians in fight against Islamic State, report cautions

     

While defeating Islamic State in northern Iraq. would remove a formidable threat, religious minorities and other civilians remain at risk and could face further atrocities, according to a new report… Read more »

After Mosul: state-building means democratic state-building

     

A dispute between Iraq and Turkey has emerged as a dramatic geopolitical sideshow to the complicated military campaign to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from the Islamic State, with Turkey’s… Read more »

Reformists, hardliners vie to influence choice of Iran’s next supreme leader

     

There is a lot of manoeuvring in Tehran to influence the decision on who will be Iran’s next supreme leader. There is no public succession plan for the most powerful… Read more »

What chance for democracy in the Middle East?

     

There are many lessons to take from the Iraq debacle, notes Gerard Russell, who served as an assistant to Iraq’s first elected prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, in 2005. The postwar… Read more »

The future of Arab reform: beyond autocrats and Islamists

     

The argument for democratic reform in the Middle East seems harder to make today, despite the evidence for it being clearer, than it was when the Arab Spring sprung, argues… Read more »

Decisive factors that will shape post-conflict Mosul

     

The root causes of Iraq’s civil war involve the sectarian policies of previous Iraqi governments and the failure of the Iraqi political system to establish power-sharing arrangements, argues Zalmay Khalilzad,… Read more »