Middle East / North Africa

Russia's foreign policy towards Syria and the Greater Middle East is generally not aggressive. It is a defensive policy aimed mainly at developing its traditional political and economic interests in the region and protecting its Southern borders.

The potential synergy between development and migration has become a key feature of most international migration politics. However, this relationship is far from evident.

On November 5th 2009, a cocaine-loaded Boeing 727 aircraft arriving from Venezuela was discovered torched and emptied on a makeshift airstrip in the Malian desert (Gao region). The Sahel-Saharan area is clearly a contact zone between very distant worlds.

Before the 9/11 events, US-Maghreb relations were growing stronger, especially after the United States had long left the floor to the Maghreb’s “natural” European partner. Therefore, the American action in this region was in line with a mechanism previously set off by Clinton Administration...

Since Mohammed VI came into power, Morocco’s African policy has undergone notable change in comparison to his predecessor’s period.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is a regional organization which was created in 1981, reassembling six Arab countries together: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Thanks to their oil income, GCC countries have enjoyed economic boom since 2002,...

Our interest in this topic stems both from our annual visits to Mauritania which started fifteen years ago, and the tiny amount of research noticed on trafficking in this country.

While largely interrupted by the colonial period premise, trade relations between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa have enjoyed a new boom with the independence era. However, until the end of the 1990s, the African policy of the three Maghreb countries significantly impacted their economic...

The industrial revolution underwent by Europe in the 18th century has triggered the need for the major colonial powers to find new markets for their manufactured products. It is in this colonial competitive framework that European explorers delivered information about the different access...

One of the major events of the last couple of decades has been the rise of China and India, reflected by their increasingly important economic presence in the world, both in terms of trade flows and of foreign direct investments.