North Africa and Middle East

Created in the Fall of 2008, the J Street movement seeks to represent those in the U.S. Jewish community who would like Washington to be more active in supporting a lasting peace in the Middle-East.

The promise of democracy enshrined in the "Arab Spring" has been accompanied by significant developments in migration flows across North Africa and to Europe. With political turmoil sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of persons, mainly from Libya, have been displaced since January 2011.

U.S.-Moroccan ties have sometimes been described as a "special relationship." This paper explores the bilateral relationship to investigate how special it really is. 

How will the US respond to the changing Palestinian and Arab paradigm? 

This paper explores the recent evolution of security cooperation between the United States and Algeria, which have forged a strong partnership on counterterrorism despite lingering mutual distrust.

Since 2009 the influence of immigrant party Israel Beiteinu on foreign and security policy in Israel has grown. The party won 15 seats in the 2009 parliamentary elections and its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, became the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

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.

Since the beginning of 2010, German authorities have become conscious of the fact that they cannot continue to maintain the Bundeswehr’s involvement in Afghanistan with a majority of the German population opposing it. It is clearly understood that the federal government and the Bundestag will adhere to President Obama’s plans to gradually withdraw national troops from ISAF, starting in the summer of 2011, and to hand over complete control of the country’s security to Afghani authorities.

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 member, Stuart Eizenstat, which aimed at reducing intra-regional obstacles and stimulating American investments towards an area where Americans were little-represented. Hence Washington seemed more involved in promoting the emergence of a strong, world-economy-integrated Maghrebi market.

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

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 projection.

This contribution consists in analyzing the unifying or opposing relations between the central State-power and the southern part of central-Saharan populations, mainly Arabs and Tuaregs, within the relational framework of colonial and Malian armed forces. The French Colonial State and the Malian independent State (from the 1960 independence movement) are both considered by Arabs and Tuaregs as external entities, whatever the form of their relation, good or bad.

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, hence breaking with the 1990s economic slow-down.