Middle East & North Africa

105 Items

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, center right, and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabollahian, left, attend a joint news conference

Yury Kochetkov/Pool Photo via AP

Policy Brief - European Council on Foreign Relations

Alone Together: How the War in Ukraine Shapes the Russian-Iranian Relationship

| Sep. 06, 2023

This policy brief explains how Russia and Iran have sought to upgrade their partnership through greater diplomatic support for pushing back on Western hegemony, mutual provision of key weapons systems, and sharing of expertise on evading sanctions.

Displaced Ethiopians from different towns in the Amhara region wait for food to be distributed at lunchtime at a center for the internally-displaced in Debark, in the Amhara region of northern Ethiopia

AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene

Policy Brief - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Women in Public Policy Program, Harvard Kennedy School

SVAC Explainer: Wartime Sexual Violence in Tigray, Ethiopia, 2020–2021

| March 2023

The Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC)dataset measures reports of the conflict-related sexual violence committed by armed actors during the years 1989–2021. The dataset includes information about the prevalence, perpetrators, and forms of the reported sexual violence by each armed actor in each conflict-year. The information used to compile these data comes from three sources: the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. 

This photo released Nov. 5, 2019 by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran shows centrifuge machines in the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran.

Atomic Energy Organization of Iran

Policy Brief - Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship and the German Council on Foreign Relations

Transatlantic Action Plan: Middle East and North Africa

    Author:
  • Nathalie Tocci
| February 2021

It has become impossible to read conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East in isolation, as regional powers like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Israel and Turkey weigh in across the region. Likewise, migration, energy, security and climate dynamics have generated indissoluble ties between North and Sub-Saharan Africa, the Gulf and the Horn of Africa as well as between the Eastern Mediterranean and the broader Middle East. North Africa and the Middle East have become a much wider and more heterogeneous geographical space, in which different thematic issues interlock.

Houses of Parliament

Wikimedia CC/Arpingstone

Testimony

Written Evidence Submitted to the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee

| June 27, 2020

Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft Fellow William James submitted written evidence to the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee for its inquiry into the government's forthcoming Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy.

Greenpeace activists hold fishing rods from which garbage is dangling

AP/Hussein Malla

Policy Brief - Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Brandeis University

Lebanon's Civil Society as an Anchor of Stability

| April 2018

Lebanon's political system is often described as weak and perennially at risk of collapse. The sudden resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri in late 2017 was just one example of how regional crises threaten to destabilize Lebanon's government. In this policy brief, the author challenges this conventional wisdom and argues that the activism and organizational capacity of the Lebanese public make the country's political system more stable and resilient than is commonly assumed.

During a re-enactment in a park in southern Tehran, members of the Iranian Basij paramilitary force re-enact fighting in the 1980–88 war with Iraq.

AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi

Policy Brief - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Managing U.S.-Iran Relations: Critical Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War

| November 2017

The best way to address the various challenges associated with Iranian behavior—meaning the one most likely to succeed and to bolster long-term U.S. security interests—is to preserve and build on the nuclear deal. Doing so would enable Iran to reconsider the lessons of the Iran-Iraq War, which taught it that it cannot trust the international organizations and world powers that seek to isolate it and undermine its security.