Diplomacy and International Politics

Robert Springborg, a preeminent senior scholar of the Middle East has joined the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) community this semester as Kuwait Foundation Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

An interview with MEI Faculty Affiliate Asim Khwaja on his work at the Center for International Development's Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) program with the Saudi Ministry of Labor on labor market policy as well as EPoD's Smart Policy Design and Implementation methodology and implications for the future of informed, iterative policymaking.

The agreement to freeze production was geopolitical not economic, writes Meghan O’Sullivan in the Financial Times.

"Keep your eyes on the oil-fueled Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Arab states in the year ahead, because they are just starting to experience a genuinely novel, almost existential, challenge that will test the quality of their statehood and national integrity as these have never been tested before. The issue that sparks this historic reckoning of statehood and citizenship in the GCC is not Iran’s nuclear future, the fate of “Islamic State,” nor the wasteful war in Yemen. It is the sudden array of sharp fiscal adjustment measures that most GCC states have announced in the past three weeks..."

"Capital-rich and labour-poor. This is how the curse of the Gulf States was described fifty years ago. The world’s largest oil stocks had just been discovered under the earth’s most arid and depopulated region. With oil internationally recognised as the property of the state and not of the company that did the pumping, the scarcely populated states of the Gulf acquired enormous wealth. From the largest and oldest (Saudi Arabia) to the tiniest and youngest (Qatar), all six Gulf states soon faced income surpluses with population shortages, to which they all responded by importing labour. In just five decades, the Gulf, which for centuries had received only small population flows, became the world’s third largest receiver of global migrants after the United States and the European Union."

On June 23 and 24, twenty five experts met at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government under the auspices of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The group, which included experts from academia, the financial sector, government, and the energy industry, spent an evening and the following full day discussing and debating the possible energy implications of a nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran.

Audio recordings from MEI's Spring 2015 Study Group Rethinking the Arab State: the Collapse of Legitimacy in Arab Politics, with Professor Michael C. Hudson.

During the Spring 2015 semester, Prof. Hudson hosted a distinguished group of scholars to re-examine the foundational concepts of legitimacy, the state, civil society, religion, and regional stability in the wake of the Arab Uprisings.

An audio recording from Yezid Sayigh, Senior Associate and Professor, Carnegie Middle East Center, Beirut.

On March 31, 2015 at MEI, Dr. Yezid Sayigh examined the political legacy of Saddam Hussein's regime in ISIS' leadership structure and methods of control in Iraq, Syria and beyond.

A consensus has emerged since the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia that the kingdom will not change course on oil policy. This consensus is probably right, at least for the short term.  It is, however, correct for reasons other than the ones that most observers have invoked.