Middle East Initiative

We spoke with two Emirates Leadership Initiative Student Degree Fellows, Mariam Balfaqeh and Tarek Zeidan, about their time as a fellow at Harvard, and their plans after graduation. The Emirates Leadership Initiative Student Degree Fellowship was established by the United Arab Emirates to support students from the UAE and other Arab countries who have demonstrated interest in developing leadership and public management skills.

MEI has supported the annual Winter Field Study Course, o ered jointly by HKS and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and led by Professor Claude Bruderlein and his team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Advanced Training Program in Humanitarian Action (HHI-ATHA), since 2014, bringing 77 students to the region to grapple with some of the toughest public policy challenges faced by the region and the international humanitarian community from an on-the- ground perspective.

NEW YORK — The United States’ announcement that its troops will leave Syria as soon as possible marks one more important stage in the recent evolution of strategic and diplomatic moves across the Middle East — anchored in Syria, of course, as many such moves have been for most of the past century, and much of the last four millennia before that. This episode is worth pondering by those who wonder why and how things happen in the Middle East, and how foreign powers should interact with our societies, countries, and political power centers.

BOSTON — This is a historic moment in relations between the United States and the Middle East, because we may be witnessing the beginning of the decline of that combination of forces that has been at once the most destructive and the most powerful in our modern history. I am speaking about the U.S.-Israel-Saudi Arabia close relationship that reached its apex, and saw its Israeli-Saudi Arabian dimension emerge into the public, in the past two years of the Donald Trump administration.

Review Essay: Civil War in Syria: Mobilization and Competing Social Orders. By Adam Baczko, Gilles Dorronsoro, and Arthur Quesnay. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 336p. $84.99 cloth, $27.99 paper.

The horrors of the ongoing Syrian civil war have never been far from the front pages of the news. Social scientists who wish to study it soon confront the awkward reality that the war’s ferocity precludes field research on its central military and political dynamics. Scholars have made important advances in studying mechanisms behind protest activity and the mobilization of armed opposition to the al-Assad regime, but much work is confined to studying the conflict through the lens of refugees. Adam Baczko, Gilles Dorronsoro, and Arthur Quesnay’s research is all the more indispensable for that context. Scholars of civil war and of autocracies, researchers investigating the 2011 Arab uprisings, and Syria specialists all will find value in their book’s rich pairing of theoretically-driven analysis and empirical material gathered through field research in Syria. 

A seminar with Rami Khouri, MEI Senior Fellow; Senior Public Policy Fellow, Issam Fares Institute, American University of Beirut; and Visiting Adjunct Professor of Journalism and Journalist-in-Residence at AUB.

Co-sponsored by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

I’ve recorded a Q&A with Rami Khouri. Mainly, we talk about Saudi Arabia, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi (whom he knew), and U.S.-Saudi relations. How important is Saudi Arabia to the United States? What is the role of oil? What is the nature of the Saudi government today?

BOSTON — The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s leaks to several American news organizations this weekend that it believes with “high confidence” that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi has triggered a series of fascinating political contests and confrontations that may profoundly impact several decision-decision-making spheres in Washington, within Saudi Arabia, and between the United States and foreign countries. We enter uncharted terrain here with potentially tumultuous results, largely because of the unprecedented, unpredictable, and mostly uninformed, uncaring, and dangerous nature of the Trump presidency and the rule of Mohammad Bin Salman.

How authoritarian regimes manipulate rural politics to shatter coalitions between two of the fiercest opponents of their rule, Islamists and leftists.