Middle East & North Africa

In this installation of Conversations in Diplomacy, Congressman Seth Moulton, Representative of the Sixth District of Massachusetts, military veteran, and graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School, discusses the most serious threats to U.S. national security with Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Faculty Director of the Future of Diplomacy Project.

Atiyeh Vahidmanesh became inspired to focus her research on the inequality of educational opportunity after hearing her Virginia Tech advisor and former Belfer Center Visiting Scholar, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, speak on the issue at a seminar. Salehi-Isfahani also introduced her to the Belfer Center, where she then applied for a research fellowship with the Middle East Initiative through its new Emirates Leadership Initiative. Vahidmanesh, a PhD student in economics at Virginia Tech, describes her research as somewhat interdisciplinary between economics and education.

The Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS) has given $8.1 million to Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) to support the continuation of the Kuwait Program at HKS Belfer Center's Middle East Initiative. The gift will be used to develop leaders with the capacity to address the many challenging public policy issues facing the region. It will also fund research issues of vital importance in the region, such as education, energy, and water.

"Critics of the role of universities in economic transformation argue that higher education takes too long to show results and that its focus is usually too academic. However, the evidence suggests that practically oriented universities offer the fastest and most durable ways to incubate new states. With the right vision, universities can confer their attributes to a new state."

"The finance and education ministers and the heads of the academic planning institutions have to understand that when they plan new "centers of excellence," it is important to include, in the correct proportions, the fields of philosophy, political science, history and communications, among others. These are not necessarily subjects that encourage national economic growth by luring investors or making technological breakthroughs, but they definitely meet an academic demand and undoubtedly can help address the non-material needs of Israeli society, thereby contributing to its strength and vitality."

DUBAI -- When the public policy institute that I work for, the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, organized a regional seminar this week on researching "youth identity and values" in the Arab world, we decided to hold it in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in a Gulf region where "identity issues" are widely debated because nationals tend to account for less than twenty per cent of total populations.

"Meeting safety requirements in international markets will involve the use of sophisticated information systems that allow regulators to effectively trace the movement of products through the entire food chain.

Having technical capacity to manage safety information will help African countries to add value to their produce."

Many of the Arab nations have been blessed historically with oil and natural gas, which became the dominant engines of economic change  in the last century. That is the good news. The bad news is that oil and natural gas are the sole economic foundations of the Arab world. What the Arab world has failed to achieve is economic diversity.