Commentary Pieces
The Fall of Kabul: reflections after one year
by Richard Gray It has been a year since the Republic of Afghanistan fell, with the Taliban engulfing the streets of Kabul on August 15,
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by Richard Gray It has been a year since the Republic of Afghanistan fell, with the Taliban engulfing the streets of Kabul on August 15,
Especially after the 15 July (2016) coup attempt, Turkey entered into a process of questioning its position within NATO and got bogged down in its relations with the USA….
The seemingly invincible Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may face a defeat when Turkey goes to the ballot boxes next time. Although the next election is scheduled for 2023, the centenary of the nation’s birth, the country’s precarious situation regarding both economy and foreign policy has made people call for an advance of the election. A foretaste of what is to expect has been given in the local elections in early 2019 when the ruling AKP lost both Istanbul and Ankara. Turkey is considered more divided and polarized than ever and the electorate can easily be categorised as pro- or anti-Erdoğan. This contribution will look at the trajectory of Erdogan’s term as Turkish president and its potential prospects for the next elections.
Throughout history many colonial powers have sought to subdue Morocco. No matter whether the conqueror has been Europeans, Ottomans, or Islam, the Lions from the Atlas Mountains have proven not so easy to tame. The most recent demonstration of this resistance occurred during the unraveling of the Arab Spring in early 2011, when Morocco was one of few countries in the Middle East that did not see any attempts at revolution. Through a well-institutionalised monarchy and a thorough political strategy, the regime has managed to remain unchallenged. This article thus takes a closer look at the regime’s survival mechanisms.
Join us today a year on from our original talk with Maryam Nsaif to discuss the crisis in Lebanon which has only worsened since July
When attempting to quantify the vast territorial holdings of the British Empire, particularly throughout much of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, it has often been noted that from the Western Canadian shores to Australia and Oceania, the sun never set on the Empire. Put another way, if a map of territories invaded by or brought under the political control of the British Crown were overlaid with a map of United Nations member states, 171 of the organization’s present 193 states would have been historically impacted by British colonialism in some way. Much of these British holdings were concentrated in locations other than the Middle East given the vastness of the local Ottoman Empire, but at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, the Sultan’s grip on the region was drastically weakening.
The coalition between Erdoğan’s AKP and the nationalist MHP, which took form after the election in spring 2015, may have appeared strange to many people. The collaboration between Islamists and nationalist is, however, by no means anything new, but rather has deep underlying causes – causes which have paved the way for the situation we see today. The final power overtake of the Islamists may at the same time not be seen as a paradigm change, but rather as part of a continuum.
Turkey has been the first country to sign and ratify the Istanbul convention, but also the first to withdraw. Before analysing the possible consequences and the impact that this decision has caused, we must first briefly present the content of the Istanbul Convention. It is relevant that women’s rights are human rights, thus violations against the former are human rights violations. The United Nations has sought through the establishment of international treaties such as CEDAW (The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) or the promotion of SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) number five to achieve these objectives. But, what about regional treaties?
This article aims to present the main features of what is known to be the worst humanitarian crisis which have derived from the Yemeni War that started in 2015. Although this war could not directly affect the European Union and its interests in the immediate term, the Union – as a global actor – has throughout its history engaged in spreading its values. In 2016, the Union presented the European Union Global Strategy (EUGS), aiming to establish a set of objectives to be carried out through a set of values and compromises. Thus, in this paper, we will examine how the Union puts into practice the Strategy presented by Federica Mogherini in the situation of Yemen.
Russia’s return as playmaker in the MENA region is a matter of consensus, albeit a lively debate exists on the Moscow’s main interests in the region and its strategy to pursue them. With this article we attempt to give a small contribution to such debate.The first focus are Russia’s interests in the region, according to Moscow’s own definition of its role and objectives in the international arena in the 2013 and 2016 Foreign Policy Concepts (FPCs), which offer “an important insight into how Russia views an international environment that has changed considerably since 2008.
