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Publisher`s note: The article focuses on phenomenas which are expressions of a more active and self-reliant European Union(EU). Topics include soft power of EU as a result of its members investment in development cooperation more than the rest of the world combined, sanctions policy against the regime in Damascus following its violent clampdown on demonstrations and protests in Arab Springs, and active participation by EU in negotiations with Iran which led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Publisher's note: The article looks on the current position of the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East and its possibilities of transformation by the decision of administration of Donald Trump, president of the U.S. Topics include rivalry between Russia and the U.S. for power, geopolitical rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and end of dual leadership of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and ascension of leadership of Saudi Arabia in Arab world. It also discusses the Kurdish independence movement in Syria.
Publisher`s note: The article offers author's views on how both China and Russia have increased their engagement in the Middle East in recent years. It is mentioned that the involvement spans multiple dimensions, including trade and investment, energy sector, military cooperation, and diplomatic activity. The article adds China's profile has increased substantially in the last ten years, and Russia returned to the region in 2015, when it deployed military personnel to Syria to prop up the Assad regime.
Publisher's note: Along with China's growing presence and interests in the Middle East, Beijing finds it increasingly challenging to sit on the sidelines of regional conflicts and tensions and has called for establishing China's new role in the region. By adopting content analysis to examine 53 articles written by Chinese elites, this study analyzes how the concept of China's new role in the Middle East is understood by this group. In particular, it addresses the following questions: What is new about China's new role? What are the policy debates of Chinese elites? And, has China's policy fundamentally changed or not? This study finds that the concept of "China's new role in the Middle East" is still under heated debate. This concerns what extent, and in which aspects, China should abandon the non‐interference and non‐involvement policy in the Middle East; whether China should identify itself as an order participant or order shaper; and which countries China should attach most importance to when conducting role adjustment in the region. The article also finds that China's elites and decision makers oscillate between prioritizing China's economic interests and geopolitical concerns with respect to this issue. This argument is tested by using the ordinary least squares model. The article concludes that the new role is too vague to be institutionalized at this stage, which reflects China's dilemma between expanding its influence and discursive power in the Middle East's rule‐setting, and trying to maintain its current risk‐aversion policy by not turning any Middle Eastern country or major international player in the region, such as the United States, into a hostile force.
Publisher`s note: The Middle Eastern regional order has been undergoing profound changes in the current decade. These can be traced back to a reconfiguration of international and regional structures. On the one hand, shifts in US foreign policies towards the Middle East corresponded with new regional dynamics. On the other, the monarchies of the Arab Gulf have become more active in regional politics. In this contribution, we scrutinize these two changes and explore their interplay. We argue that a new regional order has emerged that can be characterized as a highly contested multipolar system in flux. Subsequently, three aspects that constitute and reinforce this disorderly regional system of the Middle East are discussed: first, the securitizing of policies by regional and extra‐regional political leaders; second, the increasing disintegration of regional institutions; and third, the emergence of lasting war zones. The paper concludes with a discussion of the meaning of these profound dynamics for future aspects of Middle Eastern regional affairs. The roots of both the shift in US policies towards the Middle East and the new dynamics in regional politics are structural: decreased US threat perception and reduced strategic interest in the Middle East on the one hand and increased threat perceptions and new strategic interests in the region on the other. These changing patterns of threat perception and interests occurred in the wake of a diminishing role of regional institutions in Middle Eastern affairs.
Publisher`s note: Great Britain was more successful at organizing the politics of the Middle East, maintaining its clients and securing its interests, during the interwar period when it could credibly be claimed to be the hegemon in the region, than did the United States during its period of regional dominance. That difference is best explained not by relative power disparities or the styles of regional management practiced by London and Washington, but by changes in the infrastructural power of the local actors and changes in the relationship between the local actors and the would-be hegemons to the institutions of international governance.
Publisher's note: The Trump administration's foreign policy is often perceived as an isolationist ideology that has radically reversed American global leadership in a matter of years. In the Middle East, critics have harangued the Trump Doctrine as an even hastier surrender of the US hegemony that has defined regional order since the 1980s. In reality, American interest in this region has been declining for a decade as expressed by its rising reluctance to leverage its economic and military supremacy to constrain, regulate, and destroy perceived foes as it once did. This waning interventionism precedes the Trump Doctrine. It stems not from any ideological turn, or the financial and military exhaustion of a cresting superpower, but rather a structural dynamic: the Middle East no longer generates credible threats against the US. Whereas in the past alarmist fears of communism and energy insecurity propelled Washington's regional imperium, today the perceived enemies of US interests – radical Islamism and Iran – do not endanger the political institutions and economic prosperity of American society. Absent a catastrophic terrorist attack, the US will continue to relinquish its hegemonic mantle, turning away from overt interventionism as the logic of coercively dominating a region of diminishing importance runs its course. As a long‐term implication, as the US continues to gradually extricate itself from the MENA, the geopolitical terrainwill shift. Regional powers, particularly Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, will have increasing room to manoeuvre asthe rules and norms imposed by decades of American hegemony dissipate, but they must also bear more of thecosts of maintaining regional order.
Publisher`s note: Why do some ethno-political organizations get support from their diaspora while others do not? There is little analysis that examines why some organizations (both violent and nonviolent) get support. Using data on 112 organizations in the Middle East we examine how factors like the power of the organization, ideology, political behavior, and government treatment might impact the likelihood of an organization getting support from its diaspora. We argue that contentious political behavior should have the largest impact on such support. We find that those that do the best job of getting attention through visible action get the most support.
Publisher's note: Oppositional coalitions, networks and social movements in the MENA region have long attracted scholarly attention. The Arab uprisings of 2011 have given renewed strength to this focus. In the literature that has followed, a great deal of attention has been devoted to cross-ideological coalitions, their origins and their trajectories. This literature has also tended to focus on a strict dichotomy between success and failure. The collection of papers in this Special Issue moves away from some of these narrower approaches to coalitions and, in doing so, expands significantly on how we understand coalition building in the MENA region. This Afterword examines the key questions raised by these papers regarding why, how and when coalitions are formed, how those who are challenged by the emergence of new coalitions respond, and how this impacts on those coalitions. Finally, it examines the related questions of how internal divisions from within, and challenge from without, weaken coalitions and lead to their demise as well as the longer term and potentially 'transformative' impact of the act of coalition building in particular settings.
Publisher`s note: This article focuses on the impact of emotions on the European Union (EU)'s international identity and agency in the context of the memory of trauma. Emotions are understood as performances through which an actor expresses itself to others while constructing its identity, creating its agency, and potentially affecting the social order. It is argued that the memory of trauma is translated into EU foreign policy practice through emotional performances of EU representatives. Empirically, we explore this impact in relation to the EU's engagement in the Israel‐Palestinian prolonged conflict that has many underlying emotions linked with past traumatic experiences. By doing so, we aim to instigate a discussion between the emotions literature in International Relations and the European Union studies literature to nuance understanding of the politics of emotions that increasingly constrain what kind of a global actor the EU actually is or can become.
Publisher`s note: This study examines the impact of environmental regulations stringency on agricultural trade between European Union (EU) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA countries). Using a gravity model and applying the zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) model, we estimate the impact of environmental regulations stringency on bilateral agricultural exports between 28 EU and 20 MENA countries during the period 2001–2014. The results have showed that environmental regulations do matter for agricultural trade between both regions because in the presence of excessive zero trade observations, they act as significant fixed export costs that affect the probability of trade. More stringent environmental regulations stimulate innovative efforts in cost-saving green technologies, which increase productivity and positively affect agricultural exports. The results have favoured the revisionist Porter hypothesis (PH), according to which environmental regulations may stimulate innovative efforts, which mitigate the negative effects of higher fixed abatement costs and enhance trade competitiveness.
Publisher's note: This paper aims to analyse whether better governance rewards economic performance and facilitates the integration of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region into the world economy. In comparison with other regions in the world economy, MENA countries suffer from important institutional deficiencies, which generate insecurity and difficult international transactions. Despite this fact, the relationship between trade and institutional quality in MENA countries remains unexplored. A gravity model of trade augmented with governance indicators is estimated for the exports of 19 MENA countries, their 189 trading partners and for all exporters in the period from 1996 to 2013. The main results indicate that improvements in five of the six governance indicators increase exports from MENA countries, whereas better governance in destination countries does not affect MENA exports. Instead, each of the six governance indicators used has a positive effect on bilateral trade for the entire sample of exporters (189). Moreover, the effect of country‐pair similarity in governance indicators suggests that a similar level of regulatory quality and rule of law in exporting and importing countries increases exports from MENA countries. Similarities in voice and accountability also foster exports for the average exporter, but not for MENA exporters.
Publisher`s note: Since the late 1980s governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have created commercial institutions in order to promote regional economic integration. The primary aim of this policy has been regarded as the promotion of economic welfare gains at the national level. The second, albeit less-emphasized goal, has been to promote regional peace through economic interdependence. This study examines the prospects for a liberal peace in the MENA by analyzing two stages of the commercial institutional peace. First, the study considers whether commercial institutions have promoted intra-regional trade in the MENA. Second, it examines whether economic interaction has had an impact on promoting peace within the region. Twenty states are considered here and the unit of analysis is the dyad-year over a 25-year period from 1990 to 2014. This study finds that commercial institutions in the MENA have only a limited positive correlation with trade volume and while there is a direct positive correlation between economic integration and peace in the region, this is quite limited. These findings suggest that the conclusions made by previous studies demonstrate a direct positive correlation between commercial institutions (and economic integration more generally) and peace, may be less applicable to some regions such as MENA.
Publisher's note: This paper examines the economic ramifications of the recent political reconfigurations that the MENA region witnessed, commonly known as the Arab Spring, utilizing MENA countries’ data for the period 2005–2016. Using the Arellano-Bond dynamic panel estimation, the paper estimates a growth model using the difference in the log of GDPC between periods t and t + 1. Buttressed by sufficient empirical evidence, the paper’s findings corroborate that the Arab Spring had been negatively associated with growth.
Publisher's note: The Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) economies have one of the highest degrees of dependency on received remittances worldwide. In this study, we have examined the role of remittances in the trade balance of 11 labour abundant MENA countries. Our panel regression analysis showed that the inflow of remittances has fostered the trade deficit. We also found that the final effect of remittances depends on the level of domestic capital formation. The results are robust after controlling for other drivers of trade deficit such as income, inflation, exchange rate and institutions as well as country and year fixed effects.
Publisher`s note: Does the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) reflects the real risks perceived in doing business in countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)? To explore this question, first, we examine whether the CAPM yields consistent results in calculating the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) as applied by different academic databases, by comparing three different academic databases for 736 listed companies on stock exchanges in the MENA region. Second, we examine whether practitioners use the WACC inputs and calculations consistent with academic databases, through an analysis of 83 companies and in-depth interviews with 8 financial institutions. We also explore adjustments made by practitioners to reflect the real risk they perceive in MENA countries.
Publisher's note: Despite progress with economic and social development over several decades, life satisfaction was relatively low and declining in many developing Arab countries in the second half of the 2000s--a situation described in this paper as the "unhappy development" paradox. The paper empirically tests the direction and strength of association of a range of objective and subjective factors with subjective well-being in the Middle East and North Africa in the years immediately preceding the Arab Spring uprisings (2009-2010). The findings suggest a significant, negative association between life satisfaction levels and each of the main perceived grievances voiced during the 2011 uprisings--dissatisfaction with the standard of living, poor labor market conditions, and corruption in the form of nepotism or cronyism. The increased prevalence of dissatisfaction with the standard of living contributed the most to the decline in subjective well-being during this period, followed by worsening labor market conditions manifested in increased unemployment and decline in self-reported earnings. In addition, perceptions about corruption became more important for people's life satisfaction, particularly in the Arab Spring countries where the uprisings were most intense.
Publisher`s note: Examining the human development of societies is one of the important economic policy practices of recent times. Therefore, economies steer the sub-components of human development and their policies implemented by researching the factors that affect such subcomponents. In this context, the aim of this study is to examine the relationship between economic growth and terrorism with human development in 12 selected MENA countries in the period of 2002-2017 by the panel causality method.
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