There has been a decade-long dispute over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile since 2011. Recently, after the final failure of the negotiations in Kinshasa, this dispute has intensified between Cairo and Khartoum on the one hand, and Addis Ababa on the other. Various rounds of talks under…
Ten years ago, people across the Middle East and North Africa rose up in protest against their rulers, demanding freedom and democracy. Despotic rulers were toppled or feared that power was being torn from their grasp in countries across the region, as millions of demonstrators surged through the streets, chanting that “the people demand the…
Recent events and Cairo’s policy in this context clearly show that Egypt is steadily reclaiming its major role in the Middle East, not as a tool in the hands of the US and Israel, but as it was before, standing on all-Arab patriotic positions. And these vectors of Cairo’s foreign policy are clearly visible in…
A strange thing happened on Friday outside Geneva, not a city you would nowadays associate with progress in the Middle East. The internationally favoured candidates for an interim government in Libya failed to get the votes of delegates at UN-backed talks. Instead, a group of relatively less well-known leaders who, according to some, are closer to the…
Hosting major sports tournaments can confer prestige on a country, but in the case of Egypt, the 2021 Handball World Championship will do little to repair its relations with the US, Italy and states in the Gulf, argues James M. Dorsey in this analysis. Egyptian general-turned president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi sees the 2021 men’s handball…
Since November 4, the focus of the international community in their observations of the internal conflict in Ethiopia has largely been centered on the central government’s suppression of a rebellion against its authority in the northern region of Tigray. Within a matter of three weeks, the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had declared victory…
