The last few days of April feel like Shakespeare’s ides of March for geopolitical star gazers in the MENA region. It’s often written that weak elites in the region are watching Algeria and Libya very carefully to see how much of a people’s revolution can permeate into other countries. But in reality all leaders of…
A massive shift in the geo-political status quo in North Africa has placed the United States in the passenger’s, not the pilot’s, seat. No longer does Washington, not even as a co-pilot with the French, influence the actions of key actors in North African affairs. The shift in the North African chessboard is the result…
Political transition in the Middle East and North Africa operates so far on the principle of ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’ Libya’s battle for Tripoli alongside ongoing mass anti-government demonstrations that toppled autocratic leaders of Algeria and Sudan demonstrate that both popular Arab protests that in 2011 forced four presidents out of…
Western media outlets are once again in throes of panic as they report on the latest developments in Libya. According to French newspaper Le Monde, while the world was following NATO’s Jubilee Summit, held in Washington, there was a turning point in the civil war in Libya. Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who controls Libya’s eastern…
The sound of machine gun fire in Tripoli after the start of Khalifa Haftar’s military campaign to “liberate the city” is accompanied by a bitter squabble between two conflicting sides aired by media outlets and on social networking sites. These opponents are Fayez Mustafa al-Sarraj’s Government of National Accord (GNA), which controls the capital and…
In previous times, when Saudi Arabia sought to intervene in the affairs of foreign nations, it did so overtly. Whether funding foreign masjids to advance Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam or sponsoring militant groups with unambiguous links to Riyadh, it used to be that when Saudi Arabia wanted change in a foreign nation,…
