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 secretive British government counter-terrorism propaganda unit is working on campaigns aimed at changing the behaviour and attitudes of young people in the Middle East and North Africa considered to be at risk of becoming violent extremists, Middle East Eye can reveal. The campaigns, which have so far run in Tunisia, Morocco and Lebanon, use…
Saudi sports diplomacy is proving to be a mirror image of the kingdom’s challenged domestic, regional and foreign policies. Overlorded by sports czar Turki al-Sheikh, Saudi sports diplomacy, like the kingdom’s broader policies, has produced at best mixed results, suggesting that financial muscle coupled with varying degrees of coercion does not guarantee success. Mr. Al-Sheikh,…
If any one part of the world has forced China to throw its long-standing foreign and defense policy principles out the window and increasingly adopt attitudes associated with a global power, it is the greater Middle East, a region that stretches from the Atlantic coast of Africa to north-western China, a swath of land populated…
80% of the French World Cup team is of African heritage, yet their victory in the tournament didn’t result in any increase in awareness about their homelands’ stories, which is a pity because it could have otherwise been a priceless opportunity to inform the world about what’s happening in the continent. France’s victory in the…
Seemingly out of nowhere, the international media has focused on the ordinarily uninteresting event of the North African Kingdom of Morocco cutting off ties with Iran, with the global attention given to this diplomatic decision meant to hype up the so-called “Hezbollah threat” and prompt Saudi Arabia’s other fellow coalition members in Africa to follow…
