Middle East and North Africa

Mubarak’s children come home

This is not a victory for freedom but for the old regime, or more precisely the Egyptian deep-state – a bureaucratic, military, and business elite, that never went away, is considered to be the real power in Egypt and that just reasserted its interests.  

Syria: the Kurdish view

This essay forms part of an eight-part ECFR series exploring the regional responses, dynamics and ramifications of the Syrian uprising and civil war. These…

Syria: the view from Israel

Israel’s strategic approach to Syria can be described as wary, pragmatic and broken down into specific micro areas of threats and interests rather than comprising a comprehensive picture of what kind of Syria it would like to see, and what it could do to facilitate this outcome.  

Syria: the view from Lebanon

Tensions in Lebanon, whose political fate has long been intimately tied to Syria, are sharpening rapidly as its neighbour sinks deeper into a sectarian civil war. But a growing number of clashes within Lebanon are now raising fears that a domestic eruption is becoming hard to avoid.  

Syria: the view from Turkey

The crisis in Syria has presented a profound challenge to Ankara’s orientation towards Damascus, forcing it to adapt to changing conditions on the ground that confounded the expectations of Turkish policy makers – as well as challenging its Zero Problem with Neighbors (ZPwN) foreign policy.  

Europe sticks a warning label on the settlements

With no real case to make, the bullying opponents of the European Union's long-delayed plan to label produce from Israeli settlements in the West Bank are crying anti-Semitism, cheapening the term at a particularly inopportune time.