Middle East History, Map, Countries, & Facts

The Constitutional Revolution in 1906 replaced the absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchy. Iran’s parliamentary government led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq was toppled in a 1953 coup d’état by royalist forces supported and funded by CIA and MI6 after Mohammed Mosaddeq nationalized Iranian oil. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi became the preeminent leader in Iran, and instated Fazlollah Zahedi from the military as the new Prime Minister.[29] United States has considered the Shah as a close ally and Iran as its main base in the Middle East. These and other policies contributed to alienating nationalists, leftists, and religious groups. The most populous countries in the region are Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, while Saudi Arabia is the largest Middle Eastern country by area. Corruption risks in Qatar go far beyond the FIFA World Cup event in 2022, as public access to relevant information on state procurement and government budgeting is highly restricted.

When leaders failed to establish a democratic state after the ousting of the Gaddafi regime, another civil war erupted between various armed groups, with the latest ceasefire in 2020 still failing to curb violence among factions. As the state is incapacitated, elites battle with each other over the country’s rich oil resources, and corrupt public officials serve themselves instead of the Libyan population. Especially in the western region and along the southern border, armed groups flame tensions as the public lead demonstrations calling for better access to basic services. The country has thus been unable to hold elections, and the UN has claimed key institutional players continue to hinder progress. Lebanon (24) has been caught in a spiral of economic, political, and social disasters since its financial sector imploded as a result of overspending and corruption.

Blinken Talks a Grand Vision for Mideast Peace but Hits a Wall in Israel

Yet a combination of factors, from institutional strategies of governance to geopolitical machinations, have enabled the ruling Hashemite monarchy to persist. This chapter surveys the panorama of religious communities in the MENA, a Muslim-majority region but with Jewish-majority Israel and smaller Christian and non-Abrahamic minorities dispersed throughout. It weighs how religiosity prefigures public attitudes and preferences on social and political issues.

• Egypt has condemned the targeting of Israeli civilians by Hamas and other Gaza-based factions and the targeting of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces.
• For political, civil, and social rights, the region continues to struggle with authoritarianism, with even the leadership changes sparked by the Arab Spring uprisings of over a decade ago ultimately failing to improve the social contract.
• Women’s sporting events are now an integral part of national health and wellness transformation agendas as governments get keen to improve health and fitness levels in women.
• Even though the international community will have to negotiate with Hamas over hostage releases, the organization is unlikely to be accepted as a representative of the Palestinian people in future political negotiations.

The Program’s resources also allow students to enhance their proficiency in a regional language through intensive summer immersion programs in the Middle East and other locations. The Southern Mediterranean, Syria, Yemen and sub-Saharan Africa will remain of the utmost strategic significance for Germany’s foreign policy. Still, a coherent strategy for how to address such theatres of crisis has not been developed yet due to a lack of capacities in crisis prevention and foresight analysis. Besides traditional formats for conflict mediation, Berlin should thus also consider engaging more in ad hoc diplomatic mechanisms and regional cooperation forums to better prepare for acute crisis escalation in regions where German interests are at stake.

Government and Politics of the Middle East – Oakland Campus

Algeria remains one of the lesser researched countries in the MENA and Arab world, due to its past conflicts and perceived inaccessibility to many social scientists. In terms of broadcast media, the National Company for Radio and Television began to stream online in the early 2000s various programs for Moroccans living abroad; it streams daily news clips in Spanish, Tamazight, French, and Moroccan Arabic. Radio Méditerranée Internationale is a Tangiers-based radio station that plays a fun, eclectic mix https://www.metadialog.com/government/ of music (Moroccan, American, African, Middle Eastern, and European) and broadcasts official news in Arabic and French. To start, an excellent resource for exploring civil society organizations across the Arab world is Arab.org, which is a regional portal for non-governmental organizations that lists close to 4,000 entities. It features a consociational political structure marked by confessionalism, all knit together by regnant tensions, frail institutions, and the shadow of foreign intervention.

The country has long served as a mediator in the region, reducing tensions between various groups. Now that its scores on the CPI and other indicators are deteriorating, regional and international actors are less likely to trust the country in this role, threatening future attempts to establish and maintain stability. This exciting new edition of the successful textbook for students of Middle Eastern politics provides a highly relevant and comprehensive introduction to the complexities of a region in constant flux. In the current climate, no Gulf country is likely to risk angering its population or inflaming anti-Israel sentiments in the Arab and Islamic world by pursuing normalization negotiations with Israel. Gulf Arabs feel that their governments should stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and halt all forms of cooperation with Israel. The expansion of the conflict into Lebanon could quickly transform into a regional war, as it may draw in Iran’s proxy forces from as far as Iraq and Yemen and entangle the region in hard-to-predict dynamics.

As life under occupation continues to economically deteriorate and global actors continue to propose new peace deals in the post-Oslo era, it does not appear the solution that seemed most reasonable not long ago – a two-state compromise, with a Palestine and Israel co-existent – is possible any longer. In this section, you will find useful learning materials from each chapter, including summaries; multimedia from each chapter; discussion questions; links to online sources for further research; flashcards; and true/false quizzes. Pay especially close attention to the online references, as they are periodically updated as we scan for new, promising resources and remove obsolete ones. We seek to promote knowledge of the Middle East in America and strengthen understanding of the United States by the peoples and governments of the region. We believe pursuit of this goal is integral to building a world of peace and stability, in which the people of our two regions value our shared humanity. The Climate and Water Program seeks to assess and understand the broader impacts of climate change in the region, with emphasis on water resources management, sustainability, and the environment.

For the moment, Hezbollah’s and Iran’s calculuses are not clear, even though both actors have stated that they will intervene militarily in the event of a ground invasion of Gaza. Current altercations between Israel and Hezbollah are taking place within what appears to be accepted rules of engagement, but this can change at any moment. Lebanon is already in the throes of multiple crises, and the Lebanese, for the most part, are hostile to getting embroiled in this conflict. Indeed, a new front in Lebanon would sow the seeds of the country’s destruction and make it very difficult for Hezbollah to operate in the aftermath.

Chapter 15: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

In July, protesters rose up in response to Saied’s abuses ahead of a vote scheduled to approve a new constitution that would significantly expand executive powers. But the president took it as an opportunity to further consolidate power, arresting protesters, dismissing the prime minister and freezing the parliament. Amidst widespread boycott of the election, the new constitution was voted on by just over 30 per cent of the population.

Led by renowned scholars and regional experts, MEI’s policy research programs produce original analysis, convene roundtables and public events, and work to advance understanding of the complexities of regional policy. MEI fosters greater understanding https://www.metadialog.com/government/ of the Middle East through non-partisan policy analysis, educational services, and promotion of regional arts and culture. This book provides an analysis of the relationship between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).

Middle East Links

The six top languages, in terms of numbers of speakers, are Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Hebrew and Greek. Prior to the formation of civilizations, advanced cultures formed all over the Middle East during the Stone Age. The search for agricultural lands by agriculturalists, and pastoral lands by herdsmen meant different migrations took place within the region and shaped its ethnic and demographic makeup.

The region is one of the regions where agriculture was independently discovered, and from the Middle East it was spread, during the Neolithic, to different regions of the world such as Europe, the Indus Valley and Eastern Africa. As a result, initiatives for development, reduction of poverty, tackling of unemployment, and promotion of civil rights and freedoms have all failed. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. But the sentiments of the Arab public could not be more different from their governments’ official statements.

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Intelligent automation applications are also driving efficiency, promoting economic innovation and improving the quality of e-government services. E-government is the transformation of the public sector through ICT in order to optimize both government service delivery and citizen participation. Parliamentary elections were held in December, in a period marked by further rising tensions and strikes. As even more organisations and activists encouraged a boycott of the elections, considering them a threat to democracy, just 11.2 per cent of voters turned out.