First Independent Mena Newspaper
While the French newspaper Le Figaro was reporting lengthily on the arrest of an opponent to the wedding for everyone, a 23 years old student “still dressed in his hooded Manif for everyone sweatshirt”, the daily missed the 2 millions people who were marching against Monsanto. And so did almost all other French Medias. Commonly […]
Many security pundits have repeatedly warned that the political unrest, the eroding security situation and the flourishing weapons, human and drug trafficking in the Sahel/Sahara region have made of the area a terrorism breeding ground, an exploding powder keg, or what some have called ‘an arc of instability.’ The warning has just been echoed in […]
The popular uprisings and political turmoil rocking the region of North Africa and the Middle-East since 2011 have dealt a hard blow to the sector of tourism that suffered losses going up to $ 15 billion, according to Arab Tourism Organization (ATO). At a meeting held lately in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), ATO president Bandar Al-Fuhaid […]
While Syria is tumbling deeper into the abyss with the participation of Lebanese Hezbollah in the fierce combats waged by the Syrian army to drive back the rebels and seize the strategic city of Qousseir, the international community seems time pressured to find a solution to this conflict in which over 94,000 persons have reportedly […]
Empirical studies show that the international monetary system is already tripolar. The Chinese currency, the renmimbi, has increasingly become a reference currency, as one which exhibits a high degree of co-movements with other currencies. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the renmimbi has accelerated its standing as the East-Asia exchange rate reference currency […]
North and West Africa are facing a complex set of challenges in terms of democratic transition and consolidation, a growing prominence of Islamist influence, and potential knock-on effects of recent socio-political transformations. Adding to this complexity is Africa’s raising geopolitical importance that is evident in the growing interest of other extra-territorial powers, such as China, […]
Ever since the Syrian uprising began, the West has quietly been rooting for the opposition. And while the opposition has made some progress in chipping territory away from regime control, the conflict is far from over. Having passed the two-year anniversary, the conflict is now putting the West in a difficult dilemma. After years of […]
The United States has for years voiced support to the settlement of the Western Sahara in the context of the United Nations and when in 2007 Morocco proposed a plan providing to grant a large autonomy to the disputed territory, Washington has expressed in unequivocal terms backing to the Plan and subsequently to the Moroccan […]
The January 14 ouster of Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia set off a wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East, the most significant change in more than thirty years. The last time the Middle East saw such monumental shifts was in 1979, when the ouster of the Shah in Iran, the Soviet invasion of […]
By international standards, extreme poverty or destitution is relatively low in the countries of North Africa. According to the World Bank, the number of those living below 2 USD a day was 13.9 percent in 2008, which would make the region of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) the fourth poorest region in the world […]