Analysis, essays and commentary on the geopolitics, history and political economy of the Middle East and North Africa. Browse everything below, or filter by topic.
The 1916 agreement is routinely blamed for the region’s borders. But most of today’s frontiers were drawn later, by other hands, for other reasons — and that matters for how we read the region’s crises.
A narrow waterway carries a fifth of the world’s oil. Why the threat to close it has been made so often — and carried out so rarely.
For half a century, the idea of the ‘rentier state’ has explained why oil wealth sustains authoritarian rule. How well does it still hold as Gulf governments tax, diversify and reinvent the social contract?
A 1936 convention still governs one of the world’s most strategic waterways. How Montreux turns geography into diplomatic leverage for Ankara.
Turkey, Syria and Iraq share two great rivers but no comprehensive agreement on how to divide them. Why hydro-politics in Mesopotamia is about power as much as scarcity.
In ten days, a war over a canal ended Britain and France’s claims to dominate the Middle East — and revealed who really held power in the post-war order.
What this publication tries to do, and how: structure before headlines, history before prediction, and local actors before grand narratives.
