Mitarbeiter sonstige

Download

European cooperation with the Middle East and North Africa amid crisis and war

in: Mark Furness / Niels Keijzer (eds.), International development cooperation and the emerging global order, Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), 47-50

In recent decades, civil and interstate wars, foreign interventions, repressive rentier-authoritarian political economies and deepening environmental crises have hindered socio-economic development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The Arab Uprisings of 2010-11 revealed the limits of externally supported development models that prioritised stability and technocratic governance reforms while overlooking structural inequalities and exclusion (El-Haddad, 2020). During and after the uprisings, some of the European countries that had been funding autocratic rulers in the MENA region participated in a NATO-led military intervention in Libya that removed its unpopular leader. This contributed to the country’s prolonged instability, which has had spillover effects across the Mediterranean and the neighbouring Sahel region. Living standards have stagnated amid region-wide authoritarian consolidation in the decade and a half since the hopes raised by the Arab Uprisings were dashed (Wehrey, 2023). The MENA region’s crises are unfolding at a moment of deeper structural transformation in the global economy. Beyond war and authoritarian consolidation, the global order is marked by increasing trade fragmentation, rising barriers, the securitisation of technology, green industrial policy competition and the regionalisation of supply chains. For MENA economies – many of which remain dependent on commodity exports, remittances, tourism revenues and external capital flows – these shifts generate new vulnerabilities alongside selective opportunities for diversification and upgrading. Finally, the MENA region faces the additional challenge of being among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions, while also being particularly vulnerable in terms of access to drinking water.