This book examines the changing dynamics of stabilisation efforts in the Middle East and North Africa. Written by recognised scholars and practitioners in the field, this volume provides a rich overview of the broader spectrum of stabilisation. The topics range from a comprehensive set of lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq to transitional justice and reconciliation efforts in Tunisia and international attempts to protect the region’s cultural heritage. Ultimately, this edited collection presents a comprehensive look at the attempts to increase stability in the MENA region.
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an economically diverse region. Despite undertaking economic reforms in many countries, and having considerable success in avoiding crises and achieving macroeconomic stability, the region’s economic performance in the past 30 years has been below potential. This paper takes stock of the region’s relatively weak performance, explores the reasons for this out come, and proposes an agenda for urgent reforms.
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the contemporary Maghreb. It includes profiles of individual countries, and regional issues such as migration, gender, economics and war in Western Sahara.
After a decade of popular uprisings and civil wars, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region experiences a deep governance crisis. The transformation, weakening or even the collapse of state institutions has changed the security framework, with direct implications for the safety and security of civilian populations across the region. Security Sector Governance and Reform (SSG/R) has to cope with hybridity and institutional fatigue. This report explores the MENA region's governance crises, providing case studies on Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, and Yemen. How can we effectively bring about meaningful SSG/R in hybrid security orders? In which way is "institutionalised insecurity" challenging traditional patterns of governance in vulnerable settings?
This book examines the processes, practices and principles of defence planning in small and middle powers. Small and middle powers are recalibrating their force postures in this age of disruption. They are adapting their defence planning and military innovation processes to protect the security of their nations. The purpose of this book is to explore defence planning and military innovation in 11 contemporary case studies of small and middle powers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. Employing a structured focused comparison framework, it traces patterns in the choices of small and middle powers across the following themes: (1) alliances, dependencies and national ambitions; (2) approaches, processes, methods and techniques; and (3) military innovation strategies and outcomes. Breaking new theoretical ground, it offers a three-pronged typology distinguishing between the strategic defence planner, the transactional defence planners and the complacent defence planner. The book offers a rich array of insights into cases that fall across different geographies, strategic cultures and governance systems. These insights can help guide discussions on how to structure decision-making structures, arrive at ambition levels, formulate priorities, select partners and design defence planning and military innovation processes. This book will be of much interest to students of defence studies, security studies, public policy and international relations, as well as to professionals in defence planning.
This volume, the first of its kind in the English language, examines the law and politics of federalism and decentralization in the Middle East and North Africa. Comprised of eleven case studies examining the experience across the region, together with essays by leading scholars providing comparative and theoretical perspectives and a synthetic conclusion by the co-editors, the volume offers a textured portrait of the dilemmas of decentralization during a period of sweeping transition in the region. The collection addresses an important gap in the comparative decentralization literature, which has largely neglected the MENA region. Both retrospective and forward-looking in orientation, the book is a valuable resource not only for scholars of comparative politics, constitutional design, and Middle East studies, but also for policy makers evaluating the feasibility and efficacy of decentralization as a vehicle for improving governance and responding to identity conflict in any part of the world.
A pathbreaking call to halt the intertwined crises of cultural heritage attacks and mass atrocities and mobilize international efforts to protect people and cultures. Intentional destruction of cultural heritage has a long history. Contemporary examples include the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, mosques in Xinjiang, mausoleums in Timbuktu, and Greco-Roman remains in Syria. Cultural heritage destruction invariably accompanies assaults on civilians, making heritage attacks impossible to disentangle from the mass atrocities of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Both seek to eliminate people and the heritage with which they identify. Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities assembles essays by thirty-eight experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities. Focusing on immovable cultural heritage vulnerable to attack, the volume's guiding framework is the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a United Nations resolution adopted unanimously in 2005 to permit international intervention against crimes of war or genocide. Based on the three pillars of prevent, react, and rebuild, R2P offers today's policymakers a set of existing laws and international norms that can and—as this book argues—must be extended to the protection of cultural heritage. Contributions consider the global value of cultural heritage and document recent attacks on people and sites in China, Guatemala, Iraq, Mali, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Comprehensive sections on vulnerable populations as well as the role of international law and the military offer readers critical insights and point toward research, policy, and action agendas to protect both people and cultural heritage. A concise abstract of each chapter is offered online in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish to facilitate robust, global dissemination of the strategies and tactics offered in this pathbreaking call to action. The free online edition of this publication is available at getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book.
The central argument of this book is that while central bank independence can contribute to stabilization, inflation-targeting monetary policy is quite powerless in promoting economic development. The basic message is simple: Policy makers should not strive to achieve price stability at any cost, as stability in product markets does not necessarily translate into economic development. The recent experience of Turkey is illuminating and other developing countries, in particular those using inflation targeting monetary policy framework, can draw useful lessons from this experience. Early chapters summarize the deregulation process from 1980 to 2001. The Turkish Central Bank is placed at the center of the analysis as monetary policies have a significant impact both on stability and development. Although the 1994 and 2001 financial crises have been extensively studied elsewhere, they are nevertheless summarized to underscore the importance of central bank independence. Later chapters investigate the impact of an independent central bank on stabilization and development from 2001 onwards. Upon visiting the Turkish Central Bank's website, readers are greeted with the following statement: "The primary objective of the Bank is to achieve and maintain price stability." By the end of this book the reader should be able to assess the relative merits of a monetary policy that focuses on price stability, versus an alternative where price stability is accompanied by other objectives targeting development, for instance, monitoring also unemployment rates, which would undermine its independence to some degree. The study aims to provide a perspective on the need for such an alternative in line also with the vision of some international agencies on development, such as the UNCTAD and the ILO. This is the first book-length study examining the financial reforms Turkey undertook in its path towards EU accession. This unique work will be of interest to economists and other experts in financial history, (de)regulation, institutional economics and economic development, as well as a broad range of scholars interested in the dramatic transformation of Turkey's economy and society in the 21st century.
Price instability is a fact of life. In a market economy, domestic prices change in response to changes in supply, consumer preferences, policy, world prices, and other factors. Crop prices tend to be particularly volatile because harvests occur only once or a few times per year and because the size of the harvest varies due to weather, prices, and other factors. For internationally-traded commodities, volatility in world prices can be another source of instability in domestic prices.
