The 5 July marks Algerian Independence Day, with the country today celebrating 64 years of independence from French colonial rule, which ended in 1962. Understanding the history of Algeria remains vital to decolonising knowledge and scholarship, as well as to tackling injustice today. It informs us about how the impossible becomes possible: how an imagined utopia of justice, equality and democracy can inspire a revolutionary movement to overturn 132 years of brutal colonial rule. The colonisation of Algeria and appalling violence of the War of Independence, still leave a painful legacy. This is the case both in Algeria and France, as witnessed once again through media and diplomatic standoffs. Yet, the present realities of Algerians in Algeria and in France are often overlooked in scholarly analyses of the powerful legacies of the War of Independence. Whilst the Algerian struggle for independence and the ensuing 8-year war reshaped the political landscape of Africa and influenced global economic and governance paradigms, Algeria’s vibrant youthful population today also aspires to transform political life and lived realities. 

Revived interest in Algerian decolonisation and the works of decolonial scholars such as Franz Fanon can be seen in the many conferences held during the centenary last year of Franz Fanon’s birth in both France and Algeria. On 28–29 May 2026 our network of Algeria-focused scholars welcomed 110 participants from over 20 countries for the first large-scale conference on Algeria hosted by a UK university. Supported by the British Academy and Coventry University’s Centre for Peace and Security, and hosted and organised by the LSE Middle East Centre, our network brought together historians, political scientists, economists, cultural and literary scholars to share original research on Algeria’s past, present, and imagined futures.  

The gathering was originally proposed by Professor Hugh Roberts during his tenure at the Middle East Centre. Professor Roberts, who sadly passed away in 2025, was widely seen as a leading scholar of Algerian history and society, with an extensive body of research that has shaped the field. His work on Amazigh and Kabyle history, culture and society formed a major theme of the conference’s programme.  

Professor Roberts’s work consistently challenged colonial discourse that, as Dr Latefa Guemar explained in her paper, ‘either misunderstood or deliberately erased’ Algerian social and political complexity. In his book Berber Government, Roberts pushed back ‘against the colonial tendency to describe “tribal” societies as politically underdeveloped’ and against the idea that Kabylia’s divergence from this characterisation was ‘evidence of a fundamental distinction between Kabyles and the rest of Algeria.’ His work is important today for Algeria’s territorial integrity, in recognising Algerian independence fighters from Kabylia, as well as the contributions of Kabyles to rebuilding what Professor Zahia Smail Salhi described in her keynote talk as ‘shattered lives’ in the aftermath of colonialism. 

The conference also explored questions of language and policy choices, moving away from French as a form of cultural emancipation after 132 years of oppression. These historical challenges of unifying the nation can equally enlighten policy makers today around current shifts towards English. This was discussed across several panels, from Professor Zahia Smail Salhi’s keynote to panels on education and cultural heritage. Forgotten histories such as those explored in Hamza Koudri’s Sand Roses, and the Maluf music discussed by Lina Ounissi were brought to the fore and analysed as part of ongoing decolonisation processes and the healing of traumas. Dr Tamara Turner introduced her book on trauma and the musical heritage of the Algerian south. Her research carefully documents the profound ways in which traumas that remain in the psyche of a population can find collective resolution through the healing power of music. Of course, Algeria’s renewal is not only spiritual and social, as Professor Elias Boukrami argued in his paper. Boukrami spoke of the economic contribution of agriculture, which has grown from approximately 8% of GDP in the 1990s to around 16% in 2025 – equivalent to around $42 billion. This doubling of the sector’s contribution in roughly 25 years is a significant achievement.

The conference’s final speaker, the former governor of the Bank of Algeria, Abderrahmane Hadj Nacer, in the final conversation with journalist Francis Ghiles, pointed to other positive developments, particularly among Algerian youth and their vision for a “New Agleria.” Since the youth-led movements started in 2019, young Algerians have continued to demonstrate their highly developed technical skills and political maturity. Similarly, return migration from France to Algeria, with up to 25,000 arrivals per month, according to Hadj Nacer, points to positive trends in inclusion and tolerance despite ongoing challenges.  Algeria is seen by return migrants as a country of freedom, with many contributing in their own way to a sense of what Hadj Nacer described as ‘change in the air’.

Overall, this British Academy conference on Algeria: Historical Struggles and Imagined Utopias has inspired debate, media and public interest, as well as new scholarly networks in the UK for the study of Algerian history and contemporary society. As the organisers, we plan to continue working with the Society for Algerian Studies set up by Professor Hugh Roberts over twenty years ago to revitalise these networks and contribute to expanding scholarly research on Algeria.

• Listen back to the Algerian Conference keynote lecture: Algeria and the Anxiety of Decolonisation: Case Studies in Language and Gender.
• Listen back to In Conversation with Abderrahmane Hadj Nacer and Francis Ghiles on the historical challenges and reforms from the 1980s to contemporary Algeria.

The post Decolonising Algerian Scholarship, Territorial Integrity and the Post-Hirak ‘New Algeria’ first appeared on Middle East Centre.

by Islam Alhalawany

By no design, I was deep in the memoirs of Mahmoud Fawzi, Egypt’s Foreign Minister from 1952 to 1964, when I began Mohammed Soliman’s West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East. Fawzi wrote as a witness to Nasser’s prime years, his testimony centred on Suez and the early republic. This was the formative decade of an Arab-centred Middle East, when Cairo shaped the character of a regional order under the shadow of the Cold War, with the Arab-Israeli conflict as its defining fault line. Fawzi’s book was the account of a world being built with Arab sovereignty being reasserted, Bandung convened, Nasser seated across from Nehru and Zhou Enlai in what felt, to those present, like the birth of a new order.

Soliman’s book arrived to tell me that that world is gone. Not in decline, not in transition, but gone. Reading the two together produced a kind of historical vertigo, the sort that comes from holding a photograph of something that no longer exists beside a blueprint of what is taking shape. Fawzi died in 1981, two years after Camp David and the Iranian Revolution. He did not live to see the peace with Israel fracturing Arab consensus, the Iranian revolution stretching the region’s gravity eastward, or Turkey’s Islamisation and its later endeavour for leadership of the Islamic world. And equally important, Fawzi did not observe the hydrocarbon revenues building up the wealth of the Arab Gulf countries, re-shaping the intra-Arab balance of power. Soliman picks up the thread there.

Formed intellectually in Cairo, Soliman sheds the attachment to the old Middle East in favour of a realist eye. What makes his vantage distinctive is that it layers two further formations onto that Cairo base. Washington gave him the vocabulary of American grand strategy, while observing the Gulf, especially after the Arab uprisings, showed him where the region’s gravity had actually moved. That positioning is the book’s greatest asset.

Soliman’s book also yields a historical reading that deserves more recognition than reviews have given it. Soliman refuses the lazy habit of treating Sykes-Picot as the moment that explains everything. Instead, he reads the region through the realities accumulated over the many following decades. His historical view gives more weight to the region’s countries, their agency and deliberate choices, while also recognizing the American expansive role in re-shaping the region rather than the over-estimated legacy of Britain and France. In this context, Soliman identifies two foundational factors that reconfigured the Middle East the way we see today: First is the Kissingerian settlement after 1973 that drew Egypt into a bilateral peace and neutralised the Arab world’s most capable state, and second is the 2003 invasion of Iraq that shattered the state and opened the Arab core to Iran.

The book’s most original contribution is its map of what replaced the Arab state system. Instead of being confined to the Middle East, Soliman views a larger region, called West Asia, that expands from Aegean Sea to the Indian Ocean, where two transregional coalitions compete. The first is the Indo-Abrahamic framework Soliman has developed since 2021, in which India, the UAE, and Israel converge around shared anxieties over Iran and Turkey, deepening trade and defence ties, and a connectivity architecture whose visible expression is IMEC. It is a religiously diverse coalition organized around interest rather than identity.

The second is its rival: a Turkish-led vision of geopolitical Islam that unites initially non-Arab Muslim states across the maritime rimland, from Somalia to the Maldives to Indonesia, and most consequentially Pakistan, whose integration with Ankara now surfaces in its tensions with India. It may even expand to include Saudi Arabia and Egypt, depending on Israel’s security behaviour in the post-Gaza geopolitical reality of the region. On the surface: one coalition brackets religious identity in favour of interest. The other makes Islamic solidarity its organizing principle. In Soliman’s vision, the threat hierarchy dividing the region: Is Israel the primary threat and Iran secondary, or the reverse? This is the fundamental fault line.

The two-axes framework is a genuine analytical instrument, and the empirical basis Soliman assembles, in trade flows, joint infrastructure, and military cooperation, is concrete and persuasive. critically, Soliman’s West Asia is the only original full manuscript at hand that explains the Iran war’s expansive strategic landscape. It maps the realignments that crystallized during the war: Pakistan’s mediating role in the U.S.-Iran channel, the Turkey-Egypt-Pakistan-Saudi coalition, and the India-Israel-UAE alliance. Modi visited Israel before the war and the UAE during it. Israel deployed air defence systems to the UAE for the first time. These moves reflected the geopolitical logic predicted by Soliman’s framework.

However, Soliman assumes that Washington has natural inclination for the Indo-Abrahamic axis. In hindsight, the recent record shows that the US is open, and rather enthusiastic, about larger roles for Turkey and Pakistan in the region, sometimes against the concerns of Israel, and India. While Turkey is a major NATO member, Pakistan has been a longstanding partner, and Prabowo’s Indonesia is forging closer ties. Each presumed axis is a candidate for American backing and endorsement, subject to the calculus of the administration in office.

That qualification leads to the book’s deepest unexamined limit. Soliman’s framework lays the groundwork for the long-forgotten offshore balancing. Washington has long known the Pacific is its primary theatre but has never found a way to pivot without an alternative security architecture. West Asia is his solution being a self-sustaining regional order that manages the Middle East so Washington can concentrate on China. It is intellectually serious, but the difficulty is that it requires Washington to do the one thing it has never done. Israel retains a veto over American Middle East policy that no alliance architecture has circumvented, and the current war made this visible. Rather than let the Indo-Abrahamic coalition manage the crisis, Washington doubled down on direct involvement. The offshore-balancing thesis is not wrong about what the region needs. But Washington cannot release the Middle East while it remains captive to one relationship within it, and a captive power cannot let go.

This is also where the framework’s reliance on India strains. The plan asks New Delhi to anchor Gulf connectivity and absorb security burdens to its west, yet this clashes with another active US doctrine, the ‘Indo-Pacific’, which casts India in a major role to its east. The two doctrines together may place unbearable pressure on a resource-limited India that prizes its strategic autonomy. A sharper contradiction runs within the West Asian framework itself. It needs an India bound to Israel’s security to satisfy Washington, and a neutral India to remain workable for Arab partners. Riyadh has already cooled toward an Israel-aligned New Delhi in favour of Pakistan. It is not clear one country can be both.

West Asia is not a flawless book, and it matters for that reason as much as despite it. It thinks at a scale most policy writing on the region refuses, connecting Washington’s China calculus with the rise of the Gulf states, Indian ambitions, Israel’s future, and post-Ukraine Europe into a single architecture. Its unresolved tensions, the India trap, the Israel veto, the fragility of an Iran-centred coalition, are not refutations. They are the agenda any successor project will inherit.

Reading the book beside Fawzi’s memoirs, one feels the full distance travelled. Fawzi belonged to a generation constructing a durable order, imperfect and contested but pointed toward something recognizable: Arab sovereignty, a regional voice in a bipolar world, the slow accumulation of post-colonial dignity. Soliman writes after that construction ended and another began, where ‘Arab’ political power is diluted into a wider geopolitical, demographic, military and cultural West Asian domain. Hence, Arab countries cannot think of a way the region is an insulated island and rather build cross-regional bridges of cooperation and deal with farther faultlines than the historical ones.

The post Between Fawzi and Soliman: Mourning the Middle East, Building West Asia first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Few concepts in contemporary Arab political life have been defined as differently, as al-dawla al-madaniyya – the civic or civil state.  The concept has been claimed by Islamist movements, secular parties, transitional governments, constitution-drafting bodies, and civil society demonstrations. But across these uses, agreement on what it actually means remains very thin.

This conceptual ambiguity was the subject of a recently published special issue of the Journal of Constitutional Law in the Middle East and North Africa (JCL-MENA), titled ‘The Concept of the Civic State in the Middle East and North Africa: Between Constitutional Text and Practice’, as part of  the LSE Middle East Centre based project  ‘Legitimacy and Civicness in the Arab World’. 

The papers of the issue engaged with the civic state both at a conceptual level, examining its intellectual and historical roots, and through empirical case studies spanning six countries: Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, and Morocco. What emerged was a proliferation of meaning. The term appeared at once as a constitutional aspiration, a political slogan, and – in some cases – a language through which existing forms of power were re-described and legitimised.

Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations

The contributions approach the civic state from different angles but converge on a shared set of tensions; the tensions between intellectual genealogy, political mobilisation, and institutional practice.

Housamedden Darwish traces the genealogy of the civic state in modern Arab thought, showing how twentieth-century political discourse was long dominated by supra-state ideologies – Arab nationalism, Islamism, and socialism, before a sustained theorisation of the state itself emerged. It was only in the late twentieth century that Arab thinkers, such as Mohamed Abed al-Jabri and Georges Corm began to treat the state as a central object of political inquiry.

Within this intellectual historical context, madaniyya emerges as a layered and unstable concept, suggesting secular institutional governance, ‘civilised’ progress, or opposition to military and religious authority. Darwish argues that this multiplicity in meaning is not actually a defect. It is rather the very reason the civic state resists closure. It is best understood as a set of historically produced tensions rather than a single coherent idea.

A similar ambiguity appears in the analysis of Islamist political thought in Azzam Al Kassir’s paper. He shows that Islamist engagements with the civic state are often pragmatic rather than doctrinal. Some Islamic reformist movements attempt to reconcile civic governance with Islamic reference (marjaʼiyya), arguing that political order is inherently civil because it is human-made. Other movements reject the concept as one that is externally imposed and incompatible with divine sovereignty.

Al Kassir also highlights a more recent and politically significant development. And that is the appropriation of civic language by authoritarian actors. In Syria, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham has adopted the language of civil administration and institutional governance while at the same time maintaining centralised control over power. The case of HTS provide an example of how civic rhetoric can serve to legitimate power rather than constrain it.

Shaimaa Magued grounds these tensions in a structural account of protest and political economy in the region. She contends that the Arab uprisings articulated demands closely aligned with civic-state ideals, including rights, accountability, and social justice, but encountered entrenched structural constraints. These are military dominance, rentier economic systems, and long-standing patterns of elite reproduction. She argues that the central issue is not the absence of civic aspirations but the absence of conditions that would allow these aspirations to be institutionalised.

Country Studies: Civic Ideals in Context

The six country studies show how the concept unfolds and fractures in actual constitutional and political settings.

Wissam Lahham challenges the assumption that sectarianism politics in Lebanon is necessarily anti-civic. He argues that Lebanon’s constitutional order is formally civic in important respects. Sovereignty is located in the people, and legislation is not subordinated to religious authority. Sectarianism, in this analysis, operates primarily through political practice rather than through constitutional design, producing a persistent gap between civic text and sectarian reality.

In Syria, Ibrahim Daraji and Reem Turkmani trace how repeated dissolution of political parties, restrictions on public participation, and expansive executive control over associations systematically weakened civil society across the twentieth century. They argue that what appears today as civic fragility is the outcome of deliberate institutional engineering that persisted historically rather than just a recent collapse.

Kaouthar Debbeche reads Tunisia as a long-term experiment in civic constitutionalism, from the 1857 Ahd al-Aman through the 1959 Constitution and the democratic transition of 2014. While civic principles gradually became embedded in law, the 2022 constitutional revision introduced new interpretive frameworks that reopened the role of religious authority within constitutional meaning, further complicating earlier trajectories.

In Morocco, Mohamed Tozy highlights a different constitutional paradox. The 2011 reforms strengthened judicial review and constitutional supremacy, yet they preserved the monarchy’s religious authority as ‘Commander of the Faithful’. Rather than separating religious and political legitimacy, reform reorganised their relationship within a new constitutional architecture.

In Egypt, Heba Ezzat shifts the terms of the debate by questioning whether ‘civil’ can meaningfully describe the state at all. She contends that given the coercive nature of sovereignty, the civic should be understood less as a type of state than as a field of rights, practices, and public life that the state either enable or constrain. In this sense, Egypt’s constitutional history is marked less by linear secularisation than by enduring hybridity.

Finally, in Sudan, Sami Abdelhalim Saeed examines the 2019–2021 transitional moment, when the civic state became a central revolutionary demand. However, the constitutional texts remained uneven in translating this aspiration into enforceable mechanisms, particularly where military actors retained leverage. The Sudanese example shows how civic language expands or contracts in line with shifting balances of power.

Three Patterns, One Question

Across all of these contexts, three broader patterns emerge. The civic state functions as a floating concept whose meaning is produced in context rather than fixed in advance. Constitutional texts and political realities are rarely aligned, but their divergence follows recognisable historical and institutional logics. And civic language is frequently mobilised strategically, not only to imagine alternative political futures, but also to legitimise existing structures of authority.

The contributions show how the question that opened the special issue gradually transformed. What began as an attempt to define the civic state became an inquiry into how the concept travels, how it is translated, contested, and repurposed across different political settings. The contributions demonstrate that the concept of civic state persists not because it has been resolved, but precisely because it has not. 

The post So, What Is a ‘Civic State’? Unpacking a Contested Concept in the Arab World  first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Across a turbulent eighteen months in the Middle East, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) has been one of the few places where the regional storm has been absorbed rather than amplified. As the Iran war reshaped energy markets and regional alliances, Syria moved through a fragile transition, and Baghdad recalibrated its federal arrangements, Erbil continued to function as an interlocutor that Washington, Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Brussels and even Tehran could still talk to. That role is not an accident of geography. It is the product of thirty-five years of institution-building since the exodus of 1991.  

Yet it rests on a foundation that is once again being tested from within, and the question of whether the Iraqi Kurdistan Region holds together has become inseparable from what it can do abroad. Thirty-five years ago, Kurds were united. As the Cold War came to an end and a new US-led international order emerged, the Kurds benefited, leading to the creation of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The Middle East is now being reshaped once again, but the Kurds lack the unity of 1991. 

What Thirty-Five Years Built 

The KRI’s contemporary history began with the hope of being a part of the liberal democratic world order. The Kuwait invasion led to the Kurdish 1991 uprising. However, the possible return of the Iraqi dictator regime following the liberation of all the KRI, including Kirkuk, sent more than a million Kurds fleeing toward the mountains and the Turkish and Iranian borders. The Kurds collectively chose exodus over subjugation to the former regime, and it was the international safe haven that followed which created the space for self-rule, one of the very few successful international interventions worldwide.

The first parliamentary elections were held in May 1992, and a regional administration took shape from almost nothing. The harder achievement came later. Between 1994 and 1998 the two principal parties fought a civil war that split the Kurdistan Region into two rival administrations, and it took the 1998 Washington Agreement and nearly a decade more before those administrations were formally reunified in 2005. The US-led Iraq invasion in 2003 helped the Kurds take advantage of the regional changes, once again collectively. The two ruling parties together, along with other Kurdish groups, secured the rights of the Kurds in the newly democratic constitution of Iraq, and ensured the federal system for the country.  

The deeper backdrop to all of this, Anfal and the chemical attack on Halabja, is why cohesion is treated less as a preference than as a survival strategy. The central accomplishment of thirty-five years was not autonomy alone. It was the overcoming of division. 

The Mechanics of Drift 

That accomplishment is not self-sustaining, and the present moment illustrates why. More than eighteen months after the parliamentary elections of October 2024, in which no party secured a majority, a new regional cabinet has yet to be formed. The fault lines are structural rather than merely personal; separate financial legacies, parallel security histories, and a power-sharing settlement designed for a different electoral balance. The cost of prolonged drift is not abstract. Analysts at Chatham House have described the Kurdistan Region as dangerously exposed during the Iran war, its institutions stretched precisely when regional volatility demanded a coherent response.

What is notable, and easily missed, is that the case against division is not contested across the Kurdish spectrum. Senior figures in both leading parties have publicly rejected any return to a dual administration, with one describing the Kurdistan Region as the product of immense historical sacrifice. However, there are also voices that advocate for returning to two administrations if the current political deadlock is not resolved. The danger is not only that some are arguing for two administrations. It is that institutional paralysis can produce the effect without the intention. 

Cohesion as Leverage Abroad 

The link between internal cohesion and external standing is the part of the picture most often overlooked. The Kurdistan Region’s diplomatic weight has always rested on its ability to present a single, coherent position to the outside world. In the recent Atlantic Council conference on Iraq, US former officials clearly urged the Kurds to be united as they considered division to be one of the main political threats for the Kurds to protect their achievements and strengthen their region. That was visible at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, where the President of the Kurdistan Region, Nechirvan Barzani, held a sequence of meetings with the US Secretary of State, the Syrian transitional leadership and the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, and again in his engagements in Abu Dhabi, recently in Baghdad, and his exchanges with the European Commission. 

Across those meetings ran a consistent formulation that one analysis summarised as unity paired with constitutional guarantees, a posture that rejects fragmentation without endorsing unchecked centralisation. The significant point is not the individual diplomacy but what it depends on. A Kurdistan Region that speaks with one voice can mediate between Damascus and its Kurds, reassure energy partners and act as a bridge to Baghdad. A fragmented one becomes an object of other actors’ bargaining rather than a participant in its own right.  

The Stake 

This is why the internal question matters far beyond the borders of the Kurdistan Region. Prolonged division would not only paralyse domestic governance; it would forfeit the standing abroad that three and a half decades of effort produced, and it would do so at a moment when the surrounding region offers little margin for self-inflicted weakness. The achievements of the past thirty-five years can feel permanent to those who do not understand those achievements are products of decades of sacrifices and chemical attacks on the Kurds. They are not. The generation that walked into the mountains in 1991 assembled a functioning self-government out of catastrophe, and the single thing they were determined never to repeat was the splitting of that government against itself.

Allowing the Kurdistan Region to drift back toward two administrations, even by inertia rather than design, would not register as a passing policy setback. It would be the undoing of the one achievement on which all the others rest. Cohesion is not the reward for getting everything else right. It is the precondition, and it has to be chosen again, more than ever, as the changing Middle East demands unity. 1990 and 2003 have already proved it is the only path to prosperity. 

The post Holding Together: The Kurdistan Region at Thirty-Five  first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Much of the analysis surrounding the current US-Israeli war on Iran has understood the conflict through the lens of Donald Trump’s personality. Through this lens, Trump’s reckless foreign policy decision-making explains why the superpower decided to attack Iran. Israel plays the role of agent provocateur in this account, inducing the impressionable president to launch a war which serves the regional ambitions of the settler-colonial state whilst being ultimately detrimental to the US national interest.

The lack of clear short-term strategy on the part of the Trump administration certainly speaks to the impulsive and unhinged nature of the President. This was clear also in his threat to destroy an entire civilisation.^[1] Moreover, whilst Israel may reap the benefits of this attack by weakening its regional adversaries and expanding its settler-colonial project, on the American side, the domestic and international costs of the war continue to mount. However, focusing on these short-term strategic considerations misses the important ways in which this conflict is less of an aberration in US strategy than the idiosyncrasies of Trump seem to suggest.

Whilst Trump is certainly responding to the immediate context, the conditions that structure this context have long been in the making. The US-Israeli war is the product of an imperialist dynamic which has characterised US-Middle East relations since at least the second half of the twentieth century. This imperialist dynamic centres around the region’s economic and strategic significance including, crucially, control over oil and trade routes. The existence of Israel has long been integral to maintaining that control. The suggestion that conflict with Iran is a result of the current administration’s policies belies a long-term strategy for regional domination and regime change in Iran, with military action against Iran being threatened by both Democrats and Republicans.

The imperialist dynamic at the heart of the conflict structures US-Middle East relations along a core-periphery divide. The US displaced the European powers as the imperial core of the region in the wake of the second world war and, whilst the superpower did not establish direct rule, it nevertheless reinforced the region’s position primarily as an exporter of fossil fuels. The region’s resource abundance also closely relates to its geo-strategic value as a crucial crossroad in networks of global trade.

Imperial powers learnt very early on that attempts at subjugating populations, whether in the Middle East or across the world, would be met with resistance. Whereas the mainstream media and policymakers in the West often portray the instability in the region as inherent and culturally pre-determined, the political turmoil that has marred the region for decades stems in part from a universal dynamic whereby resistance follows from domination.

The incorporation of the region into the global political economy, which culminated in the early twentieth century, set in train a process of region-wide class struggles at both the elite and popular levels. The division of the region into numerous individual nation states served the interests of European powers, and subsequently the US, by partly displacing internal class struggles into processes of regional state competition. In a context of both domestic opposition and regional competition, the ruling elites of many states, including Israel and the oil rich Gulf monarchies, came to see their interests as fundamentally aligned with their imperial patrons.

Yet imperial divide and rule strategies could not put an end to the imperative to resist. Challengers have constantly sought to thwart US designs for dominance. In the cold war, the Arab nationalist movement sought to challenge the region’s structural subordination and fragmentation. In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel proved its strategic value to the US by defeating the figurehead of the Arab nationalist movement in Egypt, Gamal Abd Al-Nasser, and thereby removing a core node of resistance.

The rise of the Islamic republic took place in this context. Iran has faced repeated imperial interventions in its modern history. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh’s nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry was overturned by a CIA-sponsored military coup in 1953, leading to the revival of a US-backed dictatorship under the Pahlavi dynasty. The repressive rule of the Shah led to a mass uprising of the Iranian population in 1978–9, and ultimately the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The revolution once again took control of the Iranian oil industry and sought to extract Iran from its condition of imperial dependence.

This explains why Iran has faced constant aggression from the US, Israel and their regional allies since 1979. From Saddam Hussain’s US-backed long war against the country to the launch of the war on terror in 2001, the US and Israel have made no secret of their desire to topple the Islamic Republic. The country has endured sanctions that have crippled its economy. It has been surrounded by hostile forces; with neighbouring states hosting major US military installations.

The war which is raging across the region today is therefore not simply a product of Donald Trump’s recklessness. It is a conflagration by a deranged leader of a project that has long-since been a keystone of US grand strategy. The influence of Israel over US policy is now widely accepted and has been particularly clear under Donald Trump. However, the fact remains that Israel would not be able to execute its regional aggression without US backing. Despite increasing domestic opposition to supporting Israel financially, since 7 October 2023, the US has continued to provide Israel with billions of dollars in emergency supplementary military assistance.

From the outset of the war Trump had hoped that he would be able to achieve what his predecessors had been unable to, namely the defeat of the Islamic Republic and its network of allies. But after months of war, the attainment of these objectives looks further away than ever. What is clear, however, is that this is a war long in the making. Viewing the war as merely the product of an irrational world leader manipulated by Israel’s political might obfuscates the enduring imperial dynamics driving US-Israeli aggression against Iran, and more broadly in the region. The war has worked to empower hardline factions in the Iranian regime suggesting that it is unlikely that the US and Israel’s position with regards to Iran will fundamentally change going forward.

[1] It should be noted that this kind of genocidal language is by no means unprecedented amongst US officials. In 1991, US secretary of state James Baker threatened to send Iraq ‘back to the stone age’.

The post Donald Trump, Imperialism and the Long US-Israeli War on Iran first appeared on Middle East Centre.

The Middle East is once again facing a moment of profound uncertainty. Beyond the profound human suffering and humanitarian consequences of ongoing conflicts, war, regional escalation, disruption risks in the Strait of Hormuz, volatile oil and gas markets, and rising concerns over food, water, and energy security are reshaping strategic thinking across the region. With tensions involving Iran, Israel and the United States drawing global attention, policymakers are again being reminded how quickly geopolitical shocks can threaten critical energy routes and international supply chains.

For Kuwait and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, this is not only a geopolitical challenge. It is a strategic warning that the future of energy policy cannot be framed solely around production, exports, or emissions targets. It must also be framed around resilience: the ability to protect economies, cities, households, and future generations from geopolitical, energy, and supply-chain shocks that are becoming more frequent, more complex, and more interconnected.

This perspective lies at the heart of our new research project, supported by the LSE Kuwait Academic Collaborations Programme, titled From Pledges to Pathways: Scenario-Based Policy Modelling for Kuwait’s Bioenergy Transition to Net Zero.

Using bioenergy as a case study, the project asks a simple yet urgent question: how can Kuwait design a net zero pathway that is not only environmentally credible, but also economically resilient, socially realistic and strategically secure?

Net Zero in an Age of Shock

The global energy debate has changed. The IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 states that energy is now at the centre of geopolitical tensions, with energy security increasingly linked to economic and national security. It also warns that electricity systems are becoming more exposed to cyber, operational, and weather-related risks.

This matters deeply for Kuwait and the GCC, whose economies remain closely tied to global energy markets, critical trade routes, food imports, and resource-intensive urban systems. It also puts net zero, often seen primarily as a climate slogan, into a broader national resilience agenda: countries that diversify their energy systems, strengthen domestic resource use, and reduce waste are not only lowering emissions. They are also reducing vulnerability.

For hydrocarbon-producing economies, such as the GCC countries, this is not a contradiction. It is the next chapter of strategic planning.

Kuwait’s Overlooked Energy Resource

Kuwait is rich in hydrocarbons, but it is also rich in another underused resource: organic waste.

Food waste, agricultural residues, petroleum sludge, sewage sludge, and other biodegradable streams are often treated as disposal problems. Yet globally, they are increasingly being converted into value through anaerobic digestion and other waste-to-energy technologies. These systems can produce biogas, biomethane, electricity, heat and fertiliser, while reducing landfill pressure and methane emissions. As shown in Figure 1, Kuwait generates substantial quantities of organic waste streams annually, creating strong potential for bioenergy (methane) generation and circular economy solutions.

This is where Kuwait has a powerful opportunity.

The World Bank’s 2026 report on waste management in the Middle East and North Africa highlights the urgent need to modernise waste systems, reduce food loss and move toward circular economy models across the region. Kuwait’s high per-capita waste generation makes this especially relevant, with recent regional analyses noting that Kuwait produces around 1.55 kg of municipal solid waste per person per day, above the global average.

In other words, Kuwait is not only facing a waste challenge. It is also sitting on a major circular economy opportunity. As highlighted in a recent LSE research paper, treating just 50% of Kuwait’s organic waste through anaerobic digestion could generate nearly 394 GWh of renewable electricity annually and create more than USD 1.8 billion in long-term public value over two decades.

Why Bioenergy Matters Now

Bioenergy will not replace oil and gas overnight. It should not be presented as a miracle solution. But it can become a practical, locally rooted pillar in a broader resilience-led transition.

For Kuwait, bioenergy can help:

• convert domestic waste into domestic energy
• reduce landfill dependence and methane emissions
• support cleaner cities and healthier waste systems
• produce biofertiliser for agricultural and soil applications
• create green jobs and technical skills
• strengthen the food-water-energy nexus
• support Kuwait’s carbon neutrality ambition by 2060

This also aligns with Kuwait’s broader national direction. Kuwait has communicated a carbon neutrality target for 2060, while Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s roadmap targets net zero in its operations by 2050 as part of the country’s wider transition framework.

The point is not that bioenergy alone will deliver net zero. The point is that a serious net zero strategy cannot afford to ignore local resources that can deliver environmental, economic and resilience benefits simultaneously.

From Pledges to Pathways

Many countries have climate targets. Fewer have credible, costed, and socially grounded pathways to achieve them.

This is why scenario-based policy modelling matters. It allows policymakers to compare different futures before they arrive. What happens if Kuwait delays action? What happens if waste-to-energy deployment accelerates? What policies would be needed to scale bioenergy? What are the economic, environmental, and social trade-offs? Where can the highest public value be created?

The IEA’s World Energy Investment 2025 shows that global energy investment is moving rapidly: around USD 3.3 trillion was expected to be invested in energy in 2025, with about USD 2.2 trillion going to renewables, nuclear, grids, storage, low-emissions fuels, efficiency, and electrification, twice the amount going to oil, gas, and coal.

This global shift should matter to Kuwait. The question is not whether the world is changing. It is whether Kuwait can shape its own transition before external forces shape it for Kuwait.

A GCC Moment

Across the GCC, governments are investing in renewables, hydrogen, circular economy initiatives, industrial diversification, and climate strategies. At the same time, the region faces shared pressures: water scarcity, high energy demand, dependence on food imports, waste generation, climate stress, and geopolitical exposure.

This creates a regional opportunity. The Gulf can become a global laboratory for resilience-driven sustainability, linking energy security, the circular economy, and climate policy into a single integrated agenda.

A resilience-led strategy asks a different question: not only “how do we decarbonise?” but also “how do we become stronger while decarbonising?”

From Pledges to Pathways: Why this Project Matters?

Our project is designed to inform this conversation by moving beyond general ambition and toward evidence-based pathways. It examines how bioenergy can fit within Kuwait’s wider net zero strategy, how different policy scenarios could shape outcomes, and how technological, economic, institutional, and behavioural factors interact.

More broadly, the project explores how Kuwait and the wider Gulf can move from vulnerability to resilience in an era defined by geopolitical uncertainty, climate pressure, and accelerating global transition.

This matters because transitions fail when they are treated as purely technical exercises. They succeed when they are designed around real systems: people, institutions, markets, infrastructure, and political economy.

For Kuwait, a resilience-led net zero strategy means recognising that climate action, energy security, waste management, and economic diversification are no longer separate policy files. They are part of the same national future.

Geopolitical shocks expose what stable times often hide: dependency, fragility, and the cost of delay. But they also create moments of clarity. Kuwait’s future will not be shaped only by the resources beneath its soil, but by how boldly it unlocks those above ground: innovation, talent, institutions, and untapped waste streams.

The green transition is not a distraction from today’s crises. It is one of the smartest responses to them.

In an uncertain Middle East, the question is no longer about Kuwait’s commitment to net zero. The real question is whether it can move early enough, think boldly enough, and act decisively enough to turn uncertainty into leadership.

The post Geopolitical Shock and the Green Transition: Why Kuwait Needs a Resilience-Led Net Zero Strategy first appeared on Middle East Centre.

In the summer of 2006, during the FIFA World Cup, I was a student at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. Our dormitory housed more than three thousand students from across Iran. Football matches were screened on a large projector in the university sports hall. On 11 June, Iran played Mexico in its opening match. The hall was packed. When Mexico scored its third goal and sealed a 3–1 victory, a heavy silence fell over the room. 

Yet not everyone shared that sense of loss. In one corner of the hall, a small group of Kurdish students jumped up and cheered each time Mexico scored. Their reaction was met first with disbelief, then with visible anger. To many in the room, this was an incomprehensible betrayal: how could they celebrate the defeat of Iran when they so clearly looked Iranian? As tensions escalated, and particularly after the third goal, the Kurdish students were forced to leave the hall. 

That moment has stayed with me, not because it was exceptional, but because it exposed the limits of Iran as a shared national imagination. Why did these Kurdish students support Mexico rather than Iran? What did Iran represent to them, and what did it fail to represent? And more broadly, what does Iran mean for non-Persian populations, and for Kurds in particular? 

For many Persian citizens, Iranian identity appears culturally natural, as the official national narrative reflects their language, literature and historical memory. This is not accidental. As Michael Billig’s concept of ‘banal nationalism’ suggests, national identity is reproduced through everyday practices – in language, education and public discourse – in ways that make it appear natural and beyond question.

In the Iranian context, these everyday forms of reproduction are closely tied to state institutions and dominant cultural production, reinforcing a particular understanding of Iranian-ness centred on Persian language and culture. For many non-Persian communities, including Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs, and others, however, the experience has been more ambivalent. This ambivalence reflects the legacy of modern state-building projects, which, particularly under the Pahlavi monarchy and later the Islamic Republic, consolidated a centralised and culturally homogenising understanding of Iranian-ness.  

In Iran, the manipulation of fears of secessionism has, over the past century, served to delegitimise the political and cultural rights of non-Persian populations. Territorial integrity has, accordingly, been elevated into a sacred principle, one that overrides questions of justice, representation and equality. Modern Iran, forged through increasingly rigid centralisation, came to embrace the doctrine of one nation, one state. This left little space for non-Persian peoples except as ‘ethnic groups’ subordinate to a Persian-centred concept of Iranian-ness. Kurdish cultural, linguistic and political rights, for example, were systematically restricted under the pretext of ‘national unity’, with demands for recognition frequently recast as threats of ‘separatism’.

As a result, Iranian identity became closely associated with the Persian language, its literature and history, while other languages were treated as ‘local’ within a singular national linguistic framework. Non-Persian populations, therefore, were incorporated into the dominant nation primarily as cultural communities rather than as equal nations. In fact, labelling them as Iranian ethnicities (aqwam-e Irani) – both by the Iranian state and much of the Persian intelligentsia – while avoiding the term ‘nation’, reflects a reluctance to move beyond a centralised political order in which Persian language and culture occupy a privileged position. The insistence on describing these groups as ‘ethnicities’ rather than nations is politically significant because, as ethnic groups, they are denied rights associated with nationhood, such as self-governance and the right of self-determination. 

Kurds, for example, are frequently described as ‘Kurdish-speaking’ (kord-zabān) or ‘of Kurdish origin’ (kord-tabār), terms that acknowledge difference while narrowing its political meaning. Kurdish language and literature may be recognised as part of Iran’s cultural diversity, yet they are often framed as mahalli (local) – expressions of regional diversity that remain subordinate to a national culture defined largely through the Persian language and historical narratives.  

This distinction between what is ‘official’ (rasmi) and what is ‘local’ sets the boundaries within which cultural difference can be expressed. Kurdish cultural production, therefore, is incorporated but largely confined to what Raymond Williams describes as ‘residual’ forms rather than becoming ‘emergent’ forces capable of reshaping the cultural or political order. Such linguistic and cultural framing normalises a dominant national narrative while marginalising alternative political subjectivities. 

This pattern of discursive framing reflects a broader logic within Iranian nationalism: unity is often equated with cultural homogeneity. The nation is imagined as having a singular historical past, within which diversity is acknowledged only insofar as it aligns with a monologic national identity. Difference is not necessarily denied; it is accommodated only so long as it does not change the underlying structure of belonging.

These underlying assumptions have direct implications for how political authority is understood in Iran. The central issue is not who should rule Iran, but rather how the country should be governed, and for whom. This, in turn, is closely tied to how the nation is imagined: whether as a unified entity seeking restoration to a perceived ‘glorious’ past, or as a plural political community requiring institutional recognition of its internal diversity. In the former vision, Iranian identity is understood as culturally layered yet politically singular; in the latter, political authority is shared and distributed. 

Limited cultural recognition does not amount to political recognition. In the Iranian context, Kurdish, Baluchi, Azerbaijani, Arab, and other identities are treated as ethnicities which are subsumed under the umbrella of ‘Iranian’ identity rather than as communities entitled to institutional recognition. Cultural pluralism without structural pluralism therefore leaves the hierarchy of belonging intact, allowing demands for self-governance or meaningful cultural recognition to be dismissed as unnecessary and ‘separatist’.  

Democratisation cannot be reduced to electoral competition. Durable democracy will not be achieved without institutions capable of accommodating plurality. Democracy is about accepting and accommodating differences. Unity, therefore, need not mean uniformity, and meaningful self-governance within a shared constitutional framework can strengthen rather than weaken the state. Some countries have adopted federal or devolved arrangements to distribute power while maintaining political unity, including federal systems such as Canada and devolved models such as those in the United Kingdom or Spain.

The prospect for a better future requires that Iran’s struggle for democracy embrace a new political vision, one that reimagines the country as plural and decentralised rather than reproducing older centralised models in new forms. The task ahead is not restoration, but transformation. It requires reimagining Iran as a political community of multiple voices – one in which no single identity, culture or narrative dominates the others. Only a pluralistic and decentralised democratic order built on such foundations is likely to secure dignity and freedom for all the peoples of Iran.

The post Beyond a Monologic Vision of Nation: Building Democracy Requires Reimagining Iran  first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Recent developments in digital communication in the Middle East point to a broader transformation in the relationship between digital platform logics, cultural production, and political authority. Rather than relying solely on formal diplomatic statements, state-linked actors increasingly engage in cyber political communication, sometimes framed as social media wars, where humour, remix culture, and popular media references are used to shape public perception of geopolitical affairs, including war.

In March 2026, a series of videos, generated by a group called Explosive Media, began going viral across social media platforms. At first glance, they appeared playful: brightly coloured Lego-style animations, AI-generated visuals, fast-paced editing, and soundtracks echoing American rap music. This blending of AI imagery and political messaging reflects a deliberate effort to maximise virality on social media platforms. Yet beneath this surface lies a sophisticated form of political communication that sits uneasily between propaganda, satire, and what has been termed Slopaganda: generative AI being used to disseminate propaganda and manipulate political beliefs. Iranian-linked networks have invested in producing short-form animated meme-style content that draws on globally recognisable visual language and audio styles. These materials are widely seen as part of a broader strategy of algorithmically optimised political messaging designed for social media rather than traditional broadcast channels.

The videos’ aesthetic is not incidental. Lego-style figures function as a global visual shorthand: instantly recognisable, non-threatening, and culturally decoupled from any single political tradition. This enables politically charged content to circulate more easily across the digital sphere and gain traction. They are a Middle Eastern form of Banksy-style political art, characterised by visual simplicity, and the use of instantly recognisable imagery to communicate political critique outside of formal state channels. Regional geopolitical narratives are presented in highly stylised and culturally familiar formats, drawing heavily on American cultural references to make accessible commentary on unfolding global events.

What is striking about these videos is their capacity for rapid responsiveness to unfolding political events in the US, translating ongoing developments into stylised audio-visual narratives almost immediately. These developments indicate that Iran is actively asserting narrative agency within the digital information environment. The speed reflects a broader shift towards rapid compression of geopolitical interpretation into visual content, allowing non-state actors to intervene in real-time geopolitical discourse, challenge mainstream media narratives and offer alternative framings of events.

A significant feature of this content is its reliance on, and inversion of, American cultural forms, particularly rap music. Rap which is historically rooted in expressions of marginalisation and resistance within the US, is repurposed here as a vehicle for critique of American foreign policy. The familiar musical forms are re-signified within a different ideological frame. Cultural familiarity becomes the entry point for engagement.

Digital Diplomacy and the Performance of Voice

Through these strategies, Iran has sought to engage American audiences directly through content designed to be shareable, entertaining, and non-threatening, including songs with lyrics such as ‘We love you, America’. This strategic narrative approach reflects an awareness of how emotional and cultural messaging can be used to shape perceptions in foreign publics. A comparable dynamic can be long observed in Israel’s strategic communications in Arabic. The IDF Arabic spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, often engages directly in a war of words with regional popular figures on social media, including the Lebanese singer Elissa. He has done so on several occasions, including a public exchange in 2019 amid the escalations in Gaza, and again during the more recent war in March 2026. These exchanges, widely reported in regional press and at times prompting the singer’s supporters to rally in support, suggest that direct confrontation and public critique are, in this case, counterproductive, often consolidating audience support around Elissa and her broader political cause.

In contrast, the emergence of Lego-style political animation signals a broader generational and institutional shift in state communication. Iran appears to adopt a strategy of indirect engagement through cultural comparison, mimicry and talking directly to the American public, rather than direct confrontation, suggesting an understanding that face-to-face rhetorical ‘showdowns’ on social media are less effective. The effectiveness of these video-campaigns lies not only in their content but in their optimisation for algorithmic circulation. The visual imagery, audio appeal, and recognisable cultural references increase the likelihood of engagement and redistribution. Such videos have collectively reached millions of views across platforms, demonstrating how political messaging can achieve scale without relying on traditional media and hierarchical models. This marks a departure from earlier models of Iranian state propaganda, which prioritised message control and linear distribution. The new digital influence operates through decentralised amplification, where users themselves become agents of dissemination, shifting narratives into public digital spaces shaped by visibility and engagement.

The Iranian approach contrasts with digital communication strategies in other parts of the Middle East, particularly the United Arab Emirates. Where Iran-linked content is adaptive, decentralised, and meme-driven, the UAE has tended toward a more controlled model of information governance. Journalists and influencer activity, particularly around sensitive geopolitical events, has at times been subject to regulatory oversight and restrictions aimed at maintaining message consistency and reputational stability.

In this context, art as political discourse plays a further role in enabling audiences to overcome epistemic obstacles within a given ideological situation, allowing meaning to be accessed through affective and audio-visual registers rather than purely informational ones. As a result, the boundary between art and propaganda becomes increasingly unstable, and political messaging extends beyond official statements to become interwoven with AI-generated forms of expression.

As such, these developments signal a shift away from hierarchical models of state communication towards decentralised and performative forms of digital diplomacy, in which influence is produced, contested, and sustained through the digital media attention economies.

In the Middle East, this transformation reshapes the dynamics of war not only on the battlefield, but also within the cultural infrastructures through which conflicts are narrated, and understood. Messages delivered in deliberately non-threatening, highly accessible forms, using familiar language, achieve influence through relatability and emotional engagement as much as through strategic messaging.

The post When Lego Goes to War: How Iran’s Meme Propaganda is Reshaping Digital Diplomacy first appeared on Middle East Centre.

If one were to ask a casual observer to identify the Arabian Gulf’s historically dominant city or its most longstanding international airline, the likely response would be ‘Dubai’, or possibly ‘Doha’. Yet, throughout the twentieth century, Kuwait served as the Gulf’s primary trading nexus and a regional beacon of development. It is also home to Kuwait Airways, a carrier that took to the skies decades before Emirates Airlines or Qatar Airways were even conceptualised. Today, however, this historical primacy has faded. While decades of investment have transformed Kuwait’s urban landscape, the results have been checkered. 

Unlike its neighbours – particularly Qatar and the UAE – Kuwait has not forged a super-connector airline to take advantage of the Gulf’s geographic positioning between Europe, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific, nor has it used transregional connectivity and related urban boosterism to diversify the economy by promoting local tourism or innovative offerings that could spur further growth. Kuwait Airways provides a useful entry point into this discussion about shifting developmental dominance in the region, but the challenges and opportunities it faces are inseparable from the wider aviation ecosystem in which it operates. Airlines do not function in isolation: their performance is shaped by airport infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, competing carriers, tourism strategies, and governance arrangements that determine how decisions are made and coordinated. In Kuwait’s case, understanding aviation as a system – rather than as a single firm – helps explain why substantial investment and historical advantage have not translated into premier hub status or economic spillovers comparable to those seen elsewhere in the Gulf in the last two decades. 

The Gulf’s Shift in Urban and Aviation Development 

To understand Kuwait’s current predicament, one must look at the populational and infrastructural shifts redefining the region. While Kuwait’s demographic dominance was a staple of the twentieth century, Dubai surpassed Kuwait’s population following the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, long-term population size has not correlated with airline connectivity (see Chart 1). While Dubai and Doha cultivated global hubs to bolster transit and tourism, Kuwait’s aviation sector languished. By 2024, whilst Emirates Airlines surged to 61.1 million in passenger traffic and Qatar Airways to 40.1 million, Kuwait Airways managed only 5.2 million. 

Chart 1: Gulf urban population (bars) and hometown airline traffic (lines), 2000-2024 

The divergence in international tourist arrivals is equally stark. In 2024, Dubai attracted over 18 million visitors following decades of rapid growth, whereas Kuwait saw just 2.6 million in the same year (see Table 1). 

Table 1: Annual International Tourist Arrivals (Millions) 

These figures reflect contrasting aviation systems: in Dubai and Doha, airlines, airports, and destination promotion are tightly coordinated; in Kuwait, development remains haphazard, with weaker integration between carriers, infrastructure investment, and national economic strategy – an imbalance that shapes outcomes as much as market competition does. 

Aiming for Strategic Renewal 

Under the New Kuwait Vision 2035 strategy, endorsed by the World Bank, the state is attempting to reverse this trajectory. Significant capital – over £3.5 billion (1 billion KWD) – is being invested in a spectacular new Terminal 2 at Kuwait International Airport, or KWI (Gottlieb 2025). This project aims to position the airport as a global connector while evoking a sense of place through stunning architecture with strong local inflections (see Images 1-3). 

Images 1-3: KWI’s bold new Terminal 2, under construction (2025)

Simultaneously, initiatives have been launched to overhaul Kuwait Airways into a carrier that both nationals and foreign travellers prefer. Yet, these efforts have been hampered by frequent turnover in leadership. In the last 15 years, numerous CEOs have attempted makeovers, but their diverging backgrounds – ranging from policy to entrepreneurship to piloting – have resulted in shifting priorities and disputed visions. While often framed as managerial shortcoming, it also signals a deeper governance issue. State-owned airlines operate under mixed mandates, balancing commercial viability, national symbolism, and public accountability. In Kuwait, unclear boundaries between political oversight, regulatory authority, and executive autonomy have made it difficult to sustain long-term strategic direction. The result is a system that struggles to translate investment and ambition into durable operational coherence. 

Navigating Turbulence: Structural Weaknesses and Competition 

While product quality at Kuwait Airways has improved, the airline remains unprofitable. It possesses a slight geographic advantage over Doha and Dubai for connecting Europe-Asia traffic, potentially reducing journey times by one hour due to its more northerly location, but its fleet and network are a fraction of its competitors. 

Several structural factors compound this weakness: 

• Market Focus: The airline emphasises the Indian Subcontinent and the Philippines as key markets – which have high volume but also a high degree of price elasticity, and thus low brand loyalty. There are also many leisure destinations in Europe, but there is little connective focus. 
• Isolationism: Unlike many regional neighbours, Kuwait Airways has never joined a global airline alliance – i.e., Star Alliance, SkyTeam, or oneworld – nor does its frequent-flyer programme have any airline partners, reducing cross-airline appeal, even though it has ‘codeshare’ partners to facilitate ticketing only. Furthermore, it has not developed a level of premium-brand reputation similar to Emirates, for example, which enables a more standalone, non-alliance strategy. 
• Domestic Competition: The state-owned carrier has also faced two decades of competition from Jazeera Airways, an aggressive private-sector low-cost carrier, with a destination network that now rivals Kuwait Airways. Moreover, our fieldwork conducted with the Kuwait Civil Aviation Authority in February 2025 revealed that, despite massive state investment in Kuwait Airways, officials indicated no explicit policy preference for the national carrier over the private upstart in future infrastructure allocations, including KWI’s Terminal 2, slated to open in late 2026. 

As Kuwait approaches the 2035 horizon, the challenges facing its aviation sector are not merely operational but deeply geopolitical and strategic. The state’s ambition to revitalise Kuwait Airways coincides with an unstable regional situation (most notably due to proximity to Iran) and intense commercial competition. Beyond all this, Kuwait Airways must carve out a new survival strategy in regional skies now dominated by the formidable duopoly of Qatar Airways and Emirates Airlines. 

Ultimately, the dilemma facing Kuwait Airways reflects a wider question confronting Kuwait’s aviation sector. Infrastructure, regulation, airline strategy, and destination development must evolve in concert if new investments are to yield meaningful returns. The challenge is not merely to improve one airline, but to design a governance framework capable of aligning aviation policy with broader economic diversification goals. Without a decisive resolution, the gleaming new Terminal 2 risks becoming a beautiful gateway with too few passengers passing through it. 

Note: This post was originally submitted before the commencement of multinational armed conflict in the region in early 2026, which shut down all Kuwaiti commercial air traffic for two months. Just prior to publication, limited commercial operations recommenced at KWI, on 26 April 2026. 

The post Kuwait’s Aviation Paradox: Urban Ambition and the Struggle for the Skies  first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Human migratory patterns have long been constitutive of Arab states and their political, social and economic makeup. But while travel is integral to the regional fabric, the present conditions of Arab state citizens’ mobility within the region – rather than vis-à-vis North America or Europe – remain understudied. Home to some of the strongest and weakest passports in the world, the region presents a rich context for the study of visa regimes and policies.

Visa regimes of Arab states trace their origins to colonial and imperial rule. Still, these regimes have endured and evolved with the independence of Arab states and as visas became a standard of international travel. Measuring mobility of Arab citizens through visa requirements reveals a limited scope for travel within the region with implications for tourism, trade, work and social relations.

A Snapshot of Intra-Regional Visa Access

Most Arab state citizens require visas not only to travel intra-regionally but also to visit bordering states. Citizens of war-affected states like Libya, Syria and Sudan face wide visa limitations for intra-regional travel. However, even citizens of relatively stable states, such as Jordan and Morocco, do not enjoy ease of access. Citizens of the most populous Arab country, Egypt, require visas to travel to most Arab destinations, while also applying visa requirements to many Arab states. In contrast, citizens of Arab Gulf states have wider visa-free access to countries within the region as well as freedom of travel within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) bloc.

Economic and political factors influence these visa regimes. For instance, Saudi Arabia and Oman recently relaxed their visa requirements to support their economic diversification goals. Meanwhile, ongoing political conflicts in the region contribute to the intra-regional travel limitations.

Alternative Models of Intra-Regional Travel

While Arab states may limit visa access due to regional instability, they do stand to benefit from increased mobility. Freedom of movement among European Union (EU) member states, for instance, has been viewed as a preventative measure against intra-European conflict. Most remarkably, youth travel has been observed as central to this process of regional connectivity, fostering social and cultural exchange and reconciliation in post-World War II Europe. What if Arab youth, making up 25% of the region’s population, enjoyed similar travel prospects?

Indeed, zooming out to other geographic regions and regional organisations may be instructive. In South America, the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) established freedom of movement for six member states, including Argentina and Brazil. In Oceania, Australia and New Zealand have had a policy ensuring freedom of travel and work for their citizens since 1973. Most recently, the African Union (AU) proposed a pan-African passport in a move toward realising freedom of movement for citizens of the AU’s member states.

One may argue that Arab states are well-placed to consider similar policies, given their close linguistic, historical and geographic ties and given that twenty-two of these states are organised into the Arab League, the oldest regional organisation of its kind. Some efforts have been made in pockets of the region. In 2011, the Arab Gulf states considered extending freedom of travel within the GCC to Moroccan and Jordanian citizens, but ultimately this did not occur. Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Mauritania and Tunisia committed to form a trade zone with freedom of travel for their citizens in 1989. This was not fulfilled.

Today, Moroccan and Algerian citizens enjoy visa-free access to one another’s countries only through air travel. Land crossings have been closed since 1994, impacting communities living near the borders, who have to make expensive journeys to see their families on the other side. If the 1989 pledge had been actualised, it is estimated that the economies of both countries would have ‘almost doubled in size’. ‘Their [Algeria & Morocco’s] poor border regions would be booming crossroads,’ lamented an article from The Economist.

Learning with the Visa Regime

Global human mobility has been characterised by gross inequality, often seen as a North-South divide. Those with European, North American and some Asian passports receive unhindered access through most borders, while most of those with Arab, African and other Asian passports struggle to receive a fraction of the same. This has resulted in a skewed globalisation, wherein ‘the bulk of the world’s population lives in closed worlds, trapped by the lottery of their birth,’ as described by Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson.

But the state of human mobility is more multilayered and complex than a dichotomous poor versus rich or north versus south divide. A 2018 study suggests that the ‘international configuration of visa regimes is primarily realized as part of regional alliances and the formation of regional blocs. Instead of a global mobility divide, it is therefore perhaps more appropriate to speak of multiple regional mobility divides in an increasingly multi‐polar world.’

In this vein, using the regional scale to unpack visa regimes among Arab states opens a broad research agenda, ripe for exploration. Pursuing this research avenue further can enrich our understanding of the constraints and potentials of visa regimes and their impacts on Arab societies and provide an analytically rigorous account of human mobility among Arab states.

[To read more on this and everything Middle East, the LSE Middle East Centre Library is now open for browsing and borrowing for LSE students and staff. For more information, please visit the MEC Library page.]

The post The Distance Between Us: Visas Among Arab States first appeared on Middle East Centre.