Tourism is one of the more effective ways a country can broaden its economy. A developed sector brings in foreign spending, attracts investment, and generates demand that spreads into transport, agriculture, retail and construction. Recent research also suggests that diversifying a country’s tourism markets and activities can be a genuine driver of economic growth. Kuwait would like a larger share of this activity. A stronger tourism sector would help loosen its dependence on oil, support local businesses and stimulate the wider economy. For now, however, the sector remains modest, well short of what the country’s resources and location might allow.

When this shortfall is discussed, the conversation tends to settle on a single missing ingredient: a larger airport, a revived national carrier, a new museum or a flagship resort. Each of these matters, yet none of them, on its own, explains why the sector has struggled or how it might grow. The reason is that visitors do not buy any of these things in isolation. They buy a journey assembled from many parts: a flight, ground transport, a hotel room, meals, attractions and the services that fill the spaces between them. That journey is delivered by dozens of separate firms and public bodies, few of which coordinate their decisions with one another.

This is precisely why it is useful to think of tourism as a supply chain.

Zhang, Song and Huang (2009) describe a tourism supply chain as a network of organisations that together produce and deliver a tourism product, extending from the suppliers of flights and accommodation to the distribution and marketing of the finished experience at a destination, and encompassing both private enterprises and public institutions. In plainer terms, it takes in everyone whose work a visitor encounters, from the farm that supplies a restaurant to the ministry that issues a visa. Figure 1 sets out the general structure of the tourism supply chain.

Figure 1: A typical tourism supply chain within a destination (from Zhang, Song and Huang, 2009).

The chain can be read from right to left. Tourists sit at one end, and the intermediaries closest to them, the tour operators and travel agents, assemble and sell the trip. Behind these intermediaries stand the direct, or ‘Tier 1’, suppliers that a visitor deals with in person: accommodation, transport, excursions, shopping and dining. Further upstream lie the ‘Tier 2’ suppliers that remain largely invisible to tourists, among them food and drink producers, craft makers and the providers of equipment and utilities. Beneath the entire structure sits local government (or a national government in the case of Kuwait), which sets the rules, provides the infrastructure and carries responsibility for the sector’s long-term health. Two things move through the chain in opposite directions: services travel towards the tourist, while information travels back towards the suppliers.

Seen in this way, the relevant questions change. Rather than asking whether Kuwait has enough hotels or a competitive airline, we begin to ask whether the individual links actually connect. Does investment in one part of the chain reach the others, or does it stop where it lands? Does information flow between the actors, or does it break down along the way? And are local suppliers genuinely integrated, so that visitor spending circulates within the economy instead of leaking abroad?

A recent post on this blog, Kuwait’s Aviation Paradox, advances a similar argument for air travel. The country is investing more than a billion dinars in an ambitious new airport terminal, yet, as its authors observe, an airline “does not function in isolation.” Its success depends on airports, regulation, tourism strategy and governance working in concert. What holds for aviation holds for the sector as a whole. A spectacular terminal that opens onto an uncoordinated destination is, in the end, an expensive gateway to very little.

Understood through this lens, Kuwait’s difficulty looks less like an absence of components than a weakness in the connections between them. That is, in some respects, a more encouraging diagnosis, since connections can usually be built faster and more cheaply than world-class assets. The essential ingredients are already present: available capital, a strategic position between three continents, a distinctive culture and an established domestic leisure tradition of sea chalets, desert camps and weekend farms. Some links in the chain are genuinely strong, while others are considerably weaker: coordination between public agencies, the thin network of operators able to market Kuwait abroad, and the long, quiet summer season.

A supply chain perspective allows this stock to be taken honestly. It offers a way to identify what already works, to locate the weakest links, and to recognise where the remedy lies in better coordination rather than in further spending. It also discourages the habit of measuring success by a single prestige project, directing attention instead to whether the separate pieces combine into an experience worth travelling for. For a country that has long approached tourism one asset at a time, the more useful question is whether the chain as a whole can be made to hold.

The post Rethinking Tourism in Kuwait: A Supply Chain Perspective first appeared on Middle East Centre.

The Anfal operation carried out by the Baʿthist Army against the Kurds in 1988 played a central role in shaping Kurdish identity in Iraq and forms one of the foundational narratives of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Although many written sources discuss Anfal, the most authentic remain the oral testimonies of survivors. These narrators speak not in abstract terms but through lived experience, drawing on culturally embedded references like nature, tradition, religion, and collective memory. This blog introduces an ongoing study focusing on the Jabbari area in the Garmian region near Kirkuk. By analysing collected oral testimonies through fieldwork, the study aims to reconstruct a coherent narrative without altering the narrators’ words or structure. The findings reveal that these oral accounts implicitly follow a pattern aligning with historical research methods.

The Anfal Campaign in Jabbari

The Anfal campaign was carried out in eight phases between February and September 1988. According to Kurdish sources, approximately 182,000 people were killed and more than 5,000 villages destroyed. Iraqi forces launched coordinated air and ground attacks which included the use of chemical weapons. The third phase of the campaign, led by Barq Haji Hanati, focused on the Garmian region and parts of Kirkuk between 7–20 April 1988. During this phase, there were approximately 159,433 casualties, of whom an estimated 43,841 were killed. Many civilians were taken to detention camps in Topzawa, Dibz and Tikrit, while others were executed in the deserts of southern Iraq. Survivors later returned to Kurdistan after Saddam Hussein declared a formal amnesty following the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Jabbari, which is part of Garmian, suffered heavy losses during the Anfal campaign. Out of a population of 2,481, 284 deaths were recorded, approximately a tenth of the population.

Codes of Anfal

Images are in part connected to the natural environment of Kurdistan. For those who have been dispossessed, nature constitutes the primary source of knowledge, particularly in the form of the animals, birds and insects observed closely by villagers. This natural landscape in a Kurdish village can serve as a source for narrating the experience. For instance, when recounting the arrival of the soldiers, one of the survivors employed the metaphor of the locust to illustrate the destructive nature of such pests.

The Day of Judgment is a concept of paramount importance in Islam, and Anfal narratives employ it as a metaphor to describe their experience. In Islam, the Day of Judgment is defined as a time when each individual is preoccupied with their own affairs, yet it is also marked by widespread screaming and distress. A mother is not aware of her baby, and the child is not aware of the father. To achieve a closer connection between the narrator and the listener, according to one survivor of Anfal, ‘the noise of children, women, dogs, and sheep, mixed with smoke, made us feel like we were in Judgment Day.’ ‘We felt like we were witnessing Judgment Day on Earth.’

To define Anfal, one must move from the natural world and the realm of religion to the world of cultural expression. Within this cultural context, Anfal seeks to identify the symbols and signs that convey this experience, attempting to find answers through the cultural meaning attributed to them. The Kurdish expression ‘not even a needle can reach the ground’ signifies a state of saturation beyond which no further element can be absorbed.

While religion, culture and nature provided metaphors for the survivors, the Anfal attack simultaneously created situations which defied such resources and left the survivors clueless. This is illustrated by frustrations expressed by one survivor: ‘I don’t know you left us that night. I don’t know why that night felt so endless. No, what have we done? Do these guards have guns? Didn’t know where we were going. The buses kept coming and taking people away. We didn’t know what they were doing to these people. What are they going to do with them? Are they going to kill him, or not? I don’t know why they [the soldiers] did this. We didn’t know what they were doing to us in Arabistan.’

Anfal and Kurdishness

The people who were killed in the Anfal attacks identified as Kurds. When they became targets of the genocide, they saw that all the Anfal victims were Kurdish speakers and that being Kurdish was the reason they were attacked. Upon arrest and detention at Topzawa prison camp, one survivor explained: ‘You thought there was nobody left, but there was a crowd.’ There, they learned that the Kurds were in danger. Another said: ‘As we looked around, we could see only Kurdish men. It felt as if there was not a single man left in all of Kurdistan – everyone was here.’ One asked, ‘Well, are the Kurds really helpless? Kurds think they can’t do anything to help themselves. But when they see this massacre for the first time and realise that no one can save them, they ask the same question about why they can’t help themselves. Another idea is that it was God’s anger towards the Kurdish people. In Islam, when God is angry with a group of people, He punishes them severely.’

Conclusion

The study argues that narrators of such atrocities as Anfal, even when they make great efforts, cannot fully transform their oral narratives into pure reality. The Jabbari oral narratives of Anfal yield a significant finding: its oral history is narrated within a specific local social context, which gives these accounts a strong sense of realism rather than fiction. Under these circumstances, the role of the historian is to explain what happened and why. In their endeavours to write about genocides such as the Anfal Campaign, historians cannot afford to ignore oral speech and narratives. They ought to relay the story as it is told by survivors, before deciphering the narrative codes embedded within the story. This approach allows for both a theoretical and empirical engagement with oral testimonies. Through this practice, we identify both the narrative methods used by the narrator and the codes of speech present in the Jabbari oral history narratives of the Anfal Genocide.

The post The Oral Narrative of Anfal in Kurdistan first appeared on Middle East Centre.

A few years ago, I came across an inspiring community initiative called Kuwait Forest. Like many people, my first reaction was simple: could Kuwait really become greener? For a moment, the answer seemed obvious. Plant more trees. Reduce temperatures. Capture carbon. Improve air quality. Reduce dust. Create shade. 

But environmental sustainability is rarely that simple. The real question is not whether Kuwait should plant more trees, but whether it is planting the right trees, in the right places, under an effective environmental framework and with sustainable long-term financing. As I explored these questions through my research, I found myself looking beyond tree planting to a policy instrument rarely associated with environmental governance: Islamic waqf.

A Country under Thermal Stress

The effects of extreme heat are already reshaping everyday life in Kuwait. In 2026, the Civil Service Commission reduced government working hours during the summer to ease pressure on the national electricity grid, while electricity conservation measures were introduced across public facilities, including mosques , alongside temporary rotating power cuts in residential areas during periods of peak demand. These responses reflect a broader environmental reality rather than isolated administrative decisions.

Kuwait has recorded temperatures approaching 54°C, with days exceeding 50°C becoming increasingly common. Combined with worsening dust storms, water scarcity and rapidly growing electricity demand for cooling, these trends illustrate the country’s growing climate vulnerability.

Expanding urban greenery is therefore no longer simply an aesthetic ambition; it has become an important element of climate adaptation. Yet planting more trees alone will not solve the problem. Long-term environmental resilience also requires effective governance and sustainable financing.

Why Planting Trees is Not Enough

Tree planting can undoubtedly improve urban environments. However, poorly planned greening may also create unintended environmental consequences. Selecting species that require intensive irrigation places additional pressure on scarce water resources, while introducing vegetation unsuited to Kuwait’s desert ecology can damage fragile ecosystems.

My interviews with environmental volunteers, practitioners and public officials revealed a consistent message: the main challenge is not public enthusiasm but governance. Environmental awareness, clear regulation and institutional coordination are just as important as funding. Without them, even successful community initiatives often lose momentum.

Reframing Green Waqf as an Environmental Governance Framework

This is where my research introduces the concept of Green Waqf. Historically, waqf has financed mosques, schools, water infrastructure and public gardens across the Muslim world. Its defining characteristic is permanence: assets are preserved while their revenues continue supporting public benefit over the long term. This makes waqf particularly suited to environmental governance, where projects require stable financing beyond political and donor cycles.

Rather than a charitable mechanism for planting trees, Green Waqf should be understood as a governance framework for long-term environmental stewardship. I argue that it rests on three connected pillars:

• Community  – promoting environmental awareness, volunteering and public participation.

• Environmental Authority  –  providing scientific guidance, ecological assessment and regulatory oversight.

• Awqaf Institutions  –  providing stable, long-term financing aligned with national environmental priorities.

Together, these three pillars make environmental initiatives both sustainable and scalable.

From Concept to Implementation

To move Green Waqf from concept to practice, Kuwait should:

• establish a national Green Waqf framework that clearly regulates environmental endowments;
• strengthen coordination between the Environment Public Authority, the Kuwait Awqaf Public Foundation and community initiatives;
• require ecological assessment before funding greening projects; and
• invest in long-term environmental awareness and education supported through sustainable waqf financing.

Beyond the Trees

Kuwait does not lack environmental ambition. Nor does it lack committed communities or institutions capable of supporting long-term change. What remains missing is a framework that brings these elements together.

Greening Kuwait will never be measured simply by the number of trees planted. It will be measured by whether those trees form part of a broader system that protects ecosystems, strengthens communities and supports future generations. Green Waqf offers an opportunity not merely to finance that future, but to help organise it.

The post Can Kuwait Really Become Greener? Why Planting Trees Is Only Part of the Answer first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Whether the ceasefire agreement holds or it goes back to ‘moderate shooting’, the US-Iran war has produced a sticky perception of fragility in the Gulf’s security environment. A peace deal will, at best, deliver a state of stable instability, where the structural drivers of conflict remain unaddressed and every party leaves with the standing expectation that war could resume anytime, soon. That perception will reshape the oil market for decades.

Fifty years ago, a war in the Middle East was enough to bring the global economy to its knees. The 1973 Arab oil embargo nearly quadrupled the price of crude, from under three dollars a barrel to nearly twelve, and the second shock of 1979 carried it past US$34. By the early 1980s, the price of imported crude in the United States stood at roughly fourteen times its level a decade earlier, and Western economies absorbed double-digit inflation for the better part of a decade. Hence, the stability of the Gulf was the central vulnerability of Western prosperity, and Washington built its regional strategy accordingly.

In March 2026, the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for a fifth of the world’s crude. However, the effect remained disproportionately modest on oil prices for the most significant war in the Gulf since 1991, compared to previous escalation rounds.

That muted response is the surface of a deeper shift. The oil market has been restructured over the past decade, away from the Gulf and toward the United States, and the war accelerated the move. On 11 June, as the fighting wound down, the United States was confirmed as the world’s largest oil exporter, overtaking a Saudi Arabia and a Russia whose shipments were constrained by the war and sanctions. The country the 1973 embargo once held hostage now sits at the head of the market. The peace deal opens the next phase of that contest under the shadow of a fragile Gulf region, and the US emergence as an alternative supplier.

How Washington Contained the Shock

To hold oil prices down trying to buy domestic and international patience for its military campaign, Washington drew on its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It released 172 million barrels in March as part of a 400-million-barrel release coordinated across IEA member states. Furthermore, American crude has been sold into global markets at a discount as much as US$20.69 a barrel to Brent futures. As a result, the US crude exports already hit record high in May, reaching 5.58 million barrel per day. 

Trump celebrated the shift himself after his visit to China, describing international ships loading up oil from the US Southern states ‘like we’ve never seen before’ and adding that ‘the pain is much less than people thought.’ While the Gulf producers will need time to restore its standing as a reliable supplier in an unstable region, pro-drilling trump policies will turn short-term mitigation efforts into a long-term advantage.

Why the Gulf No Longer Sets the Price

Primarily, the oil shock did not arrive as drastically as expected because of structural changes in the oil market that had been taking shape long before the war. The shares of the Gulf region, the broader OPEC, and the much broader OPEC+ have been in constant decline in favor of the United States which is now the largest producer of petroleum liquids in recorded history.

On total-liquids basis, the US share of global production increased from 15 percent in 2015 to 22 percent in 2025, Pumping more than 23 million barrels a day. On the other side, the share of OPEC+ has moved the other way from 53 percent of the market in 2016 to about 46 percent by 2026, only to be pushed further down by the war. In the past decade alone, the US surpassed the share of the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council combined. Even for crude only, the US market share increased by over 3% during the same period from 10 percent to 13.4 percent.

This advance has embedded structural drivers that it held through the environmental regulation of the Biden years, which marks it as strategy rather than accident. Trump’s relaxed licensing, and indifference to climate constraint have pushed supply further still, in ways not yet fully reflected in price. 

Paired with an aggressive American posture in the oil-rich corners of the Western Hemisphere, from Venezuela to Guyana, Washington will gain pricing influence that may insulate it from the economic costs of its choices in the region.

The Race the Peace Triggers

On the other hand, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz releases the supply the war had stranded. Shut-in production across the region averaged 11.3 million barrels a day in May, and it now returns to a market facing weakening global demand. Meanwhile, OPEC+ keeps loosening its own production limits, trying to recover the market share slipping out of its hands.

It returns to soft demand. China, the swing buyer that once made every Gulf barrel scarce, showed during the war that it can cut crude imports rather than pay up, and that restraint is part of what kept the wartime shock contained. The same restraint now means the market cannot easily absorb both the returning Gulf supply and continued American growth. The two collide over the same marginal barrel.

And American growth is not slowing. The United States, with Guyana, Canada, and Brazil, is expected to drive two-thirds of all global production growth in 2026. Moreover, Washington is building for it. In May, it approved a five-billion-dollar offshore export hub in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico to load larger tankers, and Permian pipeline capacity is set to expand sharply by year’s end. These build-outs are permanent. They commit to defending in peace the export position Washington gained from the war.

The direction of all this, if demand does not recover faster than supply returns, is downward. A market absorbing returning Iranian and Gulf barrels, expanding Western Hemisphere output, pro-fossil policy in Washington, and fresh Venezuelan investment has every ingredient of a price war. While a sustained low price has always been a challenge for American shale, it is also hard for Gulf budgets built on higher breakeven and recovering from a regional war. 

The post Stable Instability and the Coming US-Gulf Contest Over the Oil Market first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Every summer, extreme heat dominates life across Kuwait. It affects public health, increases electricity demand, reduces outdoor productivity, and places growing pressure on urban infrastructure. Climate projections indicate that these challenges will intensify over the coming decades, making adaptation an increasingly important component of national planning. Yet one important question has received surprisingly little attention: will today’s adaptation measures remain effective as climate risks continue to intensify?

This question forms the basis of the present study. Much of the climate adaptation literature focuses on identifying measures that reduce climate risks, including heat warning systems, urban greening, cool roofs, and improvements in building design. While these measures are essential, they are often evaluated as though their effectiveness remains unchanged as climate risks intensify. The study asks whether that assumption holds as extreme heat becomes more persistent and compound heat risks are increasingly shaped by population growth and electricity-system stress. 

Kuwait provides a particularly relevant case study. As one of the world’s hottest countries, it already experiences prolonged periods of extreme summer temperatures and depends heavily on mechanical cooling to sustain daily life. Rising temperatures are accompanied by continued population growth and increasing electricity demand, creating multiple and interconnected pressures on urban systems. Rather than considering rising temperatures in isolation, the analysis examines how climate, population growth, and electricity-system stress interact to produce compound heat risk.

One of the most important findings is that summer nights in Kuwait are warming faster than summer days. Although public attention often focuses on record daytime temperatures, warmer nights have equally significant implications. Cooler nights allow people, buildings, and infrastructure to recover from daytime heat. As nighttime temperatures continue to rise, this recovery period becomes increasingly limited, extending heat exposure beyond daylight hours and increasing cumulative stress on both people and critical infrastructure. Extreme heat therefore becomes more than an episodic event; it evolves into a persistent environmental condition.

These changes have important implications for adaptation planning. Many existing adaptation measures were developed to manage periods of extreme heat, but their effectiveness may change as heat becomes more prolonged and systemic. Air conditioning, for example, provides essential protection against dangerous temperatures and remains indispensable in countries such as Kuwait. At the same time, greater dependence on mechanical cooling increases electricity demand, places additional pressure on power systems, and contributes waste heat to urban environments. Similarly, urban greeningcan reduce local temperatures but requires water resources that are increasingly scarce in hyper-arid environments. Even behavioural measures, including adjustments to outdoor working hours, become more challenging when high nighttime temperatures reduce opportunities for physiological recovery. This does not suggest that adaptation has failed. Rather, it indicates that adaptation should not be viewed as a static process. As climate risks evolve, the effectiveness, feasibility, and timing of adaptation measures may also change. This distinction is important because adaptation planning has traditionally focused on identifying appropriate interventions rather than considering how their performance may vary under progressively warmer climates.

To explore this question, the study develops a framework that links climate science with policy decision-making. Instead of asking only which adaptation measures perform best under current conditions, the framework examines when different measures are likely to provide the greatest benefit and how priorities should evolve as climate risks intensify. The findings indicate that relatively low-cost interventions, such as early heat warning systems and worker protection measures, provide significant benefits in the near term because they can be implemented quickly and directly reduce risks to vulnerable populations. As warming continues, however, longer-term structural investments including urban shading, climate-responsive urban design, electricity system resilience, and carefully planned greening strategies become increasingly important.

More broadly, climate adaptation should be viewed as a dynamic process rather than a fixed set of interventions. Governments should not only identify effective adaptation measures but also consider how these measures interact with changing climatic conditions and with other urban systems. Decisions about sequencing adaptation investments may therefore become just as important as decisions about selecting individual interventions.

Although the study focuses on Kuwait, its implications extend beyond a single country. Many cities across the Middle East and other hyper-arid regions are experiencing rising temperatures, rapid population growth, and increasing dependence on cooling infrastructure. As these pressures intensify, the challenge is no longer simply to identify effective adaptation measures, but to understand how their effectiveness may change under increasingly extreme climate conditions. Kuwait therefore provides valuable insights into the adaptation challenges that other heat-exposed cities are likely to face.

Climate adaptation is not a one-time response to a changing climate; it is a continuous process that must evolve as risks change. Recognising that adaptation measures may have practical limits under increasingly extreme conditions can help policymakers move beyond short-term responses towards more resilient, forward-looking strategies. For Kuwait and other rapidly warming cities, planning means not only adapting to climate change but also anticipating how adaptation itself must evolve.

The post When Climate Adaptation Reaches Its Limits: Lessons from Kuwait’s Extreme Heat first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Parliaments can aid peacebuilding and transitional justice processes not only through their legislative functions but also as democratic mechanisms where different views over conflicted periods are represented, contributing to dialogue and social consensus on peaceful co-existence. In this blog post, we focus on one such parliamentary mechanism in Turkey – the National Solidarity, Fraternity and Democracy Commission (hereafter, the Commission) established under the Grand National Assembly of Turkey – specifically regarding civil society participation, gender equality, and transitional justice demands. We draw on findings from our September 2025 report on the Commission as an ad-hoc mechanism, published by the DEMOS Research Collective, as well as recent developments in the peace process.

Turkey’s New Peace Process and the Commission

The peace process between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has been progressing slowly, with few concrete steps by the government until now. Announced unexpectedly by the ruling Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) coalition partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli in October 2024, the process has largely unfolded through top-down and backdoor negotiations, with clear tensions on expectations from this process. The government has adopted a strictly securitised conceptualisation of peace, what they call ‘Terror-free Turkey’, focused entirely on demilitarisation. This is an extension of the Turkish state’s historical securitisation of the so-called Kurdish issue and the current government’s intensified crackdown on the Kurdish political movement amidst a decade of worsening authoritarianism. In contrast, the PKK has put forward a vision of ‘Peace and Democratic Society’, seeking to address certain inequalities that led to the conflict. Despite these fundamental disagreements, negotiations are proceeding, albeit slowly. Following jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s call to lay down arms in February 2025 and the party’s decision to disarm and disband in May 2025, a group of PKK members symbolically burned weapons in southern Kurdistan with civil society representatives present as observers in a historic ceremony in July 2025.

Partly responding to calls to ground and secure the process democratically, the Commission was established in August 2025 as an informal parliamentary body, consisting of MPs from all but one parties represented in the Parliament. Per its bylaws, the Commission’s objectives were ‘to completely remove terrorism from Turkey’s agenda, strengthen social cohesion, reinforce our national unity and brotherhood, and undertake efforts in the areas of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law’ through working on legislative proposals and informing the broader public on the process.

As the only tangible mechanism through which civil society could contribute, the Commission raised expectations that this peace process could promote democratisation after all. Yet its mission and working methods remained unclear, even to its own members. Established almost a year into the process, it offered an official but invitation-only channel for civil society and conflict-affected groups to present their views, inevitably raising questions about access and inclusion.

Following 21 sessions in which a total of 137 persons were heard, the Commission concluded its work in February 2026 – a surprisingly short amount of time for a Commission with such ambitious goals. Its concluding report reflected the ‘terror-free Turkey’ framework, with its language heavily securitised; it provided broad recommendations regarding legislative proposals for the peace process, such as demilitarisation, reintegration, and legal assurances to those involved in the negotiations. Importantly, the report only briefly touched upon democratisation demands, recommending (in a total of four pages) strengthening fundamental rights and freedoms and reforming the penal execution regime and the counter-terrorism framework, among others. It made no mention of cultural rights, for instance. The report highlighted a ‘unique and national perspective,’ supported by government representatives’ repeated emphasis on a home-grown process with zero interference from third party countries, mediators, or guarantors. While locally grounded and context-specific processes are essential, this framing also suggests an attempt to retain total political control over the process through an authoritarian conflict management approach, limiting broader participation and scrutiny. Despite being framed as a home-grown process, there has been little meaningful space for community actors, victims, and survivors to shape its direction.

The Commission’s work reflects this limitation. It failed to generate social ownership of the Commission’s work or the peace process, rather functioning largely as a platform to collect demands without concrete next steps. The lack of meaningful participation, insufficient attention to gender, and the failure to address transitional justice demands undermined the Commission’s legitimacy and led to a missed opportunity to socialise this peace process.

What is Missing from the Commission’s Work?

Firstly, the participation of affected groups and communities and civil society remained symbolic. While the Commission heard a range of voices, it excluded others and failed to ensure meaningful participation. The criteria used to determine invitees was unclear, with the final list appearing to represent a middle ground. For instance, among the first to be invited were organisations of soldiers and law enforcement and their families, as well as the Saturday Mothers/People (movement of activists and families of the forcibly disappeared) and the Peace Mothers (movement by mostly Kurdish mothers who lost their children in the conflict). However, the Commission did not permit Peace Mother Nezahat Teke to address the Commission in her mother tongue, reproducing structural inequalities against the Kurdish language and identity. Meanwhile, LGBTI+ organisations were not invited despite having been recommended by some political parties and the LGBTI+ movement’s enthusiastic engagement with the process, which is unsurprising given the government’s targeting of this community. These examples demonstrate the boundaries of acceptable inclusion within the process.

Secondly, attention to gender equality was lacking both in the Commission’s structure and outputs. Although women’s and LGBTI+ movements have consistently asserted their role in peacebuilding and insisted on being included from the outset, only 9 of the 51 Commission members were women, and while some women’s and youth organisations participated in hearings, the final report makes no reference to gender equality or a gendered perspective on conflict and peacebuilding. This absence is not simply a matter of representation but reflects a broader rejection to integrate gender as a substantive dimension of disarmament and the peace process amidst the government’s worsening anti-gender politics.

Thirdly, the Commission barely engaged with transitional justice demands, even with regards to enforced disappearances, one of the issues raised by victims-survivors of the conflict in their initial submissions. The Saturday Mothers, during the 5^th session, demanded truth and justice for their forcibly disappeared relatives, accountability of perpetrators, and the establishment of a truth commission under the Commission. Despite the wide media coverage of this session and the significance of these demands in building a democratic future for the country, the final report made no reference to transitional justice mechanisms, truth commissions, or dealing with the past. This represents one of the Commission’s most significant shortcomings, especially given the centrality of truth and justice demands among those most affected by the conflict.

Conclusion

Although the Commission initially raised expectations that injustices at the heart of the conflict would be publicly and substantively addressed, its work remained limited. Rather than transforming participation into influence, it appears to have functioned largely as a mechanism to appease communities affected by the conflict and respond to broader social opposition to authoritarianism. Despite the opportunities that this formal space for participation presented for peacebuilding, the Commission showed once again that formalistic participation does not equal meaningful inclusion or impact. The Commission appears to have failed the objectives it set for itself to strengthen social cohesion and promote democratisation.

This also raises questions about the broader parliamentary and political context. The effectiveness of such ad hoc mechanisms depends on political will and genuine openness to pluralism. In the current context of systemic weakening of the opposition, evidenced most recently by the politically motivated court decision to remove Özgür Özel, the elected chair of the main opposition party, and the crackdown on social movements opposing the NATO Summit held in Ankara, the Commission reflects the limits of parliamentary involvement in peace negotiations by a government with no political will for democratisation. In the meantime, the key legal framework for the advancement of disarmament is expected to be brought to the parliament before the summer recess. This new legislation is likely to affect thousands of individuals including the PKK fighters, those imprisoned for PKK-related charges, and those in exile, therefore will mark a crucial milestone in the peace process. However, there are concerns that the government’s proposed legislation may have a narrow scope on laying down arms rather than paving the way for democratisation, pointing yet again to differing expectations and conceptualisations.

Considering the failures of the Commission that was tasked with contributing to social cohesion, democracy, and freedom, there appears little prospect that the proposed legislation will account for ways forward for democracy and social peace. Without civil society taking ownership and victim-survivor groups becoming leading actors, this ‘unique and national’ process risks remaining confined to a top-down framework, which will hinder any possibility of achieving sustainable peace.

The post How Turkey’s Parliamentary Peace Commission Failed its Democratic Promises first appeared on Middle East Centre.

Despite several decades of investment and repeated reform initiatives, Kuwait’s education system has struggled to achieve notable improvement in its quality. The number of reforms and initiatives that have been announced or partially implemented is uncountable, creating an endless cycle of education reform. This raises a critical question: why do reforms in Kuwait repeatedly struggle to be translated into effective practice? This blog posits that the answer lies not in the design of the reforms but in the governance structures, institutional arrangements, and decision-making processes that underpin the education system. Accordingly, it examines how educational governance in Kuwait shapes the design, implementation, and outcomes of education reform, and why several reform efforts have failed to deliver real and lasting change. 

The importance of this research extends beyond education policy alone. Education reform is a key component of the broader goal, as articulated in the New Kuwait Vision 2035, of diversifying the country’s oil-based economy and transitioning to a more sustainable economy. The development of human capital is a central pillar of this vision, and achieving a high level of human capital would definitely require a high quality of education system, yet all the efforts to improve this quality have not accomplished it. This makes the question of education reform a national priority and not a ministerial priority. And without successful reform, the achievement of the New Kuwait Vision would be harder than we expected, if not impossible. 

International reports, including those by the IMF and the OECD, consistently highlight weaknesses in governance – such as institutional fragmentation, limited coordination, weak accountability, and slow policy implementation – as major constraints on reform across the public sector generally. These findings mirror patterns observed in Kuwait’s education sector, where high ministerial turnover, overlapping responsibilities, and inadequate monitoring systems have contributed to what I have described as ‘uncompleted reforms’. Understanding how governance operates within the education system is therefore essential not only for improving educational outcomes but also for advancing Kuwait’s wider economic and institutional reform agenda.

What distinguishes this articulation of the problem from others is its explicit focus on governance as the missing link between reform plans and reform outcomes. Rather than evaluating individual reform programmes, curricula, or initiatives in isolation, analysing the architecture of educational governance itself – including the distribution of authority, the role and autonomy of key institutions, and the political and bureaucratic dynamics that shape decision-making. Thus, the focus moves beyond technical explanations for reform failure to situate education policy within the broader context of Kuwait’s governance and political economy.

Educational governance – the structures, actors, and processes through which educational decisions are made and implemented – plays a central role in shaping reform outcomes. Globally and regionally, governance has become a central element of education policy as systems seek to navigate increasing complexity, rising accountability demands, and pressures to improve institutional performance. As a result, governance issues have moved up political and policy agendas, and countries are increasingly working to establish a governing model that fits their own needs.

 In Kuwait, governance remains highly centralised within the Ministry of Education and is characterised by limited delegation of authority and complex bureaucratic layers. This was the case of the education system since its establishment in the 1940s, which was a highly understandable governance style due to the limited number of schools and students and the simplicity of the system. However, the complexity and expansion of the education system today require a new governance style. Based on recent Ministry of Education statistics, there are around 1,232 schools, 105,453 teachers, and 516, 966 students. While in higher education, there are 2 public and around 14 private universities. It will be almost impossible to govern this system through a centralised approach, as some studies in Kuwait have warned against increased centralisation, which might affect the system’s quality and mechanisms. Ministries must no longer be the only actors involved in governing the education system. 

Although several institutions were established in Kuwait to support policy development and quality assurance – such as the Supreme Education Council (SEC), the National Center for Educational Development (NCED), and the National Bureau for Academic Accreditation and Education Quality Assurance (NBAQ) – their effectiveness has been constrained by structural dependence on ministerial authority.

The SEC, established in 1984 as an advisory body, lacks independence as it is chaired by the Minister of Education, who appoints its members and determines when it is convened. In fact, no new council members have been appointed since 2018, and the SEC has played no role in major decisions, including the suspension of schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, the NCED, created in 2006 to lead educational reforms, suffered continuously from leadership instability, limited autonomy, and extensive ministerial interference; instead of fixing these issues, the Minister of Education abolished the centre in September 2025. The NBAQ faces comparable challenges; despite its mandate to assure quality in higher education, it remains structurally dependent on the Ministry of Higher Education and has not conducted quality assessments of Kuwait’s higher education institutions since it was established in 2010.

Collectively, these cases illustrate how centralisation and weak institutional autonomy undermine educational governance in Kuwait. The subordination of key governance bodies to ministerial authority has limited their ability to function effectively, thus contributing to the fragmented reform efforts and persistent implementation failures across the education sector. 

The past several attempts to reform the education system have focused too heavily on the operational needs of day-to-day schooling while neglecting the broader question of re-governing the education sector. Re-governing the education system should be regarded as a foundational step toward achieving meaningful reform and improving educational quality. Given the complexity of the education system, there is a need for a new governance structure that redistributes authority, strengthens accountability, and enables the meaningful participation of diverse stakeholders.

The post Re-Governing Education in Kuwait: A New Era of Reform first appeared on Middle East Centre.

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.