The events of the Arab Spring took the world by surprise: there were no obvious signs of an approaching storm in the Levant and the Maghreb. Objective measures—used on a regular basis—showed that…
Nine year old Reem probably had one of the shortest distances that Syrian refugees had to travel when fleeing the crisis in their country in 2012. Her family walked 30 km from their town of Deraa…
The Syrian refugee crisis is now at the top of the international agenda. Pictures of refugees crossing the Mediterranean and risking their lives and that of their families have shook the world…
Defense budgets are not publicly available, oversight is weak, and information about hidden spending is non-existent, says Transparency International-UK (TI-UK) of defense spending by the 17…
[[tweetable]]Roughly half of the world’s 60 million-plus displaced people are female[[/tweetable]] (the 60 million includes 19 million refugees and 41 million internally displaced people (IDPs).…
To development economists (like myself), the uprisings that started in Tunisia and spread to several countries in the Arab world in 2010-11 came as somewhat of a surprise. For the previous decade…
. World Bank Chief Economist for the Middle East and North Africa, Shanta Devarajan discusses potential economic scenarios for the region.
In February 2012, I wrote a blog about the relevance to the Arab revolutions that had swept the region of the UN’s then recently unveiled “Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future worth…
To those European Union citizens who think that the ongoing “refugee invasion” into the EU is quickly becoming economically unsustainable: If the experience of Syria’s neighbors is anything to go…
I’ve just returned from a mission to Palestine. During the visit, I met Fatima. She was happily married until last summer, when suddenly she lost everything.