Iraq is not balancing: Pressure on Baghdad works when it is distributed
Twice this summer, drones launched from Iraq struck Saudi oil infrastructure, and twice Riyadh had to decide what to do about Baghdad. The first time, on 29 July, Saudi Arabia and US Central Command struck Popular Mobilisation Forces positions across seven Iraqi provinces, killing more than eighteen PMF members by the government’s count. Riyadh invoked […]
Beyond Headlines: Reclaiming the Narrative of a Region in Flux
Headlines are built to capture a moment, not a trajectory. And for the Arab world, that’s been a persistent problem — the region rarely gets covered as something in motion. It gets covered as a series of isolated events, each one detached from the decades of context, change, and complexity around it. But the Arab […]
From Research to Influence: How Storytelling Bridges Academia and Policy
Every year, thousands of research papers are published on the Arab world — its economies, its politics, its culture, its people. Most of them are excellent. Most of them are also never read outside a small circle of specialists. That’s the gap that matters most right now: not a shortage of knowledge, but a shortage […]
Why the Arab World Is So Often Misunderstood And What We Can Do About It
Ask most people outside the region to describe “the Arab world,” and you’ll usually get one of two answers: a headline, or a stereotype. Conflict. Oil. Sand and skylines. Rarely do you hear about the region’s universities producing groundbreaking research, its writers reshaping global literature, or its entrepreneurs building companies that compete on a world […]