Middle East

The Taliban was strategic in its use of violence, exercising restraint to influence military assessments of their capabilities in order to encourage more rapid withdrawals.

Mass protests challenging the government to focus on job-creation rather than on market liberalization and trade deals may carry a cautionary message to Western policy makers, too.

European Union countries are facing an epic challenge of integrating more than 1 million refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East and beyond.

The Arab Spring has been a fundamental event in the Arab world and yet among Middle East scholars, there is great intellectual and analytical debate about the degree of political change or continuity that the Arab Spring had produced. As reverberations of the global economic crisis have continued and the international rules of the game have fundamentally remained unchanged, the demand on post-Arab Spring governments to change policy course is high.

The chief obstacle to transformative change in the contemporary Middle East is the region-wide configuration of social power which was consolidated in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which survived the transition from empire to post-Ottoman independent states largely intact.

While successive waves of democratization over the last half century changed the political landscape in various regions of the world, the authoritarian regimes have maintained their hold on power in the Arab region.

The purpose of this Chartbook is to present a summary of evidence about changes in economic inequality – primarily income, earnings, and wealth – for 25 countries covering a 100 year period from 1911 to 2010.