CONCEPT OF THE CONFERENCE

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have been the geography of a complicated cobweb of relations for millenniums. A classic on the history of the MENA region starts with religious narratives, depicting extreme tempers of holiness, dynamic shifts of civilizations, struggles for dominating the region and designing an order. In this sense, the MENA region is usually referred to as the area of escalations, wars, and, in other words, high politics. Nevertheless, the MENA has experienced a bottom-to-up reflection of societal grievances committed to access basic services, and democratic rights. It has been an ‘Arab Winter’ rather than ‘Spring’ though; the fragility in the MENA has become the expected political and societal pattern. Other than the ‘Winter – Spring’ phenomena, structural and persistent issues in question – like the Palestinian-Israel question, competition of the Gulf Countries, or ambiguity in Libya, have downgraded the scholarly capacity of ‘explaining and understanding’ the region.

The fact that it is not a unique region and is composed of varying regional systems, MENA requires a compartmentalized effort of academic scrutiny based on three dynamics. The first dynamic is that the regional systems in the MENA attract the global powers. The competition of the dominating states facilitates the external hands to drive the regional disputes either directly or through the pros. The second dynamic is the regional states that are well-connected to each other whilst pursuing contradicting agendas based on a ‘self-help’ system. Finally, transnational dynamics challenge the states of the region for the sake of prosperity and democratic rights. Under the shade of these three dynamics, the MENA remains an ambiguity that makes it a vulnerability for a stable international system. Given the intertwined structure of the mentioned dynamics, the MENA has a weight in determining the course of overall international politics.

PROBLEM STATEMENT OF THE CONFERENCE

‘International Conference on The Middle East And North Africa: Pheno-MENA’ will address the question ‘Does MENA proceed to a state of stability in the long term?’. In this regard, ‘what concrete steps may be on the agenda?”. For this purpose, the conference will focus on the challenges that are sources of instability, how to address them for smooth regional well-being, and contradictions regionally or globally in handling the issues in question of the Middle East.