The EU’s New Resilience Agenda in the MENA Region

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is in turmoil. Hard and human security challenges ranging from on-going inter-state conflicts and civil wars to radicalization and terrorism have been proliferating against the backdrop of unstable political circumstances, demographic and socio-economic challenges, migration and climate change.

The new EU Global Strategy (EUGS) released in late June 2016 represents a point of departure to re-calibrate the EU’s external and security policy towards the MENA, placing ‘resilience’ as the main pillar or leitmotif of the new comprehensive vision for the EU’s foreign and security policy. In the EUGS document, resilience is understood as the opposite to fragility, namely “the ability of states and societies to reform, thus withstanding and recovering from internal and external crises”. It is further defined as a precondition for sustainable growth and vibrant societies as well as for the ultimate attainment of democracy.  

The culmination of a year-long research project focusing on the EU’s New Resilience Agenda in the Middle East and North Africa Region, jointly undertaken by FEPS and Istituto Affari International (IAI), a conference is organised in Beirut, Lebanon aimed at presenting and discussing the project’s important findings to a select number of stakeholders in the MENA region. The conference will take place on 3 November 2017 at Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, in Lebanon. It will feature a keynote speech by Ms. Nathalie Tocci, Director of IAI, and the participation of important researchers focusing on the project’s six case-studies, Lebanon, Qatar, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and Iraq, all aimed at unpacking the concept of resilience in concrete and substantive terms, as the implementation of the EUGS goes forward.  

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