Resilience and Reform in the Middle East and North Africa – Presentation of the Book ‘The EU, resilience and the MENA region’

The new EU Global Strategy (EUGS) ‘Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe’ unveiled in late June 2016 could represent a point of departure to re-calibrate the EU’s external and security policy towards the MENA. One of the most significant novelties brought about by the EUGS is its emphasis on ‘resilience’ as the main pillar of the new comprehensive vision for the EU’s foreign and security policy. In the EUGS document resilience is understood as the opposite of 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.

Marking the end of a one-year project – launched in January 2017 and jointly undertaken by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies and the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) in Rome – examining the concept of resilience in the context of six in-depth country studies (Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Qatar, Tunisia and Turkey), all research deliverables were presented in a edited volume in an event in Brussels on March 8^th 2018.  

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