The lack of channels for social demands creates the conditions for sudden explosions of anger. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed some latent contradictions within Egyptian society.
2019 was a tumultuous year for Tunisia. The year saw a transition of presidential and legislative power, persistent economic challenges including rampant corruption, and an ever-growing mistrust of the political class.
Over 2019 and 2020, the royal and state agenda was r marked by the emergence of the health, social and economic crises linked to the coronavirus and a renewed social unrest challenging the violation of individual freedoms.
The COVID-19 pandemic can, in all respects, be considered among the most consequential geopolitical events of recent times. It has drastically changed our everyday lives and severely hampered economic activities on a global scale.
Lebanon’s luck ran out in 2019. The country’s unsustainable debt, bad governance, internal contradictions and vulnerability to foreign interference, finally caught up with it, sending the country into economic freefall.
The year 2019 was a relatively quiet one for Jordan, after the protests of 2018. However, instability persists in the government, which has been reshuffled four times in just over a year.
Politically weakened, economically failing and socially in turmoil, Algeria has not been spared the COVID 19 pandemic.
In its response to the Arab revolts, the EU only engaged marginally with their urban causes, and above all from a technical rather than political perspective. Euro-Mediterranean cultural cooperation programmes were an exception.
Protests in the streets of the Arab world in 2011 and those taking place today in some countries in the region, such as Algeria or Lebanon, have a specific weight, different than protests with similar claims elsewhere.
Since its creation, Hezbollah’s resistance to Israel has given the party great popular legitimacy. However, the Party of God is today the target of the anger of large segments of Lebanese society.
The origins of the protests in Lebanon can be summed up in two words: neoliberalism and sectarianism. The Hezbollah party has been accusing the protest movement of being controlled by foreign interests.
Walid Abdelnasser, director of the Office for Arab Countries of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), reviews the historical development of the intellectual property system in the Maghreb and the Middle East.