Ahmad Al-Wadaey, Tobias Zumbrägel and Ali Alamudi This Report discusses the crucial but understudied impact of oil extraction industries on local communities and the environment in Yemen’s Hadhramawt governorate. By combining conceptual approaches of energy justice and the environmental peacebuilding literature, it provides a novel perspective on how environmental pollution via the oil industry in […]
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by Mirjam Schmidt and Desirée Custers In August 2022, CARPO and Stimson Europe hosted a workshop looking into the potential of cultural diplomacy and cultural exchange between Iran and Saudi Arabia. While the two countries share a rich history of cultural relations, their present-day cultural exchange is minimal due to geopolitical differences. But in spite […]
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by Marie-Christine Heinze and Ewa K. Strzelecka On 12 June 2022, FES Yemen and CARPO, in collaboration with the EU-funded Peace Women project, convened a one-day workshop in Amman, Jordan. The aim of this workshop was to discuss with researchers as well as female and male diaspora representatives challenges and constraints as well as potentials […]
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by Osama Ali, Fadhilah Gubari, Julia Gurol and Abdulsalam al-Rubaidi This Study analyzes narratives of (in)justice in contemporary Yemeni novels. Through a lexical field analysis of nine selected contemporary novels, the paper highlights how (in)justice is framed in narrative literature, both in terms of representations of certain socio-political practices and in terms of normative constructions […]
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by Bilkis Zabara and Tobias Zumbrägel This Report addresses the relationship between violent conflict and environmental governance in Yemen. It translates the concept of environmental peacebuilding to the case of Yemen, where it has not received broader attention in terms of post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation efforts. The study compares six different governorates, namely Sana’a, Dhamar, […]
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November 25, 2021
On November 25, the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO) and Stimson Europe hosted the thirteenth “Brussels MENA Briefing”—a series of after-work briefings on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region—on “Iraq, Beyond the Election: Internal and External Implications”.
Speakers included Ali Al-Mawlawi, who works as an independent analyst and researcher and specializes on Iraq’s political economy, Marsin Al-Shamary, who is a Research Fellow at the Middle East Initiative (MEI), and Hussein Al-Waeli, who works as an accredited journalist at the European Union. The discussion was moderated by Kawa Hassan, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East and North Africa division and Executive Director of Stimson Europe.
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by Khalid al-Akwa and Tobias Zumbrägel Between March and September 2020, and again in May through July 2021, Yemen experienced periods of torrential rain that resulted in flash flooding. Flash floods are and will continue to be a recurrent natural phenomenon with destructive consequences in Yemen, which has not yet received broader attention. This Brief […]
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by Mirjam Schmidt, Julia Gurol and Tobias Zumbrägel The first CARPO Research Forum, which took place in November 2020, addressed the reconfigurations and challenges the WANA region is currently grappling with by selecting three major themes at the global, regional and local levels: It discussed the reconfigurations of external powers in the region with a […]
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Poor electricity services in Yemen, even before the war, have been one of the key barriers to sustainable economic development and basic service provision (e.g., water supply, health care, education). This paper assesses the power supply system status prior to the war and subsequently discusses the impact of the war on electricity sector performance, followed […]
Read more... April 14, 2021
On April 14, the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO) and the Stimson Center Europe hosted the eleventh “Brussels MENA Briefing”—a series of after-work briefings on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region—on “Egypt in the Eastern Mediterranean”.
Speakers included Dr. Ahmed Kandil, Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Energy Studies Program at the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, and Hafsa Halawa, independent consultant, Visiting Fellow at the Middle East and North Africa Program of the European Council on Foreign Relations and Non-resident Fellow at the Middle East Institute. The discussion was moderated by Desirée Custers, Research Assistant of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Stimson Centre.
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by Mareike Transfeld, Mohamed al-Iriani, Maged Sultan and Marie-Christine Heinze After six years of war, state institutions in Yemen have fragmented along multiple fault lines. The security sector is no exception. Given their role as central nodes of the country’s security governance structure, this Policy Report explores governorate-level Security Committees in three governorates that have […]
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by Yazeed al-Jeddawy, Maged al-Kholidy and Kate Nevens This Report looks at how the arts and peacebuilding have historically intersected in Yemen, and how traditional arts are alive today and are being used to promote peace and war. It demonstrates the variety of ways in which the arts promote and educate on the values of […]
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by Aisha Al-Sarihi The novel coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the GCC’s focus on environmental sustainability projects, as shoring up economies and protecting human health have become top priorities for governmental countermeasures. This Brief argues that associating COVID-19 economic recovery packages with measures aimed to safeguard the environment and tackle climate change, towards a so-called ‘green […]
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December 1, 2020
On December 1, the EastWest Institute (EWI) and the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO) hosted the ninth “Brussels MENA Briefing”—a series of after-work briefings on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region—on “Kuwait and the post-Sheikh Sabah Era”.
Speakers included Vice Admiral (ret.) Ahmad Al-Mulla, advisor to the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense, and Dr. Courtney Freer, assistant professorial research fellow at the Middle East Center of the London School of Economics. Well-known experts on the Persian Gulf region and members of the European policy community virtually attended this briefing, which was held under the Chatham House Rule.
Read more Read more... October 6, 2020
The seventh edition of the Brussels MENA Briefing, co-hosted by the EastWest Institute (EWI) and the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO), in partnership with the Rethinking Yemen’s Economy initiative, was dedicated to the economic impact of the ongoing conflict in Yemen—a war that started in 2014/15 and has since turned the country into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis according to the UN.
The Rethinking Yemen’s Economy initiative aims to contribute to peacebuilding and conflict prevention, economic stabilization and sustainable development in Yemen by building consensus in crucial policy areas through engaging and promoting informed Yemeni voices from all backgrounds (the “Development Champions”) in public discourse on development, economy and post-conflict reconstruction in Yemen, and by positively influencing local, regional and international development agendas. It is implemented by CARPO, DeepRoot Consulting and the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies and is generously funded by the European Union and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Yemen.
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by Tobias Zumbrägel Taking the viewpoint of ‘political ecology’, this first issue of the newly created CARPO Sustainability Series highlights the social and political implications of sustainable transformation across the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Overall, it aims to achieve four goals: (a) to provide a comprehensive overview of existing research and […]
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by Tarek Barakat, Ali al-Jarbani and Laurent Bonnefoy This Brief analyzes the state of the private sector in Yemen during the ongoing war and explores its potential to contribute to the country’s peace requirements. It presents challenges entrepreneurs face and the potential contribution of these in sectors that are central to the construction and sustainability […]
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by Abdulkarim Qassim, Loay Amin, Mareike Transfeld and Ewa Strzelecka The current political and economic conditions in Yemen make it difficult for CSOs to continue functioning on an effective level, while a lack of human and organizational capacity are hampering project results. Nevertheless, Yemeni CSOs contribute to peace requirements in various sectors and remain an […]
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by Maged al-Kholidy, Yazeed al-Jeddawy and Kate Nevens Despite its major transformative potential, local level youth work is often overlooked by mainstream international discourses on national level peace processes and violent conflict. This Brief sheds light on young peoples’ activism before and during the war, the challenges they are currently facing, their visions for the […]
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by Fatima Saleh, Scott Preston and Mareike Transfeld The increased political capture of the Yemeni media since 2014 has reinforced diverging political discourses and has contributed to polarization across society and to political fragmentation. Practitioners face steep challenges in composing professional stories. Journalists are subject to harassment, intimidation, abduction and violence. Yet, Yemeni journalists remain […]
Read more...![China’s Strategy in the Persian Gulf. A Balancing Act between Riyadh and Tehran [in German]](https://carpo-bonn.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/15_carpo_brief_Cover_900.jpg)
by Julia Gurol and Jacopo Scita This Brief discusses the repercussions of geopolitical developments on China’s strategy in the Persian Gulf. It is argued that China is pursuing strategic hedging by attempting a risky political balancing act in order to prepare for a possible escalation. This Brief is a slightly edited German translation of the […]
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by Iman al-Gawfi, Bilkis Zabara and Stacey Philbrick Yadav Yemeni women are laying foundations for sustainable peace through everyday practices that have the capacity to help transform the landscape of women’s rights in the post-war period. Wider recognition of women’s paid and unpaid work in wartime, and the conditions that enable it, could improve the […]
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by Ulrike Stohrer This Study focuses on the performative genre barʿa, which is one of the most important means of nonverbal communication between social groups in Yemen. As such, this Study deals with a cultural practice of the tribal population in the Yemeni highlands that also has important significance for Yemeni society as a whole […]
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by Julia Gurol & Parisa Shahmohammadi This Study looks at China’s new maritime strategy in the Arabian Sea within the framework of the Maritime Silk Road and analyses its possible implications for the adjacent countries. The main focus of the analysis is placed on the most critical sea lines of communication which connect China with […]
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by Christian Koch and Adnan Tabatabai This CARPO Brief discusses the need to construct ideational pillars for a tafahum, or common understanding, of how to define a process towards regional integration and a shared security architecture for West Asia and the Arabian Peninsula (WAAP). This is an evolutionary process, which begins with the essential building […]
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by Julia Gurol & Parisa Shahmohammadi This CARPO Report lays out what the role of China could be in the quest to safeguard the JCPOA. It outlines the viewpoints of Brussels and Beijing, and sketches converging and diverging interests and their influence on respective policy choices. It assesses two scenarios for the future of the […]
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by Mareike Transfeld & Marie-Christine Heinze This CARPO Report serves as a background paper to five short studies Yemeni-international researcher tandems will develop in the course of 2019. It places a particular focus on ‘peace requirements’, a term that seeks to draw attention to the manifold challenges to establishing stability and building peace in Yemen […]
Read more...![Back to Crisis Mode. Iran’s Quest to Manage Internal Crises and External Pressures [in German]](https://carpo-bonn.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/carpo_policy_report_05_900.jpg)
by Adnan Tabatabai This CARPO Report is dedicated to an analytical discussion about how the ongoing crisis surrounding the nuclear agreement between the E3/EU+3 and Iran is affecting the foreign policy conduct of the Islamic Republic, its internal power balance, as well as the future of state-society relations in Iran. This is the German translation […]
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by Adnan Tabatabai This CARPO Brief provides the readers with a reflection of the discussions held during a workshop organized by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and CARPO, which brought together policy experts from the think tank communities of Europe and the United States. The focus of the discussions was on specific country contexts (Turkey, […]
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The sixth meeting of CARPO and the EastWest Institute’s ‘Iran-Saudi Dialogue Initiative’ dealt with knowledge production and knowledge dialogue in context of the highly conflictual relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia and explored the potential of academic exchanges and scientific cooperation in defusing such tensions.
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by Abdulsalam al-Rubaidi This Study presents insights into alternative values and visions offered to society by leading contemporary Yemeni novelists with the aim of laying the basis for a better future of their country. CARPO Associate Fellow Abdulsalam al-Rubaidi analyzes six contemporary Yemeni novels, each of which is built around widely debated issues in Yemen, […]
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Geopolitical occurrences and the changing role of the United States in the Middle East have led to an increased interdependence between the EU and China in the Middle East, a region where the economic and security interests of each meet, compete and converge.
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by Andrea Warnecke This CARPO Study scrutinizes the dichotomy between the political and non-political parts of the UN system and asks whether the UN system can conduct peacebuilding in contested intra-state settings irrespective of Security Council backing. It argues that the UN’s perennial pre-occupation with improving peacebuilding coherence across its bodies is bound up with […]
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herausgegeben von Andrea Warnecke and Bilkis Zabara This publication is an output of our 2018 summer school, which introduced students to the theory and practice of linking relief, reconstruction, and peacebuilding efforts in Yemen in light of the ongoing war. As the fighting and airstrikes in Yemen have continued unabatedly, several international governmental and non-governmental […]
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This brief summarizes initial findings of the author’s research among displaced school children in Sana‘a in spring 2016, based on the internationally recognized Child PTSD Symptoms Scale (CPSS).
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This brief addresses the relationship between gender and natural resources in conflict-affected Yemen. It describes the impact of the war on women’s access to water resources and sanitation facilities and analyzes the role of women in decision-making and water-distribution processes
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This brief addresses the role of the Yemeni private sector in mitigating the humanitarian crisis in Yemen as well as its relationship to international humanitarian organizations. It finds that a large number of Yemeni business owners have been engaged in trying to alleviate the suffering of Yemenis out of their own volition, but also in service of and cooperation with international humanitarian agencies.
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This report is the result of a conference with the same name, which was jointly organized by CARPO and the Regional Office Gulf States of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) at the Dead Sea in April 2017. The papers by prolific experts on Yemen included in this publication discuss the changes, obstacles and limits for successful security sector reform in Yemen during and after the conflict and offer respective recommendations for national and international policy-makers in the field.
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This publication is the result of a summer school entitled “Academic Approaches to Peacebuilding in Yemen” held in Amman, Jordan, in September 2016, which brought together advanced academics from the University of Bonn and the Gender-Development Research & Studies Center at Sanaa University as well as MA and PhD students from Yemen and Germany.
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