... known that Islam does not approve of card games. It is believed card games lead to gambling and create terrible addictions that distract people from spiritual growth and improvement. However, the complex, confusing, and often dramatic events in the Middle East inevitably evoke associations with it being a card game, where the stakes are high and the deck is intricately shuffled.
Andrey Kortunov:
Russia in the MENA Region amid the Ukrainian Crisis
Following this somewhat arbitrary analogy, the role ...
Many developments that significantly impacted the destinies of the regional players, non-regional actors, and many people around the world have unfolded during the year that followed the publication of our paper titled “The Middle East and the Future of a Polycentric World” (February 2023).
Many of these developments appeared to continue the positive trends that we saw a year or two earlier. Saudi Arabia – Iran relations were officially normalised. Syria’s membership ...
... world of Islam mean a time-tested, trust-based cooperation, with the Islamic dimension always present in the national foreign policy
The year of 2023 may well have been a year of further consolidation of Russia’s pivot to the East, especially in the Middle East and across the South, as well as to the Islamic world. Amid the pressure of Western sanctions, Moscow managed not only to retain its positions in the Islamic world but also to boost its bilateral ties with Muslim states, many of which are ...
On December 14, 2023, within the framework of the XVIII Conference of Arabists “Readings by I. M. Smilyanskaya” at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOS RAS), the 2nd meeting of the section “The Long 20th Century in the History of Arab Countries” was held
On December 14, 2023, within the framework of the XVIII Conference of Arabists “Readings by I. M. Smilyanskaya” at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IOS RAS), the 2nd meeting...
The Russia-Middle East policy has demonstrated considerable resilience, as has the regional system of international relations
Introduction
When Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine a year ago, many experts and journalists concluded ...
The new round of the Palestine-Israel conflict is a deja vue for the people and elites in the Middle East, not only for the level of hatred and bloodshed that the region is witnessing but also for the possible coming not-very-distant future consequences in the Middle East. History often repeats itself when the same objective cause that led to ...
... the end of the Cold War is unlikely to be repeated. The slow end of the American Century is already being marked by hostilities and tensions involving some of the major powers. With more likely to come.
The ongoing conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have the same root cause. Essentially, the self-proclaimed victors in the Cold War – above all, the United States of America – have singularly failed in creating a lasting international equilibrium to succeed the post-WWII bipolar setup....
... Moreover, in the modern world we increasingly see how an excessive number of external obligations is becoming more of a problem than an advantage of even the most well-resourced foreign policy strategies.
In fact, the real significance of the crisis in the Middle East that has been going on for several weeks is not the problem of relations between Israel, the Palestinian people and their neighbours. Even the most dramatic changes in the fate of the Jewish state itself, not to mention its immediate adversaries ...
... crisis suggests that the fabric of the order that emerged after the Cold War on the ruins of the bipolar system is tearing at the seams more and more frequently. It is becoming more and more difficult to mend such developments.
The developments in the Middle East have pushed the fighting in Ukraine to the background of the media agenda. Meanwhile, the situation there hardly speaks in favour of the strength of the post-bipolar status quo. A sign of such strength could be Russia’s return to the status ...
The goal of the round table was to discuss the dynamics of quadrilateral cooperation in the context of regional trends in the Middle East. The meeting was attended by leading experts from Russia, Iran, Turkey and Syria
On October 18, 2023, a closed round table “Cooperation between Russia, Iran, Turkey and Syria in the Context of Regional Dynamics” was held. Russian International ...