Research Library

Qatar’s reforms have opened the floodgates of women’s opportunities in education and defined the small nation as a hub of research and higher learning within the greater Middle East. What are the implications of the abundance of highly educated women in Qatar?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in the March 17 Israeli elections proved one thing: He is a politician of the very highest order. His party, Likud, won and — by the standards of recent Israeli elections — won big. This is in many ways a personal triumph for Netanyahu, who is already Israel’s second-longest serving prime minister. But what will Netanyahu’s triumph mean for U.S.-Israeli relations?

The only women elected to Bahrain’s new parliament are all Shi’a. While the Shi’a community in Bahrain is often considered to be economically and politically marginalized from the regime, the winning female candidates are wealthy and linked professionally with the regime.

Will Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before Congress lead to a diplomatic showdown on Iran?

The deepening civil war in Yemen poses more challenges than solutions for Saudi Arabia, writes Middle East scholar Andrew Bowen.

"Islamic extremism is not an enemy that we will vanquish. It is a problem we will be forced to manage," writes Baker Institute fellow Joe Barnes in a commentary on the Islamist attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris.

The United States and Cuba, it seems, are poised to resume diplomatic relations severed in 1961. Fellow Joe Barnes explains why normalization of relations between the two countries is simple "good sense." Read "Normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations: Long overdue" in the Dec. 18, 2014, Baker Institute Blog.

Whether out of strategic calculations or due to attitude towards women, the outcome is the same: female candidates often do not follow the party route to political office in Bahrain.

What is empowerment? How can women across the MENA region become empowered? Is it possible for Western-born concepts — such as female empowerment — to travel across complex contexts and patriarchal/male-dominated cultures? While agreeing on a definition for female empowerment has proved to be a challenging task among scholars and policy practitioners, working out a universal framework that is applicable to different settings has proven to be an even more daunting task.

The decade 2003-2013 was an exceptional one for Latin America in social terms, but less clearly so in economic terms. Growth slowed down significantly after the exceptional factors that fed the 2003-2007 boom came to an end. The possible unwinding of the super-cycle in commodity prices and, to a lesser extent, of the expansionary monetary policy of the United States, has added new challenges. But the major issue is the need to overcome the poor long-term economic performance that has characterized the region in the post-market reforms period, particularly by adopting active production sector development strategies.