Research Library

GCC states have taken an active role in supporting entrepreneurship creation, as part of efforts to diversify and grow their economies. Yet while state-led entrepreneurship policies have worked to achieve many positive outcomes, they have also revealed some major shortcomings, such as reinforcing the political status quo and limiting the possibility of genuine change toward democratization. M. Evren Tok explores these issues in both a short issue brief and longer research paper on pluralism and inclusion in the Middle East after the Arab Spring. The project is generously supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The current leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are trying to assert much more political control over their respective country's religious institutions. The lesson both regimes seem to have taken away from the Arab upheavals is not the necessity of pluralism, but instead the need for more regimentation, hierarchy, control, and exclusion.

By Daniel L. Tavana, Princeton University The evolution of Kuwaiti opposition groups following changes to Kuwait's electoral law fundamentally altered the dynamics of electoral contests after the Arab Spring, the author writes.

The author examines the seemingly conflicting policy outcomes that result from high unemployment and a large fiscal deficit in Saudi Arabia.

Procedural reforms can further advance the development of start-ups in Bahrain, writes the author in this evaluation of the country’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.

The PJD's pragmatic politics — intended to maintain the king’s support and appeal to heterogeneous constituencies — failed to protect the party from fragmentation and moves to weaken it.

Morocco's Justice and Development Party attempts to preserve its leading political position by presenting itself as an alternative to a system that, according to the PJD, is corrupt and morally bankrupt.

Morocco's monarchy preserves its power by maintaining a balance among the country’s 33 political parties, preventing the emergence of a strong party, and further dividing an already fragmented political elite. The author examines how the Justice and Development Party (PJD) has survived and grown under such constraints.

The responses of Morocco's monarchy to the rise of the PJD are examined for what they suggest about the monarchy’s perception of its vulnerabilities and because they help to frame the environment in which the PJD and the regime operate.

Nonresident scholar Elizabeth Salamanca provides an overview of the main types of visas obtained by highly skilled migrants, and how each visa category could potentially change under the Trump administration.