Research Library

Visiting scholar Osamah Alsayegh explores the water and energy challenges of GCC states and offers three key policy recommendations that could help to build the region’s resilience and sustainability.

This paper models the oil strategy of Gulf Arab states under three future energy transition scenarios. Under the most ambitious scenario, the region would have to decouple its oil revenues from its economic growth and could face significant economic and political consequences.

This issue brief highlights the potential collaboration between Arab countries and China in dealing with the global energy transition, and examines the energy transition from the perspectives of the world's largest economy (China) and richest hydrocarbon region (the Middle East).

This paper lays out one potential step-by-step path toward decarbonizing Saudi Arabia, imagining a sweeping restructuring of a fossil fuel-driven society and economy.

A report from center experts on the evolution of Islamist politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, security in the Persian Gulf and displacement in the Middle East.

This brief explores pressing issues the Biden administration should address in developing a strategy for the Middle East. It provides analysis and policy recommendations related to the GCC states, U.S.-Iran relations, Islamist groups, and refugees and migration. Further CME publications will address issues such as the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace and the crisis in Lebanon.

The authors explore the history of the resource curse and provide summarize the working paper series titled “The Role of Foreign Direct Investment in Resource-Rich Regions.”

The authors examine the recent attacks on oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations to shed light on the current state of U.S.-Gulf strategic relations and the potential directions of its evolution in coming years.

Indigenous natural resource wealth can provide a basis for robust economic development and broad macroeconomic development, especially when there is appropriate governance and robust legal and regulatory institutions. But a lack of institutional fortitude in many regions around the world has contributed to failure to translate resource wealth into broader macroeconomic wealth.

On Sept. 13, 2018, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and George Washington University’s Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) co-hosted the conference “Building Inclusive and Pluralistic States Post-Arab Spring.” The conference was the culmination of a two-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation and showcased research by leading scholars of the Middle East on political, economic and socio-religious inclusion in Arab states since 2011. This report addresses some of the conference’s key conclusions and policy recommendations for U.S. policymakers concerned with the future stability of the Middle East.