What Do We Mean When We Talk About MENA?
Issandr El-Amrani in conversation with Professor Nathalie Tocci, SAIS Europe

The region many call MENA has, for 25 years, been the object of successive attempts to impose order, none of which gained traction. This left an exhausted region with fluid boundaries whose hope for a future lies in regional powers hoping to calm things down, argued Issandr El-Amrani at SAIS Europe in September 2026. El-Amrani founded The Arabist, directed Crisis Group's North Africa program, led the MENA program at Open Society Foundations, and now works as a Senior Fellow at Crisis Group. His verdict was that MENA, as a term, is "as good as any other" for a region of fluidities and overlapping identities. El-Amrani described how before 1991, the regional order ran on Arab nationalism and playing the US and USSR off each other, which turned into the "American Middle East" characterized by designation of rogue states outside of the American container. This shifted after 9/11 into an anti-authoritarian vision for reordering the region as a blueprint for US dominance, El-Amrani argued, culminating in the invasion of Iraq, the final death of the old Arab system's legitimacy. He argued the Arab Spring was the first indigenous attempt to remake the region, causing an explosion of competing projects that did not gain traction: Islamists, counterrevolutionaries, and Iran. The subsequent Abraham Accords were a shallow attempt at remaking the region's order by signing peace treaties between countries that weren't at war, according to El-Amrani. He argued that because the real target of the Accords was Saudi normalization, Hamas partly reacted to being sidelined by them with the attacks of October 7th, 2023. Israel's reaction was to pursue a regional order imposed by military force alone with no political imagination, culminating in the Trump administration joining Israel in the Iran War, which has so far not gone as anticipated. El-Amrani continued to argue that countries that are hydrocarbon-poor, populous, and relatively stable today face legitimacy challenges down the line. Other countries are in active conflict and effectively destroyed, while some were undergoing fragile recovery phases as theaters for regional competition. The clear distinction in regional powers, El-Amrani outlined, was between actors seeing the region as zero-sum or non-zero sum: Israel, Iran, and the UAE as the former, and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar as the latter. El-Amrani stressed that these national categorizations are not static. El-Amrani described a hopeful future for the region. Because outside actors bring bad ideas of regional order, some regional middle powers are becoming constructive: the silver lining of the Iran War was creating "The Quad" (Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey). Flawed as they are, he said, they are linked by their exhaustion of war and chaos, not linked by being Sunni. Prescriptively, he argued state stabilization must precede democracy: "the region doesn't yet have its architects". Tocci, responding before the floor opened for questions, asked whether state collapse up to 2023 was giving way to a new order, drawing on historical parallels of the 1848 revolutions. El-Amrani responded by reframing the parallel more closely to the historical Concert of Europe, where adversaries could manage conflict and disagreement without sustained chaos, though with "many spoilers".

Event Photos

---

hosted by Professor Nathalie Tocci


In recent years ways to describe what has since the 1970s been called "Middle East and North Africa" or MENA have evolved. Terms like "West Asia" or "Southwest Asia and North Africa" (SWANA) have become more common. This shift tells us something about the geopolitical convulsions of the region and the way power is being reconfigured across it over the last 25 years of upheaval. The reality is not so much a single region but overlapping and sometimes competing ways of imagining ideas of regional order that embody geopolitical, ideological and economic priorities.

ISSANDR EL AMRANI

Issandr Amrani has worked on politics and international affairs in journalism, think tanks and foundations since 2000. He founded The Arabist blog in 2003, developing it into an influential platform for analysis and commentary on MENA politics and culture. His reporting and essays have appeared in The Economist, London Review of Books, Financial Times, The Guardian, The National, Foreign Policy, Middle East Report and other leading outlets. Issandr has held senior leadership roles in major institutions shaping international policy and in philanthropy. Between 2013 and 2019, he was North Africa Project Director at International Crisis Group, directing research and advocacy on conflict prevention. Between 2019 and 2026, he served successively as Executive Director of the MENA Program and Managing Director of Programs at Open Society Foundations, managing diverse portfolios in the Middle East, Europe and Latin America on issues including human rights, governance, civil society, economic justice, democracy, conflict resolution and technology. His career began in journalism, starting with local publications in Egypt. His first job was as reporter for the Cairo Times, a feisty newsweekly where his interest in Arab politics and culture developed alongside his political engagement for human rights and democratic change in the region. He later was a co-founder of another magazine, Cairo. Born in Morocco and raised across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, he has lived and worked in Egypt, Morocco and Jordan for over 25 years. He is currently based in Brussels with his family.

If you cannot attend the event in person and wish to watch the session online, please register below: