A Map and Some Hypotheses for the Future of the Middle East

Abstract

Not surprisingly, the analysis of the political, economic, cultural and strategic features of the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) today, developed in the different contributions to this volume, stresses that the entire region is in the midst of deep and interlocking trends of change. Two sets of factors have caused the present state of transition: the first is rooted in local history and is the result of a long process of social, economic and political transformation that the region has undergone during the last several decades; the second set of factors derives from the dramatic changes that have taken place in the international system during the early 1990s, influencing the different regional subsystems worldwide and hence reshaping the domestic and international environment of the Middle East and North Africa countries.