Over the past few years, the Eastern Mediterranean has become a major hotspot for both natural gas and geopolitical competition. Natural gas discoveries in the last decade have attracted growing interest from regional countries and beyond. However, recent escalations in tensions and outright confrontations suggest that competition goes beyond the scramble for energy. Indeed, natural gas is just one of the factors that contribute to shaping security and geopolitical dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean, which has emerged as a crucial strategic area in the broader Mediterranean and the Middle East. Moving from the analysis of these interconnected factors, this Report examines the strategy and the plethora of interests of regional and international players, as well as the interplay between cooperative and competitive dynamics in the region. What are the geopolitical, security, and energy interests of the countries involved? What are the implications on the regional security context of the moves and policies of regional and international powers?

Over the past few years, the Eastern Mediterranean has become a major hotspot for both natural gas and geopolitical competition. Natural gas discoveries in the last decade have attracted growing interest from regional countries and beyond. However, recent escalations in tensions and outright confrontations suggest that competition goes beyond the scramble for energy. Indeed, natural gas is just one of the factors that contribute to shaping security and geopolitical dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean, which has emerged as a crucial strategic area in the broader Mediterranean and the Middle East.Moving from the analysis of these interconnected factors, this Report examines the strategy and the plethora of interests of regional and international players, as well as the interplay between cooperative and competitive dynamics in the region.What are the geopolitical, security, and energy interests of the countries involved? What are the implications on the regional security context of the moves and policies of regional and international powers?

From the harrowing situation of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean in rubber dinghies to the crisis on the US-Mexico border, mass migration is one of the most urgent issues facing our societies today. At the same time, viable solutions seem ever more remote, with the increasing polarization of public attitudes and political positions. In this book, Stephen Smith focuses on ‘young Africa’ – 40 per cent of its population are under fifteen – anda dramatic demographic shift. Today, 510 million people live inside EU borders, and 1.25 billion people in Africa. In 2050, 450 million Europeans will face 2.5 billion Africans – five times their number. The demographics are implacable. The scramble for Europe will become as inexorable as the ‘scramble for Africa’ was at the end of the nineteenth century, when 275 million people lived north and only 100 million lived south of the Mediterranean. Then it was all about raw materials and national pride, now it is about young Africans seeking a better life on the Old Continent, the island of prosperity within their reach. If Africa’s migratory patterns follow the historic precedents set by other less developed parts of the world, in thirty years a quarter of Europe’s population will beAfro-Europeans. Addressingthe question of how Europe cancope with an influx of this magnitude, Smith argues for a path between the two extremes of today’s debate. He advocatesmigratory policies of ‘good neighbourhood’ equidistant from guilt-ridden self-denial and nativist egoism. This sobering analysis of the migration challenges we now face will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the great social and political questions of our time.

The Ottoman Scramble for Africa is the first book to tell the story of the Ottoman Empire's expansionist efforts during the age of high imperialism. Following key representatives of the sultan on their travels across Europe, Africa, and Arabia at the close of the nineteenth century, it takes the reader from Istanbul to Berlin, from Benghazi to Lake Chad Basin to the Hijaz, and then back to Istanbul. It turns the spotlight on the Ottoman Empire's expansionist strategies in Africa and its increasingly vulnerable African and Arabian frontiers. Drawing on previously untapped Ottoman archival evidence, Mostafa Minawi examines how the Ottoman participation in the Conference of Berlin and involvement in an aggressive competition for colonial possessions in Africa were part of a self-reimagining of this once powerful global empire. In so doing, Minawi redefines the parameters of agency in late-nineteenth-century colonialism to include the Ottoman Empire and turns the typical framework of a European colonizer and a non-European colonized on its head. Most importantly, Minawi offers a radical revision of nineteenth-century Middle East history by providing a counternarrative to the "Sick Man of Europe" trope, challenging the idea that the Ottomans were passive observers of the great European powers' negotiations over solutions to the so-called Eastern Question.

This book explores the significance of Turkey’s Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan) naval concept, which defines its maritime rights and interests in the surrounding seas – Aegean Sea, Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. The concept has a powerful socialized definition and a popular appeal across the political spectrum in Turkey with important implications for security in the wider Middle East. The book investigates the impact of geopolitics and domestic-political factors on the concept and uncovers motivations behind its trajectory since 2004 with a particular focus on the last several years, the period when Turkey’s naval assertiveness reached its peak following the failed coup attempt in 2016. Based on in-depth interviews with diplomats, naval officers, academics, and researchers in the field, the book takes the reader through a journey on how the Turkish government has reinforced an activist policy since 2016 due to pressures of regional insecurity, domestic coalition logrolling, and nationalist sentiment.

This book examines the history of the European Scramble for Africa from the perspective of the Omanis and other Arabs in East Africa. It will be of interest not only to African specialists, but also those working on the Middle East, where awareness is now emerging that the history of those settled on the southern peripheries of Arabia has been intimately entwined with Indian Ocean maritime activities since pre-Islamic times. The nineteenth century, however, saw these maritime borderlands being increasingly drawn into a new world economy, one of whose effects was the development of an ivory front in the interior of the continent that, by the 1850s, led the Omanis and Swahili to establish themselves on the Upper Congo. A reconstruction of their history and their interaction with Europeans is a major theme of this book. European colonial rivalries in Africa is not a subject in vogue today, while the Arabs are still largely viewed as invaders and slavers. The fact that the British separated the Sultanates of Muscat and Zanzibar is reflected in European research so that historians have little grasp of the geographic, tribal and religious continuum that persisted between overseas empire and the Omani homeland. Ibadism is regarded as irrelevant to the mainstream of Islamic religious protest whereas, during the lead up to establishing direct colonial rule, its ideology played a significant role; even the final rally against the Belgians in the Congo was conducted in the name of an Imam al-Muslimîn. Back home, the fall out from the British massacre that crushed the last Arab attempt to reassert independence in Zanzibar was an important contributory cause towards the re-founding of an Imamate that survived until the mid-1950s.

The wider region of the Eastern Mediterranean is in transition. What is being evinced is a situation of continuous volatility, centering on developments such as the ’Arab Spring,’ the Greek sovereign debt crisis, Islamic terrorism, the continuation of deadlock over the Cypriot and Palestinian Issues, significant energy finds in the Levantine Basin, concerns over nuclear proliferation and, more recently, the Syrian Civil War. At a systemic level, the move towards a regional multipolar reality has also contributed to volatility by creating a crescendo of antagonisms between all the major international actors who continuously strive for more influence, power and prestige. This collective project by leading experts represents a unique combination of International Theory and International Politics analysis that deals exclusively with the wider Eastern Mediterranean. It scrutinizes in a multidimensional manner the current geostrategic and geopolitical conditions that include the latest domestic socio-political events, as well as the active involvement of the Great Powers in the region. This book should be of interest to academics, decision-makers and a general reading public focusing on a significant and influential region in flux.