Geopolitics and Governance in North Africa

North Africa was once on the geopolitical periphery of Middle East dynamics, but it has increasingly come to shape regional trends. In addition to internal political and economic transformations that were accelerated by the protests of 2011 and that have upended or reshaped the lives of millions of the region's inhabitants, the region is also contending with a range of external challenges. These include the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated economic transformation, changing market dynamics including energy markets, the growing presence of new regional actors like Russia and China, and the changing role of traditional allies such as the European Union, Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and the United States. These dynamics are compounded by other natural and man-made climate changes and demographic changes that worsen them. This volume shows why North Africa, sometimes considered a backwater within a broader Middle East context, actually is the leading edge of change for the region and deserving of far more attention from the international community. North African countries are facing a dizzying array of challenges related to domestic and global trends--political transformation either recent or underway, economic stagnation now worsened by the pandemic, social challenges associated with a frustrated young population--are giving the region more geopolitical relevance with implications for the broader Middle East, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Sarah Yerkes is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a globally recognised expert on North Africa. She has published numerous book chapters, reports, articles and op-eds on the Middle East and North Africa with a focus on state-society relations and governance. She has published articles in IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook 2020, Arab Center of Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Democracy and Society, and Current History, as well as op-eds in The National, Diwan, World Politics Review, and The New Arab. Formerly, Sarah was a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, where she covered North Africa and spent time at the Pentagon, advising the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University.