Mediterranean Politics

the UK’s established media has spent the past week fixated on the employment terms of a BBC sports commentator than scrutinising a law that stands to make the lives of tens of thousands of people immeasurably worse.

To date, none of these stories are troubling Tunisia’s mainstream media, which appears more focused on defending Tunisia’s national image and parroting the President’s attack lines than delivering facts to a public growing increasingly hostile to the unwarranted international condemnation it feels itself subject to.

many acknowledge their fresh of support for the President since his crackdown.  Asked about the 21,000 or so black migrants residing in Tunisia, no one here is racist, they say – they simply want to distinguish between those who are here legally and illegally. It sounds reasonable enough. In fact, it could probably pass for small talk at a Conservative Party fundraiser. However, at least in Tunisia, that reasonableness fades when pressed. “They’re selling cocaine, they’re selling their wives and their girlfriends to each other,” Bassem, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler, told me. “They’re even buying boats and taking still more migrants to Europe.” In this part of Ariana, every Tunisian has a lurid tale, always experienced at one remove, which they reel off as ‘proof’ of the criminality of the country’s black migrant population.

Just as the UK media is yet to truly reckon with the financial impact of Brexit on the country’s poorest, so the Tunisian media is unwilling to fully address the consequences of the suspension of the World Bank partnership and the increasing uncertainty surrounding a sorely needed IMF bail-out. 

“Things like climate change, earthquakes, drought — they are of course realities of our lives,” Durusu-Tanrıöver said. “But there are human actions that can be taken to foresee what will happen and behave accordingly.

In the half-century leading up to empire’s collapse, the scientists found, the rings inside the tree trunks gradually start to get narrower — suggesting that water shortages were limiting the junipers’ growth. Chemical analyses of the kind of carbon captured in the wood also showed how drought altered the trees at the cellular level.

cuneiform tablets from that time in which Hittite officials fretted over rising food prices and asked for grain to be sent to their cities. But Manning said the empire — which was known for its elaborate water infrastructure projects and massive grain silos in major cities — should have been able to survive this “low frequency” drought.

Durusu-Tanrıöver blames an unsustainable economy and centralized political system. The intensive agricultural practices required to support the capital city probably exhausted the region’s water resources and weakened surrounding ecosystems

“Very few societies ever plan for more than one or two disasters happening consecutively.”

“But I think it’s naive to believe that three years of drought would bring down the storerooms of the Hittite empire,” Weiss said. He argues that the longer-term drying trend, which has been documented in other studies, was probably more significant.

“What’s a crisis for some becomes almost an opportunity for others,” Manning said. “You have adaptation and resilience in the form of new states and new economies emerging.”

between 1198 and 1196 B.C., the region was struck by three of the driest years in the entire 1,000-year-long tree ring record. The abrupt spurt of intensely dry weather may have been more than the Hittites could bear. Within a generation, the empire had dissolved.

parallels to modern urban areas, which are both major sources of planet-warming pollution and especially vulnerable to climate change impacts like extreme heat.

The Greek Island Kastellorizo, where most of the Greek military buildup has been happening since early 2022, is 600 kilometers away from Greece’s mainland, while it is only 1950 meters away from Turkey.

repeated threats by Turkish officials have not prevented Greece from announcing in late December its intention to unilaterally extend its maritime zone to a point twelve nautical miles southwest of Crete

Greece’s decision has obviously angered Turkey and Libya, which will be directly affected. Yet, Greece’s unilateral move has also been frowned upon by Egypt, which has been a strong ally to Greece against Turkey

According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of 200 nautical miles (370 km) may be claimed by coastal countries. If the distance between the shores of two neighboring countries is less than this space, the maritime demarcation between them should be drawn exactly at the half-line distance. However, this is not the case for Turkey, which is literally cuffed to its own shores, either in the southern area towards Cyprus or the southwest zone towards Greece, because Lausanne Agreement gave all the small islands in the Aegean and Mediterranean to Greece.

two new bilateral agreements. One agreement allows Libya’s interim Government of National Unity (GNU) to receive advanced weapons, including drones, from Turkey. The other memorandum admits Turkey to the Libyan waters in the Mediterranean for hydrocarbon exploration purposes. In a provocative response to Greece’s and Egypt’s objection to these memoranda, the Libyan and the Turkish officials plainly said they “do not care for what third parties think about our bilateral agreements.”

Turkey called for open negotiations with all involved parties in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the past year, Ankara led a successful campaign to mend broken ties with all its neighbors in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt, Israel, and Syria. Turkey’s renewed relations with neighboring countries, in addition to Turkey’s mediator role in the Russia-Ukraine crisis, have dramatically improved Turkey’s situation in the Eastern Mediterranean

Libya is just another victim of an unfair agreement signed over a century ago in the fog of world wars. Rather than bringing peace, the Lausanne Agreement (1922) has left the Eastern Mediterranean with a chronic conflict over a messy geographic ordeal that the successive regional leaders have failed to resolve. The agreement preserved Turkish sovereignty over Turkey’s mainland but inelegantly stripped Turkey of its rights in the seabed resources of the Mediterranean, despite being the country with the longest border (1870 km) in the hydrocarbon-rich sea.

it is not expected that Egypt and Greece would clash over these uncoordinated demarcations. However, such moves may overturn or completely invalidate their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement, which they signed in August 2020 to rescind the maritime agreement signed between Turkey and the former Libyan interim Government of National Accord (GNA) in December 2019. In other words, this is not serving Greece’s goal to curb Turkey’s advances to use the Libyan maritime zone to conduct seismic research for hydrocarbon resources. That is particularly true in light of the improvement of Turkey-Egypt relations following a historic handshake between the Egyptian and Turkish presidents in Doha in early December. It does not seem that Egypt is planning to end its EEZ agreement with Greece, but it reserves the right to sign similar agreements with Turkey in the future.

In the summer of 2020, the quiet basin of the Eastern Mediterranean witnessed an unprecedented number of military encounters disguised as joint aero-naval military exercises, wherein advanced fighter jets and navy arsenals from outside the region intervened. In 2023, these conflicts have a high potential to be re-ignited if they are not preceded by pragmatic negotiations wherein all the concerned parties on the three shores of the Eastern Mediterranean are involved.

political leaders neutralized popular outrage by manipulating sectarian sensitivities, so that the investigating magistrate, Tareq Bitar, became a target of the political forces whose officials he later sought to question. Sicily was ahead of Lebanon in having a judiciary that was willing to go all the way, despite the tremendous risks, and politicians with residues of self-respect.

at the heart of successful criminal commonwealths is a pact between those who govern and those who commit crimes, so that the criminals take on certain responsibilities of the state, and the state relies on assistance from the criminals for what is legally prohibited

In Lebanon, however, we approximate a more perfect criminal republic. Here, the ones committing the crimes are those actually in senior positions of authority. They have infiltrated all state bodies, the security and national defense institutions, the judiciary, educational establishments, even sporting federations. So perfect are their crimes, in fact, that many of their actions are not regarded as criminal by most people in society. The Lebanese will blandly mention the politicians’ “patronage networks,” but under any lawful political system plundering the state to bolster one’s own political fortunes would be considered illegal.