The European Union and North Africa ― Prospects and Challenges

How Europe can hit the ?reset? button after years of failed responses to North African turmoil

The ongoing upheaval in North Africa has presented many challenges to Europe, which previously had been comfortable with the status quo of authoritarian leadership in much of the region. Now in its ninth year, the turmoil has forced European leaders to rethink their approaches to the region, based on the now-obvious reality that the brief hopes of early 2011 for the spread of democracy and economic progress will not be fulfilled anytime soon.

In this book, experts from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East discuss what has happened since the so-called ?Arab Spring? emerged and how those often-bewildering events have affected both North Africa and the European states across the Mediterranean. The book is based on papers presented at a March 2018 conference sponsored by the South Mediterranean Regional Program of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Chapters focus on events in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia?and offer ideas for how the European Union can adopt fresh approaches to the region, moving beyond its frequently uncertain and shifting responses of recent years.

Adel Abdel Ghafar is a fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and at the Brookings Doha Center, where he was acting director from 2016–17. He specializes in political economy, with research interests including state-society relations and socio-economic development in the Middle East-North Africa region. He is the author of Egyptians in Revolt: The Political Economy of Labor and Student Mobilizations 1919–2011, and the lead editor of The Middle East: Revolution or Reform.