The Mediterranean and Middle East research area focuses on key political, socio-economic, and security dynamics in the Mediterranean and in the (mainly Mediterranean) Middle East. Today, the Middle East faces an unprecedented complexity as it navigates through shifting power alliances involving local and global actors, unparalleled levels of violence, stark economic disparities, authoritarianism and crony capitalism, significant migration and refugee flows, and environmental pressures resulting from climate change.
Research in this area covers three broad themes: First, it addresses the (re)construction of the regional order in the Middle East and the region’s embeddedness in developments at the trans-regional and global level. Second, it is interested in key structural features and developments at the domestic and societal level in the Middle East and across the Mediterranean. These include the appeal and entrenchment of authoritarianism, the salience of what we call reactionary political projects, the persistence of patriarchy and (gender) inequalities, and the interplay of all these features with a particular kind of neoliberalism. Third, we investigate the international relations of the Middle East, with particular attention given to the relationship between the Mediterranean Middle East and Europe, the geographical neighbour. This relationship is shaped by historical legacies as well as various dependencies and interdependencies, such as the issue of migration and demographic shifts, multiple security concerns, trade and investment flows, energy, and cross-border environmental issues.
Research on these themes adopt different theoretical and conceptual perspectives, including in the disciplines of international relations and political science, area studies, sociology, history, and international law. Rigorous scholarship and knowledge production on this vital but very complex and volatile region are particularly relevant in light of the superficiality and ideological imprint of many analyses and commentaries.
Regional order(s) in the Middle East
Patriarchy, inequalities, and reactionary politics across the Mediterranean
Del Sarto, Raffaella A., Helle Malmvig, and Eduard Soler i Lecha (2025) ‘Lost in Change: A Framework for Understanding Change in the Middle East’, in Order and Region-Making in the Middle East, eds. Mark Lynch and Simon Mabon, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 32-61.
Okyay, Asli S., Luca Barana, and Colleen Elizabeth Boland, eds. (2023) Moving Towards Europe: Diverse Trajectories and Multidimensional Drivers of Migration across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien: Peter Lang, at https://www.peterlang.com/document/1321490.
Okyay, Asli S. (2020) ‘The European Union and Turkey: Negotiating the Management of Europe’s Extended External Borders’, in Resisting Europe: Practices of Contestation in the Mediterranean Middle East, eds. Raffaella A. Del Sarto and Simone Tholens, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 118–41.
Okyay, Asli S. (2017). ‘Turkey’s Post-2011 Approach to Its Syrian Border and Its Implications for Domestic Politics,’ International Affairs 93(4): 829–46, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iix068.
The Middle East is an extremely complex, intriguing, and volatile region that remains vital to global politics. It is also of great importance to Europe, with many linkages and interdependencies across the Mediterranean marking this relationship. Rigorous scholarship and serious analyses of past and current developments in, and structural features of, the Mediterranean and Middle East are of utmost importance, not only for the sake of understanding the region, but also to inform European and global policies.
Raffaella A. Del Sarto
Professor, Director of the Mediterranean and Middle East research area, Joint Mediterranean Chair at the Department for Political and Social Sciences and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
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