On April 5, high-level decision-makers from Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan met to discuss key issues related to the filling and long-term operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). The contentious large-scale hydropower project under construction on the Blue Nile River is expected to be completed soon. This was the latest of dozens of trilateral meetings—under the auspices of a tripartite committee, the International Panel of Experts and later the Tripartite National Committee, formed in 2011, 2012 and 2014 respectively. The most recent meeting came after the three heads of state had announced in January that a “one-country” type solution should be expedited—a follow-up meeting will take place at the beginning of May. These are not exceptional meetings in the longer-term history of Nile Basin, but rather a piece of a much larger mosaic of transboundary water relations.

What is the Nile Conflict About?

The political conflict over Nile waters is as much about perceptions as it is about measurable quantities of water. Crossing eleven countries, the river has shaped cultural, economic and social relations at all levels, as well as political engagement between Nile Basin countries. This is particularly significant for Egypt—a country for which the Nile has been crucial in state-building and economic development—and for which the High Aswan Dam provided major control over the waters and enabled unparalleled agriculture expansion. The general perception in Egypt remains one where the economy is still highly Nile-dependent. Agriculture may still play a very important part in rural livelihoods and employment, however it is no longer the major revenue-generating economic sector that it once was. Besides, these days Egypt’s food security is mainly a mix between national production and massive food imports—and therefore virtual water (imports of water-intensive products), estimated to be around 35 billion cubic meters of water, according to the new Egypt’s National Water Resources Plan (2017-2037). Meanwhile, hydropower contributes less than 15 percent to Egypt’s energy security. In spite of these new economic realities, in Egypt the Nile is still perceived as a national security issue, and upstream developments are considered threats to the current water utilization patterns.

For Egypt’s upstream neighbours, however, other perceptions dominate. The Nile is mainly considered a vehicle for development and poverty alleviation. Compared to Egypt, these countries’ economies are far less diverse, with more rapidly-growing populations where economic value and employment remain predominantly agriculture-based. To achieve food and energy security for their growing populations, upstream countries strive to utilize Nile waters and have plans to develop hydraulic infrastructure. In addition, they have long called for a new comprehensive basin-wide agreement that goes beyond the existing bilateral 1959 Nile Waters Agreement between Egypt and Sudan, not least because of the far more complex demand that exists nowadays on basin resources.

A central question then is: what are the implications of these upstream developments, and how might they impact current water utilisation regimes? Ultimately, the answers to this complex question lie in Nile countries jointly developing, and making use of, technical, legal and institutional mechanisms that allow them to identify common approaches that maximize benefits while minimizing risks. This process began in the mid-1990s when all Nile countries established two multilateral cooperative tracks—the Nile Basin Initiative (technical track) and the negotiations for a Cooperative Framework Agreement (a legal/political track). Since 2007, however, differences in perceptions over the meaning of “water security” have derailed the ongoing multilateral cooperation process. In spite, and because, of this, all Nile countries continue to search for solutions; the first-ever Nile Basin Heads of State Summit in June 2017 is an example of the current level of political commitment to seeking compromises on ways forward.

A Wider Cooperative Framework for the Nile Basin

That management of a complex transboundary resource requires transboundary cooperation is implicit, but it is not a given. Limited or fragmented approaches ultimately do not serve the needs of countries, their peoples or ecosystems, as impacts on a shared system are felt beyond the borders of any single member of that system. Accordingly, inclusive, robust, flexible and long-term frameworks that provide guarantees for all parties have to be founded on trust. In the case of the Nile Basin, such a framework cannot, or should not, be reduced to legal aspects only. Rather, it needs to cross-cut legal, technical, economic and political dimensions. A suggested framework is laid out below.

Legal. The protracted challenge of materializing Nile cooperation relates partly to differing, and often selective, interpretation or prioritization of international legal principles, which led to deep-rooted antagonisms between countries. Part of the solution lies in bringing the principle of “duty to cooperate” to the fore. A legal framework where the “duty to cooperate” is the central tenet can provide clear guidelines for future actions on the Nile; define the rules for allocating, managing and developing water resources in the different countries and sectors; and put in place mechanisms for resolving potential disputes and cases of non-compliance. To be effective, it will have to be accepted and internalized by all countries.

Technical/Institutional. A primary concern of all Nile countries relates to issues of infrastructure development—for hydropower, irrigation, flood management and storage purposes—and their impact on water availability, demand and distribution. National water plans that do not consider transboundary dimensions should be urgently re-assessed in order to embrace joint information, planning, management and coordination of existing and future infrastructure. Regional plans should be more realistic and linked to existing national water plans and their underpinning macro-economic national plans. In order to achieve this level and detail of cooperation, the Nile countries need to have in place a strong multilateral institution that can play a balanced role in fostering convergence between national and regional plans. A fully-fledged permanent multilateral institution that is trusted by all Nile countries should be the powerhouse for effective thinking and action, and the right forum to identify suitable sustainable solutions for technical and legal issues that can be jointly adopted. And there is no need to reinvent the wheel: an empowered Nile Basin Initiative can and should play that role. This role should be based on the Nile Basin Initiative’s 20 years of accumulated experience in technical cooperation, including the development of common data, knowledge and tools, and identification of joint investment opportunities by all countries.

Economic-political. To date, linkages between water cooperation and economic cooperation have not been properly explored or promoted. The assumption that transboundary water cooperation would smoothly evolve toward wider economic cooperation, and deliver benefits to be shared between countries, still needs further testing. And the reverse assumption—that wider regional economic cooperation can actually lever more effective water cooperation—has received insufficient political attention. Here the call for regional economic cooperation and integration should be for a suite of tools to foster cooperation over transboundary waters through increasing trade, market integration, intra-basin investments and joint infrastructure development between Nile countries. The time for increasing intra-basin trade in major agricultural crops and energy bonds, for example, has arrived.

National and regional food and energy security plans need to be increasingly interlinked. Through this greater connectivity, Nile countries can then move jointly toward stronger economic development at regional and national levels, while at the same time building interdependencies that embed trust and generate long-term processes of political engagement and cooperation. Ultimately, moving away from deep-rooted perceptions and embracing alternative realistic ideas will allow the Nile countries to take the leap toward this new era of regional cooperation.

Ana Elisa Cascão is an independent consultant/researcher working in the field of transboundary water management and cooperation.  Her latest co-authored book is The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the Nile Basin: Implications for Transboundary Water Cooperation (2017). On Twitter: @anacascao.

On March 13, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) issued a statement of concern at ongoing violence in Sabha, a city in Libya’s impoverished south where a flare-up in tensions since late January has to date killed a number of civilians. The area is contested between forces loyal to Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA) and ethnic groups aligned with the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. Conflicting reports regarding who was responsible for instigating the violence emerged in the aftermath of the communal conflict. Yet in a statement condemning the violence, Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj’s Presidential Council, which heads the GNA, did not charge Haftar’s forces with provocation, but placed the blame squarely on the presence of foreign mercenaries, namely of Sudanese and Chadian origin. Following this statement, the mayor of Sabha, Hamid al-Khayali, declared in an incendiary outburst to Libyan television that “foreign forces are occupying Libya’s south,” an issue “on the shoulders of all Libyans.” Until recently, the presence of non-Libyan fighting groups had largely gone unnoticed in the chaos engulfing Libya.

Reports from Sabha have confirmed the Sudanese government’s claims that Darfuri rebel groups are active in Libya. Both the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), the two main rebel groups in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, maintain a presence in Libya’s lawless south, allegedly in Haftar’s employ. A 2017 report by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya describes these groups as an “increasing threat” and explicitly links SLA activities with Haftar’s LNA. Both main factions of the SLA—the forces of Minni Minnawi and Abdul Wahid al-Nur—are in Libya, and while estimates of their numbers are imprecise, sources interviewed by the UN panel stated that al-Nur’s branch alone has 1,500 fighters in Libya at any one time. In addition, one former JEM commander, Abdallah Jana, is known to operate with a convoy of at least 70 vehicles, and the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT) group claimed to have 700 fighters in Libya as of December 2016, although the UN report remarks that this number could have increased to between 1,000 and 1,500 fighters. The Chadian government is even suspected of pushing its rebels over the border into Libya to “keep them busy.”

Haftar has denied using Darfuri militias and accused the Sudanese government of meddling in Libyan affairs. Both the Sudanese JEM and the Chadian FACT officially deny taking sides in the conflict, but senior commanders quietly say the opposite. Ibrahim Al-Bagdadi, JEM’s chief of armament, told Sudan’s Blue Nile TV “it’s business.” While their initial involvement may indeed have been mercenary in nature, alignment with any side has unavoidable political ramifications. Whenever questioned on the matter, Colonel Ahmed al-Mismari, chief spokesman of the LNA, repeatedly maintains that there is “a clear conspiracy” wherein the Sudanese, Qatari, and Iranian governments secretly colluded to support terrorism in Libya. In June 2017, al-Mismari alleged that this collusion spread so far as to involve the provision of weapons and ammunition to the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, Islamist militias, and even to the Islamic State. The next month, during an interview on Egyptian television, he produced a 30-page document supposedly written by the Sudanese Armed Forces, which detailed a program of supplying arms to militant groups.

Regardless of the bluster over who is aligned with whom, the presence of foreign forces on Libyan soil struck a nerve and has led to a notable increase in domestic pressure to curtail the influence of the Chadian and Darfuri militias. Significantly, the presence of these groups upsets the delicate ethnic and tribal balance in Libya’s south, which could prove to be a wildcard in an area where Tuareg–Tebu hostilities have frequently boiled over. Some Darfuris are related to, or share old alliances with, the Tebu. Recognition of this distrust has persuaded Haftar’s LNA forces to reevaluate their allegiances with foreign militias, at least outwardly. Airstrikes launched on March 19 against “foreigners” and “Africans” aimed to minimize any damage to Haftar’s public image. However, although a few positions of the Darfuri JEM were also reported to have been struck, they mainly targeted the Chadian FACT rebel group, known allies of the anti-Haftar Misratan Third Force.

Haftar’s use of Darfur militias to ensure greater control of Libyan territories overlooks regional politics. Sudan’s government contends that Haftar’s approach is a continuation of Qaddafi-era policies that intended to destabilize Sudan. At this stage it seems doubtful that this is Haftar’s focus—which is more about bolstering the number of troops he commands—but it creates yet another vested interest in a conflict already saturated with outside interference. Haftar gambled that the Sudanese government would be incapable of formulating a meaningful response because its reach in Libya is more limited than that of Libya’s North African neighbors. Thus far, it has paid off. The Darfuri groups have proven effective on the battlefield and are viewed as more expendable than the Libyan rank-and-file of the LNA. The 2017 report from the UN Panel of Experts credits the SLA with playing a major role in the LNA’s push to control Libya’s strategic “oil crescent,” which includes the exporting port towns of Ras Lanuf, Sidra, and Brega. Sudanese media reported JEM involvement, noting at least 118 JEM fatalities in greater Sirte, although evidence that they died in that specific campaign is equivocal.

Sudan’s government is justifiably alarmed at the dangers posed by these fighters returning from Libya. Worryingly, Egyptian weaponry has surfaced in Darfur, and the UAE has financed the rebel groups via their connection with Haftar. The Sudanese government is sounding alarm bells that Haftar’s association with the SLA and JEM movements threatens the already fragile situation in Darfur, currently Africa’s longest running internal conflict. Inevitably, the Sudanese government will seek to capitalize on rhetoric against the rebel SLA and JEM groups, whose involvement in Libya has already had tangible effects on Sudan’s own security. Government security forces in Darfur have been targeted by at least one attack launched from Libyan territory and face further challenges monitoring the Darfuri rebel groups once they leave Sudanese soil. Such attacks threaten Darfur’s current relative peace—as do the networks bringing weapons, hard cash, and returning fighters into Darfur—at a time when the Sudanese government has made progress in improving the security situation by implementing a disarmament campaign for Darfur.

In the absence of a centralized Libyan state force capable of asserting a monopoly on violence, it is largely down to the Sudanese government to take action against the Darfuri groups. This is unlikely to involve military intervention, as apart from a brief incursion into Libya’s south in support of anti-Qaddafi revolutionaries in July 2011 there is no precedent or support for Sudanese troops operating in Libya. The focus is instead on securing the vast, porous borders shared by Chad, Sudan, and Libya, which have allowed Darfuri groups to transit between states with relative ease. Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir described the joint Sudan-Chad border force as “a model for establishing security” and has instigated a dramatic upturn in Sudanese-Chadian relations since 2010, a rare positive change for the region. Before 2010, the Chadian government had backed the SLA and JEM, offering safe havens in Chad from which they could operate with impunity and a reportedly “strong bond with the Chadian military.”

The exploitation of Libya’s lawlessness by hiring the SLA, JEM, and FACT sets a dangerous example. These rebel groups have no remit for involvement in the Libyan conflict beyond material gain, siding with Haftar purely to accrue arms and funding that will benefit them upon returning to Sudan. Haftar and other Libyan actors have embraced the assistance of another state’s rebels, enabling the conflation of mercenary activities abroad with domestic political goals. Consequently, the Sudanese government finds itself in the frustrating position of having its foes empowered by a foreign agent over which it has little sway—one uninterested in regional politics but that might spark future conflict within Sudan. For Libya, the UN Panel of Experts report has proved to be a wakeup call, increasing domestic demands for foreign armed groups to leave Libyan territory and highlighting a sense of distrust at any Libyan force that associates with them. But if Libya’s 2018 presidential and legislative elections go ahead as planned, and Khalifa Haftar becomes the president of Libya, his ties with these forces will ensure that Sudanese–Libyan relations take a nosedive.

This article is reprinted with permission of Sada. It can be accessed online here.

Thomas Howes-Ward is an MA candidate at the University of Exeter and the Middle East editor for KettleMag. Follow him on Twitter @thowesward.

The Ride-hailing industry is at the forefront of the new sharing economy. In emerging markets such as Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Brazil it has become successful by opening income-generating opportunities for the unemployed or partially employed and easing the burdens of constrained labor markets, especially for youth. The inclusion and participation of women in such services has been an intriguing—though until recently—under-researched industry feature.

Ride-hailing juggernauts such as Uber have marketed their services to women as customers and begun to employ more women drivers across the Global South and the wider world. And yet, a closer look at the Ride-hailing industry raises concerns about how this part of the sharing economy works and how its labor and market processes could potentially affect women’s participation—as both drivers or riders.

In early March, the International Finance Corporation and Accenture, a professional services firm, released a report titled “Driving Toward Equality: Women, Ride-Hailing, and the Sharing Economy.” This report explored questions of women’s access, patterns of use and engagement, and gender gaps in the Ride-hailing industry in Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The report, relying on data from Uber as well as focus groups, surveys, and expert interviews, was conducted with an eye toward improving women’s participation among relevant stakeholders in the Ride-hailing industry.

In a nutshell, the report found that the Ride-hailing industry lowers barriers of entry into the workforce for women drivers, boosts their earnings even more than men, and helps support their entrepreneurial activities and builds their credit. However, women drivers are constrained by restrictive social norms, gender discrimination, and threats to their personal safety. For women riders, ride hailing increases their mobility and independence, allows them to travel at night, and to be more effective in managing their households. Yet, this also poses problems of affordability to lower-income women showing structural issues of privilege afforded to some female riders over others.   

According to the findings, several factors impede the full participation of women as both riders and drivers. These factors include concerns over security and personal safety, lack of financial means to own cars, low access to the internet and mobile phones, and finally, fears of gender segregation or exclusion. As a possible response to these factors, when able, some women rides have decided to only use other women as drivers. Although Uber does not offer this type of service, 44 percent of surveyed women riders said would be more likely to use the Uber app if they had the option of selecting a woman driver. Already in many cities across the world, including Karachi, London, Kenya, Mexico City, New York, Paris and some Australian cities, women-only taxi services are being offered.

For women who work in the car share industry, driving boosts their income. And while failing to replace a full-time job, working as a Ride-hailing driver breaks the cultural stigma many women face. In the Middle East, where women disproportionately face all of the above challenges (access, mobility, social and financial independence, safety), such services have revolutionized patterns of transportation use.

Possessing the power to ease social and gender restrictions, however, does not mean that the Ride-hailing industry is perfect. Uber, for example, has sold its brand as the safest Ride-hailing company for women. However, at times the explosive growth of the Ride-hailing industry has outpaced and trumped attention to personal safety. In the case of Egypt, rapid growth and liberalization of transport—the natural outcome of increased and unregulated competition inherently perpetuated by the sharing economy business model—has caused Uber’s safety standards to drop. As demand rose, a labor surplus resulted and compliance with safety standards became an issue. The result has been many instances where Egyptian women have felt unsafe riding on Uber. Therefore, it is imperative that economic growth does not hinder Ride-hailing companies from creating a culture that ensures the safety of women riders.  

But the logic that women will feel safer with their own sex and gender will likely have an equally negative result; that is the creation of women-only Ride-hailing services that segregate men and women in the wider society. Yet, would that be such a bad thing? Were women to populate the women-only Ride-hailing industry, women themselves would be building a safety culture from the inside-out, and act as its enforcers. Rather than wait for safety measures to be implemented on the institutional level, women operating in the grass roots can be safety bearers and fundamentally overhaul how safety and harassment are dealt with inside companies.  

Safety aside, for women drivers, societal barriers pose a bigger challenge. According to numbers provided in the report, there is a 23 percent gender gap between men and women in global earnings. The gender gap is ever wider when it comes to access to bank accounts (58 percent), owning mobile phones (14 percent), accessing the internet (6.2 percent), or being able to read (83 percent compared to 90 percent in men). Gender gaps in access affect asset ownership, and women find it harder to set up shop or sign up as drivers, and navigate the required paperwork.

Besides that, women need to consider another issue. One of the downsides of the sharing economy is that it blurs the lines between informal and formal employment. This means that women lose some crucial benefits such as formal training, health insurance, maternity pay, and pension plans which lowers their willingness to become participants in the sharing economy. In response, Ride-sharing companies must create an entrepreneurship or scholarship program for women drivers, working with policymakers and other sharing economy sectors to design a system of portable benefits that drivers could carry across multiple platforms and apps. Also Ride-hailing companies need to partner with financial institutions to develop insurance, pension, and retirement products tailored for independent contractors. These solutions can definitely help women thrive as self-employers.

Eventually, women will have to leave the fringes of the Ride-hailing sector and become its main participants. For that to happen, a lot has to change. Governments have to facilitate many new programs and partnerships; companies have to take better safety measures, establish across-the-board connections, partnerships, and women-friendly financing programs; and societies have to become more open and supportive. Unfortunately, the forces at play in the sharing economy mean that women have inherited a system that promotes competition but does not offer benefits that can sustain them, and sometimes trumps safety. These can either limit women’s success, or give them enough awareness to overcome or rise above such setbacks.

Nadeen Shaker is associate editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. She has contributed to Vice News, the Middle East Report, Mada Masr, The Postcolonialist, and elsewhere. On Twitter: @NadeenShaker.

The regular spats between Rabat and Algiers on inadequate border security, including ineffective counter-terrorism and counter-narcotics efforts, are again indicating how the two countries’ competition for dominance is obstructing the possibility of regional cooperation. Officially, the bitter feud over sovereignty of the Western Sahara prevents the two countries from agreeing on other regional issues such as border security. Morocco urges Algeria to set aside the dispute in order to work more effectively on other pressing North African concerns, while Algeria has no incentive to decouple border security from a final settlement on the status of Western Sahara so long as it can leverage the former to pressure Morocco on the latter.

Yet Morocco and Algeria, as well as Tunisia, all face the same conundrum at their borders. The increase in cross-border trafficking over the last decade has coincided with a proliferation of new actors who are displacing old smuggling patterns. This presents a challenge to governments and security services alike—to the extent they can actually function in these regions—in a way that has stripped the protection provided by borders and turned them into potential national security threats. The patchy and under-resourced nature of the Maghreb states’ security cooperation, marred by the Morocco–Algeria political rivalry and failed or weak governments in Libya and Tunisia, is particularly evident in the border regions’ glaring vulnerabilities to transnational crime, terrorist networks, and illegal migration.

While the 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) of borders between Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya are clearly demarcated, they serve less to mark the start or end of state sovereignty than as buffer zones, lands in their own right linking geographically connected regions. These borders have little social, economic, or even political significance in and of themselves. Instead, they serve as channels for negotiating transnational identities, building mutual economic reliance—including through migration and smuggling goods—and facilitating the movement of armed groups, which see these border regions as a natural breeding ground for ideological extremism. Unlike in the majority of the African continent, the borders between the Maghreb states’ more heavily populated northern regions are old and well-established: they were not imposed by colonialist Europe, nor do they reflect strong geographical or ethno-cultural divisions. In contrast, the Maghreb’s external borders to the south are largely inherited from the French colonial administration, most notably in Algeria. While Morocco’s border with the Sahara is essentially defined by the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, Algeria owes its chunk of the Sahara Desert to France’s colonial design and interests in the region. These imposed borders make less sense in many respects, thereby increasing the Maghreb’s security vulnerabilities.

The porous nature of the Maghreb’s external borders and the countries’ historical connection with Saharan and Sahel commercial routes have compounded the security issues along the region’s precarious margins. In Algeria, decades of ineffective border control with Libya and Tunisia (where there have been noticeable operational improvements in recent years) have exacerbated established smuggling networks and led to a flourishing informal economy that helps stabilize these otherwise restless regions. The relative vacuum of authority along the Maghreb’s borders, particularly with Mali and Libya, also saw the emergence of illegal migration and trade in weapons and narcotics, which feeds into terrorist networks—a situation that rapidly deteriorated further following the Tunisian revolution and collapse of the Libyan state in 2011.

And despite Morocco and Algeria each independently improving their capacities for border control and increasing funding for it, the increase in the volume and frequency of smuggling and displacement along the Morocco–Algeria border also increases the risk of transnational terrorism. Algeria’s increased counter-terrorism efforts have kept border infiltration into Morocco to a minimum, and Morocco does face a much larger threat from the return of experienced fighters from Syria and Libya. However, Rabat’s and Algiers’ unwillingness to cooperate on border security is untenable in the long run. At the very least, the low risk that the border presents ensures that the perennial “border issue” will remain a political card that Algeria can freely link to a broader settlement on the status of Western Sahara.

In addition to the lack of coordination to address these transnational threats, the Maghreb countries lack a policy to confront shared issues of impoverished, politically neglected, and easily radicalized communities along their shared border regions—particularly in southeastern Morocco, southeastern Algeria, and western Tunisia. The root causes of these regions’ multifarious grievances would be best addressed by a cross-border and multi-pronged local approach. Border security efforts alone instead exacerbate political unrest, or even increase the appeal of extremist ideologies, because clamping down on smuggling disrupts local livelihood options. For example, the southern Algerian city of Tamanrasset—a strategic trade node between Libya, Algeria, Mali, and Niger—tripled in population in the last ten years, largely due to illicit trafficking, which would be hard to replace with equally lucrative legal economic activities. The illicit trade of cheap Algerian gasoline across the Tunisian border can bring one group of smugglers an average profit of $120-160 a day, compared to a profit of $6 to $9 a day for legal Tunisian street vendors.

The emergence of such borderland economics is a reminder that, unlike in Europe—where centralized states grew to extract riches and power from their peripheries—North Africa’s state building began with the foundation of cities along trans-Saharan trading routes, which local power bases then used as springboards for central dynastic rule. Borders in the Maghreb are thus cohesive economic spaces with shared identities thrust into a perpetually contested environment, rather than unruly and distant margins of national territory. Despite challenges of human development, Algeria’s and Morocco’s southern regions are just as strategic as the “center.” For example, Algeria’s south, which forms 80 percent of the nation’s territory and 9 percent of its population, is home to the most of the country’s lucrative oil and gas industry, which accounts for 35 percent of GDP and about 75 percent of state revenue.

Maintaining the status quo in the Maghreb’s complex borderlands could easily get out of control. However, embedding cross-border security efforts at the regional and local levels with a practical economic development strategy that offers alternative economic resources to smuggling and human trafficking, could help stabilize these regions. Provinces along the Moroccan–Algerian or the Algerian–Tunisian frontier, for instance, could implement joint borderlands development and security strategy at the local level. This local-driven model, if quietly supported by central governments, could allow for increased cooperation and security without the states having to change their stances on whether border issues should be linked to political issues such as the status of Western Sahara.

This article is reprinted with permission of Sada. It can be accessed online here.

Jacques Roussellier teaches international relations at American Military University and is co-editor of Perspectives on Western Sahara: Myths, Nationalism and Geopolitics (Rowman & Littlefield: New York, 2014).

On February 12, the Philippine Department of Labor issued Administrative Order 54, which banned the deployment of overseas workers to Kuwait, launching a diplomatic impasse over the treatment of domestic laborers in the Gulf country. While ongoing negotiations to re-open the flow of workers will likely succeed, they illustrate the extent to which Kuwait is dependent on this labor until it can oversee sustainable economic reform that incentivizes Kuwaitis to work in the retail, hospitality, and service sectors.

On February 6, 2018, Kuwaiti police discovered the body of 29-year-old Joanna Demafelis in a refrigerator. Demafelis was a Filipina domestic worker who had gone missing in December 2016. When discovered, her body showed signs of strangulation and torture. Police pursued the couple that had hired Demafelis—the Lebanese national Nader Essam Assaf and his Syrian wife, Mona Assaf—who were subsequently arrested in Damascus. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte lashed out at Kuwait in response to the news, making assertions that Kuwaiti employers routinely rape Filipina workers, force them to work 21-hour days, and feed them scraps. In addition to the ban on sending Filipino workers to Kuwait, the government also arranged free flights on Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific for any of Kuwait’s Filipino residents wishing to return home. Kuwait publicly condemned these actions as an escalation of an already tense situation but sent diplomats to the Philippines in the hopes of resolving the issue and lifting the ban. This engagement has resulted in an agreement regulating working conditions for Filipinos in Kuwait but the Philippines has not yet lifted the ban entirely.

In the wake of the Philippines’ worker ban, MP Safa al-Hashem called for Kuwait to cut foreign aid to the country. Such proposals build on populist sentiments against Kuwait’s South Asian expatriate population. However, Kuwait’s government has not given serious consideration to the proposal, which would have little positive effect.

Expatriates comprise about two-thirds of Kuwait’s 4.5 million residents, working in both blue collar and white collar jobs. In mid-March, Kuwait’s government reportedly proposed allowing foreign nationals to own property, but otherwise expatriates have few opportunities to participate officially in Kuwaiti society. While Kuwait has recently taken steps to reduce the percent of expatriates working in the Kuwaiti economy, these steps have mostly targeted white-collar workers. The country recently set 2023 as the deadline to replace foreign nationals working in the government and seeks to increase Kuwaiti employment in the banking sector to 80 percent by the end of 2018. The government also seeks to end hiring expatriates under age 30 with college degrees after July 2018.

However, as seen in its haste to push the Philippines to reverse its ban, Kuwait’s economy remains heavily dependent on foreign labor. Since many Kuwaitis receive government subsidies or public sector employment, few are willing to work in low-paying jobs. Expatriates are thus heavily represented in Kuwait’s service economy and blue-collar labor market. For example, a slight majority of the 251,000 Filipinos in Kuwait are domestic workers. Kuwait’s government has taken a few steps to limit foreign hiring for these positions, for example imposing a temporary restriction on recruitment from Bangladesh on March 5. Yet the limited nature of such measures simultaneously recognizes the need for these workers to maintain Kuwait’s economic stability. Compounding the issue is the fact that Kuwait and other Gulf states are playing a greater role in the global economy. As Gulf economies rise in international prominence, so too will questions about labor conditions and the rights of expatriates in the region.

While Duterte’s statements exaggerate the extent of mistreatment—and despite a domestic workers law passed in June 2015 requiring greater transparency regarding hiring and wages—mistreatment still exists. Nearly 200 Filipino workers have died in Kuwait in the past two years, 22 of them from suicide. In addition, in January 2017, Kuwaiti police detained a man in Farwaniya for allegedly beating his Filipina maid to death, and on February 22, 2018, a Kuwaiti citizen was sentenced to seven years in prison for assaulting his Filipina maid. The Philippines, through its embassy, has worked closely with Kuwait’s government to verify that recruiters abide by the law, but cannot regulate households where many Filipinos work. Kuwait’s kafala system, which ties workers’ visas to their employer, further opens up many opportunities for the abuse of foreign laborers. Kuwait’s announcement on March 27 that it would introduce a 100-day “probation visa” for expatriates switching jobs will help mitigate opportunities for abuse but will not eliminate them entirely.

The attention Kuwait’s government and media gave the Philippines’ worker ban is a clear indication that the Kuwaiti state cannot simply get rid of expatriates from the labor force. While targeting expatriates may make political sense in response to populist nationalism, the government knows that expatriates are a major element of Kuwait’s economic success. A workforce based on foreign labor may not be ideal for Kuwaiti nationalist factions but it is, for the foreseeable future, an intrinsic element of the country’s labor economy. Reducing the number of expatriates in Kuwait’s economy will ultimately require convincing Kuwaitis to work in lower-paying labor-intensive jobs—an unattractive prospect for both Kuwaitis and the government. However, keeping expatriates in the workforce while preventing another ban akin to the Philippines’ current one will require providing further assurances against abuse and exploitation of foreign workers, meet their basic income and health needs, and give them incentives to invest their wages back into Kuwait’s economy.

Kuwait’s expatriate population has supported the economy for decades, and change will not come quickly. However, supporting foreign workers in Kuwait while incentivizing greater Kuwaiti participation in the private labor force can begin to shift the country toward a more sustainable economic future.

This article is reprinted with permission of Sada. It can be accessed online here.

Scott Weiner is an adjunct professor of Political Science at George Washington University.

Over the past few years, Morocco’s economic integration with Sub-Saharan Africa has accelerated. Between 2008 and 2016, Moroccan exports to the rest of the continent grew an average of 9 percent every year, while foreign direct investment (FDI) rose by 4.4 percent. In particular, Senegal, Mauritania, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria have emerged as the biggest African buyers of Moroccan products, which ranged from foodstuffs to machinery and chemical goods. Unsurprisingly, in this time the trade balance between Rabat and West Africa recorded a net surplus for Morocco. This was partly compensated by a strong influx of Moroccan FDI into the region, mainly concentrated in banking, insurance, manufacturing, and telecommunications.

This reorientation toward Africa is the outcome of a long process in which Morocco has reassessed the benefits and losses of its previous priority on pursuing trade and investment ties with the European Union and United States. Initially this approach helped Morocco build a domestic manufacturing base. Its long-term impact was mixed. First, the integration of former Soviet bloc states in the European Union meant that many companies outsourced or delocalized their production to these new members, instead of Morocco. Second, the end of the Multi-Fiber Agreement in 2004 exposed the Moroccan textile industry to competition from low-cost producers in Southeast Asia. As a result, Rabat’s vertical trade and investment integration with its much bigger economic partners ended up highlighting the country’s weaknesses and led to what some economists identified as a process of premature deindustrialization. With its relatively higher labor costs, lower human capital levels, poorer infrastructure quality, and lower state capacity, Morocco struggled to compete with Asian and Eastern European economies. Morocco’s trade, tourism, remittances and FDI further suffered after the beginning of the Eurozone crisis in 2007 because of the country’s dependence on Southern Europe’s struggling economies.

In response, Morocco has started to look at other markets and partners for growth. Moroccan authorities want to reduce their dependence on Europe and diversify into emerging markets where their firms can benefit from being relatively competitive. While Moroccan firms cannot compete with European and U.S. firms, they are on a much stronger footing when faced with many Sub-Saharan companies, for example. In addition, the difficult international access to Sub-Saharan markets gives Moroccan firms greater opportunities to pursue economies of scale. Most importantly, Morocco’s long-term goal is to become a trade and production hub that can interface between European, American, and Sub-Saharan African trading blocs.

It is therefore unsurprising that, for example, in November 2017 Morocco began negotiations with the South American trading bloc Mercosur to establish a free trade area between them, hoping to become a corridor for Europe and the United States to export goods and services. Thanks to its Tangiers cargo port facilities and its geographical position, the authorities believe that international firms will find it increasingly convenient to locate at least part of their operations in the country. Becoming a logistics hub would help Morocco build up its service industry for transportation, shipping, and banking. Moreover, Morocco hopes international firms will see it as a cheap manufacturing hub from where they can export goods everywhere in the world with few or no tariffs. For instance, a U.S. firm exporting to Senegal faces a set of protectionist tariffs, but if it moves at least part of its production to Morocco these tariffs would all but disappear.

Yet although Sub-Saharan Africa is a natural target for economic expansion—due to its geographical proximity, its vast economic potential, and its growing demand for goods and investment—Morocco has faced some difficulty establishing trade relations there. Morocco formally applied to join the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on February 24, 2017. At the time, Rabat thought that this application was going to be a relatively smooth process, thanks to Morocco’s excellent diplomatic relations with all ECOWAS members and their preexisting trade and investment ties. The membership request also came on the heels of Morocco’s successful return to the African Union on January 30, 2017, which Rabat saw as a great diplomatic victory.

Yet Morocco’s bid has faced strong objections from West African civil society organizations and economic interest groups. In Nigeria, for example, a large coalition of trade unions, industrialists and NGOs lobbied the government against opening its borders to Moroccan goods, which they saw as a potentially lethal threat to domestic production. And in Senegal, the private sector has expressed its reservations about Morocco, whose higher productivity could undermine the country’s manufacturing base.

This mobilization has so far managed to stall Morocco’s application despite Morocco’s relentless lobbying efforts. For example, the General Confederation of Moroccan Enterprises (CGEM) announced in early March that it planned to meet with its counterparts in the biggest ECOWAS economies. In December 2017, ECOWAS indefinitely postponed a final decision on this matter after publishing an impact report that analyzed the political, security, and economic effects of Morocco joining the group. Under pressure from their domestic constituencies and from Morocco’s lobbying efforts, the Nigerian and Senegalese governments seem unable to solve this apparently impossible equation.

Regardless of whether Morocco’s bid to join ECOWAS will be approved, Rabat’s application indicates it has purposefully avoided addressing the full implications of joining. ECOWAS imposes a common external tariff on its members of between 5 and 35 percent, which is supposed to protect the West African economies from international competition and to promote regional trade. However, Morocco has had an Association Agreement establishing a free trade area between Morocco and the EU since 2000, as well as a Free Trade Agreement with the United States since 2004. Not only will Morocco be unable, by definition, to comply with both the ECOWAS tariff and the free trade agreement, agreeing to the tariff would also run counter to Morocco’s goal of becoming a global hub for production, logistics, and trade.

Further questions surround Morocco’s willingness to join ECOWAS’ proposed common currency. Eight of the fifteen ECOWAS members already share a currency, the West African CFA Franc, and ECOWAS plans to introduce a currency called the Eco for the remaining members by 2020 and eventually merge the two. In January, the Moroccan government widened the trading band for the Moroccan dirham, part of a series of reforms recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to introduce more exchange rate flexibility. As this policy aims to reassure investors and to make its economy more resilient to external shocks, this indicates that the authorities are not interested in adopting a common currency or even merely pegging the exchange rate to the CFA Franc. Morocco, which likely wants to join the bloc but opt out of the currency, has purposefully avoided addressing this issue, knowing that stating its position would only reinforce opposition to its application.

As for West African citizens, there has been so far no debate in Morocco about the desirability of potentially opening the borders to new Sub-Saharan migrants or whether this could be a potential “price” to pay for accessing the ECOWAS market. Indeed, as ECOWAS citizens can move freely within this area, this could potentially have an impact on Morocco’s ability to absorb economic migrants attracted to the country’s relatively higher salaries—and likely influence Moroccans’ perceptions regarding these migrants’ impact on the high unemployment rate.

The impression is therefore that Morocco is purposefully avoiding giving any firm answer to these questions so it can expand its room to maneuver and obtain an ad hoc ECOWAS membership at the expense of the other states.

This article is reprinted with permission of Sada. It can be accessed online here.