Country Brief
An interactive and continuously updated glimpse into the economic and social identities of the region.
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Wednesday, 12 Dec, 2012
Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya positioned the country in the role it finds itself in today. Lasting until another military coup in 2005, Taya oversaw vaunted steps towards a multiparty sytem, but lost friends abroad by taking a pro-Iraq stance in the first Gulf war. A series of ethnically motivated armed skirmishes with Senegal forces from the end of the eighties did not improve matters.
After the turn of the century diplomatic relations with the US and Europe improved, tha...
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Wednesday, 12 Dec, 2012
Colonial Legacy
Present day Algeria has its origins in Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century followed by French con-quest from 1830. Extensive European settlement along the coastal plain along with repressive colonial administrative and economic policies sowed the seeds of the War of Independence from French coloni-al rule. Led by the National Liberation Front, the bloody and protracted guerrilla campaign (casualty figures are disputed but range up to a million dead) dragged on for eig...
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Wednesday, 12 Dec, 2012
Hope for Sudan?
Unfortunately, many have noted how the crisis in Darfur, which coincided with the signing of the agreement, drained many of the diplomatic resource...
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Wednesday, 12 Dec, 2012
Djibouti is also an important refueling centre for shipping through Suez. Nevertheless, Djibouti's poor rainfall limits scope for agriculture production and most ...
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Tuesday, 11 Dec, 2012
Despite their defeat in the 2009 Parliamentary elections, to the March 14 coalition Hezbollah’s power in Lebanon remains in fact very much unchanged, and virtually unch...
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Tuesday, 11 Dec, 2012
In 1892, with the signing of an Exclusive Arrangement, Britain persuaded Bahrain to refuse to cede, sell, or lease any part of its territory to any foreign power o...
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Tuesday, 11 Dec, 2012
By the beginning of the 17th century, Portugal came into contact with the Comoros in its expanding global trade empire, and up until French colonial rule starting...
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Tuesday, 11 Dec, 2012
This period of turmoil was brought to an end in 1968 in a bloodless coup led by General Ahmad Hasan Al-Bakr and his coterie of Ba'athist supporters. Bakr appointed himsel...
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Tuesday, 11 Dec, 2012
Oman is a middle-income economy. Due to its own modest oil revenues, Oman’s economic future relies partly on the attraction of its visual resources of untouch...
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Tuesday, 11 Dec, 2012
Although in decline for much of the 19thcentury, the Ottomans sealed their fate at the outbreak of the First World War when they made the fatal decision of supporting N...
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