ABSTRACT
As the 2020s progress, in the Mediterranean region – the place where, for centuries, Europe, Asia, and Africa have met – relations continue to oscillate between conflict and integration. When the idea for this book was first conceived, the region was recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and had been rocked by the geopolitical and economic earthquake of the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Republic. Attention was focused on the war’s impact on food and energy supplies and prices, on global political divisions, and on the blow to the post-Cold War liberal order, based as it was on international law, global free trade, and human rights. In that early phase, observers argued that the Ukraine crisis could bolster economic integration. Europe, it was suggested, would turn south to replace Russian gas and oil and a new cereals trade might develop across the Mediterranean. As the months passed, however, the crisis, if anything, created more distance between the northern and the southern and eastern shores. In the south and east, after all, governments and peoples abstained from condemning Russian invasion and did not implement economic sanctions against the aggressor. The crisis had soon, in its ramifications, reached the Sahelian hinterland of North Africa.
