West Asia and North Africa Quarterly
The West Asia and North Africa (WANA) Quarterly report uses an interdisciplinary lens to outline regional and country-specific trends, and explore political, social, security, and economic developments. Published in January, April, July, and October, the report reflects on the previous three months, analysing the impact of major events on the region and its people.
Each report is divided into three sections:
1. A regional overview of key trends;
2. Wider analyses of events in three specific countries; and
3. Two thematic deep dives into topics of relevance to businesses and policy-makers.
Each issue will present three different countries of interest and new set of deep dives, chosen as such to analyse both micro and macro trends.
We do not forecast. We illustrate how events shape responses, influence people, and create a ripple effect across WANA.
emerge85 Lab
In a world where 85% of the population lives outside North America and Europe, and where commercial and technological connectivity has scaled unprecedented heights, we believe it is vital to explore this '85 world' unconstrained by region-specific classifications, outdated Cold War-era mindsets, and small-picture thinking.
The Johns Hopkins SAIS-Delma Institute Partnership on Geo-economic Multiplicity explores the impact of the emergence or re-emergence of ‘non-Western’, global economic players by taking a holistic approach to geo-economic trends and their impact.
Co-located in Abu Dhabi and Washington, DC, the lab's mission is founded on the premise that heightened economic activity in Africa, Latin America, and Asia has led to their increasing global relevance. In short, in less than a generation, our world has been turned upside down. To assess the impact of these important geopolitical, geo-economic, and geo-cultural shifts, the lab will work with a network of collaborators, thinkers, and other rising experts to produce original analysis through a variety of media, including digital stories, visualisations, multi-city pop-up talks, roundtables, and more traditional events.
Drafts
Drafts is a clearing house and incubator for ideas that upend traditional hierarchies. It is a space where we test both beta and final ideas; a space for Delma to explore its curiosity, courage, and humility.
Drafts is where current affairs, history, and ideas collide. We will look to the past and the present to produce innovative ideas and, sometimes, imagine futures.
We don’t craft products that have utility only once fully assembled. Rather, we iterate in stages, developing a functional product at first, and improving it at each step of the way.
Prisms
Prisms is an endeavour that seeks to draw light from the intractable, inter-connected questions concerning Arab subjectivity and agency in the modern and contemporary periods. What does it mean to be Arab today, and what has it meant since the Arab populations’ patchwork assimilation of the globalised foundations of modernity, such as individualism, rationalism, the nation-state model, capitalism, democracy, and consumer culture? Are Arabs today, and were they in the past, the main authors of their identity? What social and cultural functions does identity, as an ethno-nationalist category, serve in Arab societies today?
Prisms envisions each of its studies as a spectrum through which the light of a leading question scatters in many directions. By adopting a contextualised approach to the past, Prisms hopes to uncover the alterity of the present, finding within it signposts for a journey towards more self-critical futures.