A Strategy for Conflict Prevention and Management in the Mediterranean

Abstract

The Mediterranean is a border between a wealthy, developed, and stable Europe on one side and a fragmented North Africa and Middle East on the other side. Today, in the region there is no major military threat as was the case in Europe during the Cold War. However, the region is destabilized by a combination of wide-ranging inter-state and intra-state conflicts, socioeconomic risks and low-intensity violence. Most of these conflicts and risks have their sources along the south shore and at the sub-regional levels. The first category of conflicts is constituted by territorial and border disputes such as those between Israel and Palestine; Israel and Syria; Israel and Lebanon; Greece and Turkey; Turkey and Syria; Egypt and Sudan; Spain and Morocco; and those in the Western Sahara1. The second category is represented by ethno-cultural rivalry as in the former Yugoslavia, Cyprus, and that which is part of the Kurdish question. To this list we add the low-intensity violence of terrorism in Algeria and Egypt. However, we should also not overlook the future importance of potential conflicts over water supply, particularly in the Middle East among Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Israel and its neighbors, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia where in some cases the situation is complicated by the fact that there are connections between the territorial and ethno-cultural sources of conflicts, for example, the Greek-Turk rivalry and the Arab-Israeli dispute, whose cases belong to the category of intractable conflicts2. The geopolitical environment described above illustrates the specificity of the security