Resilience: A road-map to building a secure and sustainable future for West Asia and North Africa

The challenges facing the West Asia and North Africa region are dynamic, multi-faceted, and well publicised. Lack of entrepreneurial opportunity, competition over scarce resources, sectarianism, and a growing number of uprooted persons combine to shape a region in which the disadvantaged are victimised, and extreme thinking has become part of our everyday.

Tackling these challenges requires an in-depth understanding of the region’s carrying capacity and a pro-active strengthening of its resilience; the capacity of individuals, organisations and states to foresee, endure and evolve in response to challenges and shocks, be they exogenous or internal.

Building resilience requires a new and inter-disciplinary ap¬proach to development; one that evaluates stresses on our carrying capacity through a range of developmental parameters, including economic empowerment, natural resources management, social justice and good governance.

First, we must instil, across national borders, a united belief in what our region can and should be, and a shared determination to make these hopes a reality for all. This concept of a pan-Arab identity is not new; it took root over 100 years ago. At a time when Europe’s own factionalism was at its height, our forefathers in West Asia–North Africa were attempting to build a regional community of Arabs. Born in the late nineteenth century, the Arab Renaissance was a home-grown intellectual awakening; a call for Arab unity and autonomy in the final days of the Ottoman Empire.  At the end of World War I, our ancestors dreamt of an Arab nation without borders, self-determined and recognised by the international community.  Instead, we were thrown by allied powers into decades of divisive sectarianism and destructive rivalry, confined by borders that failed to match the economic, ethnic and environmental realities on the ground.

It is the absence of a united identity that forces us to view the people who inhabit our region in terms of individual ethnic identities as opposed to what they really are — Arabs. In 1992, the population of Jordan was 2.5 million. Today we are 11 million. Instead of uniting for economic development, innovation and social cohesion, we insist on dividing ourselves into sub-groups — the Syrian and Iraqi refugees, the displaced Palestinians of decades past, ethnic Jordanians of different tribes and so on. Are we not all Arabs? If you can be a European, a German and a Bavarian, why can’t you be an Arab, a Syrian and an Aleppan? Or an Arab, an Iraqi and an Anbari for that matter?

Second, we need to transition from short-term politicking to long-term policy-making. Not only is there an economic imperative, we need decisions that are made for the benefit of future generations in order to safeguard our fragile natural resource base. If we do not, the next war we see, or the next refugee crisis we witness, may well be driven by water and food insecurity. Popular apathy and existential crisis means that our decision-makers must lead this process. The UN ‘World We Want’ survey ranked the key concerns of 50,426 Jordanians. Of the 16 priority areas outlined, access to clean water and sanitation ranked only eighth, whereas protecting forests and rivers, and taking action against climate change ranked last. Perhaps this would be different were the facts more widely broadcast. The World Health Organisation estimates that a person needs 1,000 cubic meters of water every year — eleven of the nineteen countries in the West Asia-North Africa region have less than 10% of this amount. In Yemen, water scarcity has been put forward the reason behind as much as 70 per cent of the country’s internal conflict.

Third, we must build a sustainable and diverse economy that works for everybody and that protects both sectors and individuals from shocks. At the WANA Institute we are developing an agenda for a Regional Bank for Reconstruction and Development that could spearhead economic transition and become the driving force of fresh ideas and innovation. Within such a Bank, a centralised Zakat fund could redistribute alms to assist in immediate humanitarian relief and long-term development. Distributing private alms through a transparent, accountable organisation can help tackle poverty traps and dependency cycles in an organised and strategic manner.

The key to unlocking our potential is restoring trust between communities and governments, between our nations, and between the region and the rest of the world. Yet a perennial question remains. Our region has endured at least one major war every decade since 1940, and, after seven wars in six years — can a region involved in seemingly endless conflict come together to solve its challenges? Our carrying capacity is already stretched, and with the population of the region predicted to grow by 17.3 percent over the next ten years, this capacity will be stretched further. Our continued inability to create a regional system of cooperation and security should be considered one of the key destabilising forces in the region.

Peace is not merely the cessation of war; it is a process to be built between people who work towards a shared goal. It is our responsibility to break out of our self-inflicted paralysis, to find the courage and the political will to create a climate for a regional cooperation and security system grounded in evidence-based strategic planning, human solidarity and a pluralist human dignity. These are not nice-to-have options – these are must-have options.

It is time for a new era of Arab intellectualism to spearhead a flourishing of civilisation and to lay the paths to the future: a new Arab Renaissance, inclusionist of its core principles of social cohesion and regional cooperation. This will require an honest reappraisal of the reasons for our previous failures from the pre-colonial era to the present. Only then, and with a clear and shared vision for success and a commitment to upholding human dignity and social justice can we come together to build a resilient, safe and sustainable West Asia and North Africa for generations to come.