Report of the Focus Group with Stakeholders in the Middle-East

As part of the MENARA project, the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut (IFI – AUB) organized a focus group in Beirut (Lebanon) on 2 November 2018 with twelve scholars, experts, civil society leaders and activists from Lebanon and the Arab Middle East. The discussions were linked to the general aims of the MENARA project – characterizing the regional order, defining scenarios and discussing policy options for the EU – and was initially (informally) structured in four parts (though participants themselves were allowed to take the discussion in directions that made sense to them): 1. Regional rivalries and new regional order 2. State–society dynamics 3. The role of the EU and other external actors 4. Future scenarios This report contains the summary of the discussion during the focus group.