Valdai Club

The final session of the Valdai Club’s Middle East conference, titled "The future of the Middle East: In search of a common dream", was attended by Ilyas Umakhanov, Deputy Chairperson of the Council of the Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Amal Abou Zeid, Member of the Lebanese Parliament, Free Patriotic Movement, John Bell, Director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Programme, Toledo International Centre for Peace in Madrid, and Mustafa Barghouti, General Secretary of the Palestine National Initiative (PNI) party.

During the seventh session of the Valdai Club's Middle East conference, titled " The Middle Eastern economy: kick-starting growth" experts discussed the possibilities of the normalizing the economic situation in the Middle East with the help of regional and external actors, as well as non-governmental organizations. According to the discussion's moderator, Leonid Grigoriev, Chief Adviser to the Head of the Analytical Centre under the Government of the Russian Federation, all Middle Eastern countries are characterized by quite noticeable social stratification and rapid population growth, which allows one to trace some general trends.

The sixth session of the Valdai Club’s Middle East conference, titled " Regional actors: the responsibility of the strong " was attended by Ebtesam Al Ketbi, founder and president of the Emirates Policy Center, a Nourhan El-Sheikh, member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, Kayhan Barzegar, director of the Institute for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies in Tehran, and Al-Sadiq Rikabi, member of the Iraqi Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee.

The session titled "Global players: To leave or not to leave, that is the question" opened the second day of the Valdai Club’s Middle East conference. The Middle East region, which was long under the influence of external players, has entered a new period. Can the external actors cooperate with regional powers under the common idea and what tools they could use to stabilize the situation in the region? Who among of the global players has sufficient clout and influence in the region and whose interests are moved away from the Middle East policy? All these questions the experts discussed at the 5th session of the conference "The Middle East: When Will Tomorrow Come?"

The Session 4, titled "Yemen and Libya: Save society, restore the state," finished the first working day of the Valdai Discussion Club conference “The Middle East: When Will Tomorrow Come?”, organized in partnership with the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. The participants discussed not only ways to reconstruct the states in crisis, but also the roles that regional and external actors could play in this process.

On February 27-28, the Valdai Discussion Club, in partnership with the Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, held a conference, titled “The Middle East: When Will Tomorrow Come?” The conference was held in the format of an expert dialogue attended by politicians, scholars and diplomats from over 25 countries that play an active role in the region.