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Carlo Altomonte is Senior Associate Research Fellow at ISPI. He is Associate Professor of Economics of European Integration at Bocconi University and Non-Resident Fellow at Bruegel, a EU think tank. He has been regularly acting as consultant for a number of national and international institutions, including the Italian Government, the United Nations (UNCTAD), the European Parliament, the European Commission and the European Central Bank.

Ten years after the outbreak of the civil war and the beginning of its international isolation, Syria is experiencing a normalization momentum. Syrian ministers and officials have resumed participating in bilateral meetings with their regional counterparts, and Damascus has been included in the talks on Lebanon’s energy crisis. Furthermore, in the past months, a series of symbolic gestures proved that many Arab leaders are now ready to re-engage with Syria.

This year marked the start of a gradual shift in Turkey’s regional foreign policy. After having played a proactive and assertive role in the broader Mediterranean in recent years, Ankara has adopted a less confrontational stance, as it has turned increasingly aware of the need to break its regional isolation and to make friends again. International, regional, and domestic developments have led Turkey to open new channels of dialogue with its neighbours in an attempt to defuse tensions and repair relations.

Ten years of democratic transition left a majority of Tunisians unhappy about their country’s fate. Over the decade, growing anger occasionally spilled over onto the streets, but politicians always contained it through consensual deals and short-term remedies. A number of political and economic reforms came as top-down policies, often perceived as neo-imperialist measures imposed by the West.