Explain the region's oil-based and non-oil economies, water scarcity challenges, and major current geopolitical issues.
Oil and natural gas dominate the economies of the Gulf states -- Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait -- generating some of the highest per-capita incomes in the world despite largely desert environments with little agriculture. Countries without major oil reserves, such as Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, rely more heavily on agriculture, tourism, and remittances (money sent home by citizens working abroad). Water scarcity is a defining challenge shared across nearly the whole region: the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates system, and the Jordan River all flow through multiple countries, creating ongoing competition and negotiation over how their water is shared.
The region also faces significant current political challenges, which this course presents factually and without taking a side. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a long-running dispute over land and political status between Israelis and Palestinians, involving competing historical claims and decades of negotiation and conflict that remain unresolved. Syria has experienced a civil war since 2011 that produced one of the largest refugee displacements of the twenty-first century. The 2010-2011 "Arab Spring" protests, a wave of pro-democracy demonstrations across several countries in the region, reshaped politics in significant and lasting ways, with different outcomes from country to country.
Mastery looks like: They can explain why some countries in the region are oil-wealthy while others are not, describe the shared water-scarcity challenge, and state the core facts of at least one current regional conflict neutrally.
Common stumbles: Assuming the entire region is oil-wealthy; slipping from neutral, factual description into one-sided opinion when discussing a current conflict.