Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy

Experts and advocates with a localized understanding of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region bring unique knowledge and solutions-oriented ideas to the policy discourse. Leveraging its region-wide network, its commitment to policy that is informed by context and data, and its understanding of the U.S., EU, and UN decision-making spaces, TIMEP’s Advocacy and Policy Engagement Program serves as a resource for policymakers looking for a contextualized and nuanced understanding of the region and provides a platform for local experts and advocates to access and inform these policymakers as well.

With the extensive research conducted by its team and fellows and its close and regular connectivity to experts and advocates on the ground, TIMEP maintains an up-to-date and unique understanding of the key issues within particular country contexts and across the MENA region thematically. In this vein, TIMEP conducts two forms of advocacy:

Agenda-Setting: TIMEP sets the agenda by proactively briefing policymakers on issues that will have reverberating implications for the region, yet are often under or insufficiently addressed in policy circles. In this vein, TIMEP also pays particular attention to the work of civil society and advocates, who are themselves at risk for their engagement, offering them a platform to directly raise these issues as well.

Responsive: Having invested deeply in guaranteeing that the knowledge and output it produces is nuanced, reputable, and reliable, TIMEP has built a name for itself in the policy space. Accordingly, decision makers regularly come to TIMEP with requests for briefings, information, and points of contact on a diversity of topics and countries.

Created as the first initiative of its kind to be housed within like-minded DC-based organizations, TIMEP’s Legal Unit works to address the knowledge gap among the policymaking community on legal and judicial developments in the MENA region and to tie these affairs to broader policy issues and forward-thinking policy solutions; and to amplify, bolster, and support the work of those best positioned on-the-ground to counteract the negative implications of legal and judicial developments overtaking the region.

TIMEP’s Legal Unit works along three prongs:

Legal Research and Documentation: The Legal Unit works to track, document, and report on the top legal and judicial developments in the MENA region and to explain these developments to a non-technical policy audience and place them in a broader policy context with an eye toward institutional solutions.

Legal Support: In conjunction with members of the legal community on-the-ground, the Legal Unit works to provide international and comparative legal expertise to complement domestic legal efforts; to connect and carve out a space for the legal community within the policymaking one; and to provide support to members of the legal community at-risk in light of their work.

Legal Education: Recognizing the deteriorating state of legal education and training in the region and the limited availability of specialized international legal curricula and resources in Arabic, the Legal Unit works to invest in practical educational learning tools to empower the legal community with the mechanisms to engage with the international legal and policy communities and to bolster, evolve, and strengthen their own work in the process.