Even after 12 years, discourse on Libya remains fixated on the lethal and the lucrative — sidelining the role that the North African country’s finance and banking sector plays in perpetuating, even exacerbating, dysfunction mostly stemming from its discordant politics.

March is the month of the woman, when we ought to, among other things, celebrate the great strides made in elevating and empowering this historically marginalized demographic. Across the Arab world, however, the status of women and girls is still worrisome.

It is unlikely that even the most pessimistic assessments of Tunisia’s democratization could have accurately predicted what has befallen the North African country, or how much worse things might get in its increasingly bleak future.

This week is the 12th anniversary of the outbreak of the first Libyan civil war but there will be no fanfare or grand speeches commemorating what was the beginning of the end for Muammar Qaddafi’s regime.

Over the past two decades, Iraq has been a battleground for the intensifying rivalry between the US and Iran.

Thirty-five years ago, fleeting pan-Maghreb ambitions led Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania to found the Arab Maghreb Union with the aim of transforming this sub-region into a country with one passport, one identity and a single currency.