Doug Irving for the RAND Corp.: More than 5,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean last year, the deadliest on record. They came from the shelled neighborhoods of Syria, the desperate villages of Eritrea and Gambia. Somalia lost so many people to the sea that a warning began to make the rounds of Twitter there: #DhimashoHaGadan, or "Don't Buy Death."
That's what people see on the nightly news: the bodies washed ashore, the crowded migrant camps, the boats. But Persi Paoli, who left the Italian Navy in late 2013 and joined RAND as a research leader specializing in national security, wanted to widen the lens. He called the project the Mediterranean Foresight Forum.
The researchers traced the roots of the crisis back to the shattered promise of the Arab Spring and the cratered cities of Syria and Libya, but also to European capitals too divided to act. They mapped the smuggling routes that now crisscross Africa and the Middle East and then followed the money — billions of dollars every year — to criminal networks flourishing in North Africa and Southern Europe.
They showed that what may have once been many individual threats to the stability of the region have now merged, creating a cycle of unrest that feeds on itself. In Libya alone, for example, the same black markets that provide fake passports and flimsy boats to migrants also can deliver hashish to European drug dealers and shoulder-fired missiles to Syrian fighters.
The grinding poverty of West Africa, the unrest of North Africa and the terrorist threat of the Islamic State no longer can be treated as unrelated challenges, the researchers concluded. Those problems now all seem "to literally spill into the Mediterranean Sea," they wrote, threatening the security and stability of the two continents that share its shores. The future of Europe has become inextricably linked by sea to the future of the Middle East and North Africa.
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01.16.2025