The Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the School of International Relations at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (IAEN) of Ecuador, which is a national institute responsible for graduate studies and the training of civil servants, jointly organized a seminar with workshops called “New Geopolitics in the Middle East” (La Nueva Geopolítica en Oriente Medio). The events objectives, which Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño outlined during its inauguration, were to contribute to the training and education of current and future Ecuadorian diplomats and specialists dealing with the Middle East.
Members of the Ecuadorian diplomatic corps and, among other foreign diplomatic representatives, the embassies of Russia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and the Palestinians were present at the event and interacted with the different speakers .
The following is a lecture given by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya on December 12, 2013 at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (IAEN) about the thrust to redraw the borders of the Middle East and its historical and strategic connections to regional conflicts and US foreign policy. The lecture was followed by questions and remarks, including comments from the Turkish Embassy to Ecuador about the position of the Turkish government.
Nazemroaya and the other keynote speakers were panelists later on at a table moderated by the parliamentarian Fernando Bustamante, the presiding president of the Ecuadorian National Assembly’s International Relations Committee, to discuss the direction that the Arab Spring had taken. The other panelists at the table were the following individuals: Libya Ishtay, the Representative of the General Union for Palestinian Women in Latin America and the wife of the Palestinian Ambassador to Ecuador; Rodolfo Bueno, columnist and mathematics professor; Nagham Salman, a Syrian writer; and Norman G. Finkelstein, a political scientist and expert on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
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