Throughout the last decade, both shores of the Western Mediterranean have faced a combination of crises of varying intensity, leading to repercussions on public policies, representative systems, and regional and transnational relations, as well as affecting migratory movements by workers and the settlement of migrant populations in Europe. The worsening crisis and collapse of the state in Libya have exacerbated instability in the region, once again placing security issues at the forefront of the regional agenda. The closure of borders in Eastern Europe has shifted some of the refugee flows among people fleeing the civil war in Syria and Jihadist groups in the region to this part of the Mediterranean.

In this project, we start out with the overarching hypothesis that the simultaneous crises at the domestic, regional and international levels are producing change in a region where Spain’s political, economic and security interests are in a broad sense concentrated.

The economic and financial crisis in the Eurozone has hit southern European countries particularly hard. Fiscal tightening and European Union (EU) intervention in some economies have had repercussions on public policy (immigration, refugees, social cohesion, development cooperation, foreign relations). In the case of Spain, they have limited the ability to influence decisions reached in the EU and its surrounding area.

The situation of global economic crisis was also felt strongly in North African countries as of 2010 and accelerated the existing discomfort among broad sectors of North African societies with their governments. People protesting in different countries shared a conviction that the problems arising from the lack of opportunities, social justice, poor governance and corruption all had internal roots related with the survival of authoritarian regimes, thus requiring that they be deposed or reformed, depending on the case at hand.