Thank you for your interest in writing for MENA Affairs. This page serves as a guide to ensure that your article meets our criteria and has the best possible chance of being accepted.
Please note that we suggest you go over your opinion piece at least two or three times before submitting it. This is so that you can correct obvious spelling and grammatical errors, which may not be picked up by spellcheck. Moreover, this will you give you the opportunity to ensure that your work is well-structured and that your ideas are well-constructed and clear.
We appreciate it if you follow the criteria listed below as it ensures a smooth and effective reviewing process for our staff, as well as consistency in the way our articles are presented.
MENA Affairs reserves the right to make editorial and stylistic changes to all articles we publish. All revisions will be shared with the author.
Content and format:
The word limit on our opinion pieces is between 1,000-1,400 words. Please try not to exceed this amount.
Articles must be factually correct and have a clear argument or opinion that offers a new or interesting perspective on a given subject related to the Middle East and North Africa region.
Articles should be based on contemporary issues and up-to-date discussions circulating within the scope of our site.
Avoid technical details and jargon to ensure your arguments are conveyed as clearly and simply as possible, in order to provide an understandable analysis for our broad readership.
Overall an engaging language style is required to ensure our articles appeal to a broad audience.
Try to keep a high keyword density in your article. In addition, please list at least three keywords in your submission.
Your article must have a subtitle that summarizes the argument or indicate the main question you answer in no more than 40 words.
Please provide a professional author photo and a short biography in your submission.
Fact-checking:
MENA Affairs ensures its readers are provided with an accurate and up-to-date analysis. Consequently, authors submitting opinion pieces need to ensure that references to external news sources, incidents, events, historical facts, etc. are hyperlinked within the article so that the MENA Affairs editorial board can verify them.
Concrete facts like dates, people’s titles, names, distances, and addresses need to be verified by the author by using standard references like official websites. It is especially important to check the spellings of people’s names as they may be different in the English language.
Language:
MENA Affairs utilizes the American variant of English.
Grammar:
Ensure that your grammatical tenses are consistent throughout the piece and that a sentence does not accidentally change tense halfway through.
People should always be referred to using the pronoun “who” (not “that”).
Please avoid using passive tense wherever possible.
Punctuation:
Quotation marks should be double (“ ”) and not single (‘ ’) unless you are quoting within a quotation or in the title of the article. False starts and extraneous syllables like ‘umm’ should be omitted.
When the name ends with “s” and requires a possessive apostrophe, we use Abbas’, Hamas’ etc.
Country abbreviations such as US and UK do not need full stops after each letter.
Other than country abbreviations, when using one for the first time, please specify the full name before the abbreviation in brackets e.g. Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). After that, if the name is repeated in the text, the abbreviation should be used.
Style:
Official job titles or positions, such as president, prime minister, secretary of state etc., should be lower case when they act as common nouns. If they are used before a name or to address a person, then they must be capitalized.
Numbers from one to nine should be written out unless referring to time and date or preceded by a currency symbol. Numbers 10 and above should be numerical: 100 and 1,000… and 10,000 and 100,000 (Not 100 thousand) until you reach one million, two million, nine million, 11 million, 12 million…
Numbers starting a sentence should always be spelled out e.g. Five hundred people attended the conference.
Please use the metric system for all units of distance (centimeters, meters and kilometers) and weight (grams, kilograms, etc.).
Percentages are to be denoted as “%” if in the title of an article and in all other cases as “percent.”
Choose your words carefully, as the language we use makes a difference.
When quoting a source in your submission, whether it is an individual, a report or an official, please keep it as short, brief and simple as possible in order to better communicate the scope of the source’s message.
Dates:
Dates should be written as follows: July 18, 1996.
We follow the month-day-year format in which commas are placed after the day and year. Dates should be written as follows:
Writing the month and day in a text: The protests took place on June 14.
Writing the month, day and year: On October 29, 1999, he left the country.
How to write the century:
The century should be in numerals without an apostrophe ‘s’ (ex. The song was a big hit in the early 2000s).
How to write the decade:
The decade should be in numerals without an apostrophe ‘s’ (My grandfather passed away in the 1990s).
Where to submit:
Please email articles to info@menaaffairs.com
For security reasons, do not attach articles in the form of a word document; rather paste them into the body of the email. We try to reply to every submission, however sometimes we are unable to do this during busy times. If you do not hear from us within two working days, please remind us through another email.
Honorariums:
An honorarium is paid to the authors. All submissions must be original and exclusive to MENA Affairs. If the submitted article has been published elsewhere, an honorarium is not paid to the author.