Mapping regional definitions
What Is the Middle East, Exactly?
Seven institutions draw the region in seven different ways.
The Middle East has no single universally agreed boundary. Governments and international organizations group countries differently depending on whether they are thinking about economics, diplomacy, statistics, agriculture or regional security.
Scroll to see how the map changes ↓
World Bank
Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan
01
World Bank
The World Bank groups the region as Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan .
Its economic geography stretches west across North Africa and east to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
02
U.S. Department of State
The State Department uses the term Near East for the countries handled by its Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.
Its diplomatic map is considerably narrower than the World Bank's economic region.
03
United Nations
The UN statistical system does not simply use one region called “the Middle East.”
For this comparison, we use its grouping of Northern Africa and Western Asia .
04
OECD
The OECD's regional governance programme uses another version of Middle East and North Africa .
Mauritania appears here, while countries included by other definitions disappear.
05
FAO
The Food and Agriculture Organization calls its operational region the Near East and North Africa .
Again, the border changes according to what the institution needs the region to do.
06
IAEA
In 1989, the International Atomic Energy Agency confronted the boundary problem directly.
Unable to rely on a single official UN definition, it adopted a working geographic definition of the Middle East for its study.
07
A regional security definition
A League of Arab States technical committee proposed another definition for a Middle East weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone.
That proposal drew the region around Arab League members together with Iran and Israel.
Where the definitions overlap
So where do they agree?
Some countries appear in nearly every institutional definition. Others sit on the region’s shifting edges.
Where the boundary gets fuzzy
The edges are where the argument is.
The biggest disagreements are not usually over the region’s core. They appear around its political and geographic edges.
About the data
How this comparison works
Methodology
This project compares seven institutional definitions of the Middle East and related regional groupings across a common universe of 33 countries and territories.
Each country receives one point every time it appears in one of the seven definitions. The consensus map shows how many of the seven include each country.
Notes: The IAEA definition is based on a 1989 study and has been translated into present-day geography for this project, including treating the two Yemens listed at the time as modern Yemen. The Arab League example comes from a technical committee proposal for a Middle East WMD-free zone.
A note on definitions
These sources do not all set out to answer the same question. Some are economic or administrative regions, some are statistical groupings, and others were created for diplomatic, agricultural or security purposes.
The comparison therefore shows how the boundaries of the region shift depending on institutional purpose rather than treating any one definition as definitive.
Sources
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