The region's politics, on one map.

What it is

Tayyar — Arabic for current, as in a political current — places the parties and public figures of the Middle East and North Africa on a single shared frame. 16 axes: where an actor sits on the economy, on religion and the state, on democracy and civil liberties, on the Palestinian question, on the regional contest between resistance and normalization, and more. Put everyone on the same axes and a question that used to be answerable only by feel becomes concrete: is this Lebanese party really to the left of that Egyptian one? Has the Tunisian Ennahda drifted since 2012? Where does a Gulf monarchy sit next to an Israeli coalition? Every position is scored against primary sources by a multi-rater panel — several language models plus a hand-coded prior — and the whole apparatus is open: you can see each score, each source, and every place the raters disagreed.

Why I built it

I built Tayyar because the tool I wanted didn't exist. The infrastructures political scientists use to compare parties — the Manifesto Project, the expert surveys — were built for Western democracies and reach this region thinly, late, or not at all. So comparison across the Middle East and North Africa mostly happened by intuition, or didn't happen. I wanted something anchored in the region's own reference points rather than translated from someone else's; scored in the open rather than asserted; and honest about what it can't yet do. So Tayyar treats a language model as one fallible voice on a panel rather than an oracle, shows its sources and its disagreements instead of a single confident number, and writes its own limitations down. It is a pilot, and it is rough in places — but I would rather build the honest, imperfect version in public than wait on a perfect one that never ships.

— Tarek Gara