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The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and its capture of vast territories in the Fertile Crescent, has confounded the political calculations of a number of all major political players invested in the Arab region, including regional and global powers. With the failure of regional actors to contain the group, the United States was forced to backtrack on its military withdrawal from the region—when it pulled its troops out of Iraq—and become involved, anew, in the Middle East.

Sponsored by the “Safer World” foundation, based in the United Kingdom, this meeting held at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies examined possibilities for the spreading of peace and stability across conflict hotspots around the globe.

This paper explores public attitudes to pan-Arab issues, specifically, the question of intra-Arab relations and intra-Arab cooperation. The results, based on a series of public surveys conducted for the Arab Opinion Index, indicate that a majority across the surveyed countries agree either with the statement “The Arab peoples constitute a single nation, even if certain specificities distinguish the specific peoples”. In contrast, only 14% of the respondents agreed with the view “That the Arab peoples are entirely distinct nations tied together by only tenuous bonds”. This broad consensus among respondents in the countries surveyed is further evidenced by respondents’ answers to a number of other points, such as support for increased intra-Arab cooperation and respondents’ reported desire for increased economic, political and military cooperation between Arab countries.

Book Title: The Hashemite Arab Federation in British Documents: The Complete Official British Archive on the Hashemite Federation between Iraq and Jordan 1958 [Arabic]

​This report highlights some of the major milestones of the Arab democratic transition. The countries covered include Tunisia, Egypt, Libya,Syria and Yemen.

The Iranian nuclear agreement was the result of a pressing domestic need. This paper discusses the factors that pushed Iran to sign a nuclear deal and argues that the circumstances under which Hassan Rouhani became Iranian president meant he had to achieve a political détente in foreign relations within 100 days in office. Moreover, this pressing détente had to address the issue of sanctions. The successive rounds of US and Western sanctions drained the “resistance economy” and pushed it to resort to “heroic flexibility in diplomacy” whose lines were drawn by Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei. This paved the way for a change in politicians’ rhetoric and performance vis-à-vis relations with the US.

Book Title: The Boy Remains Missing [Hebrew] Original title: הילד עדיין איננו Author: Shoshi Zaid Year of publication: 2016 Publisher: Tel Aviv: Media 10 Pages: 248

Qatar is on a path to ever widening global production and trade, its networks today including the entire global market. This paper discusses how the economy is no longer governed by the system of the nation-state alone, as new types of actors in the economic field appear. The private sector has gained the primary role in fields of production, marketing, and global competition, causing some theorists to say that globalization has put the state’s role in the shadow of globalization, predicting an end to the state. Others, however, say that though it has removed restrictions and barriers on the flow of goods, capital, labor, values ​​and cultures, globalization does not toll the demise of the role of the state as much as it promotes the role of national authority in the management of economic, social, civil, cultural, and scientific activities. The general global trend toward the international reality of gradual global institutionalization allows the overcoming of barriers and other enormous challenges that lie ahead. This study discusses a number of issues related to globalization and the opening of old borders, it reviews the trend toward institutionalization of international action on issues such as terrorism, war, and environmental crimes, as international law has taken a step forward to develop mechanisms of judicial action

This study explore the concepts of populism and “the people,” linking them to ideology, hegemony, and the making of modern sport in Western liberal-capitalist democracies. While populism is widely seen as a useful way to understand oppositions between “the people” and elites, This study particularly interested here in what happens when self-styled populist political leaders actually govern, ostensibly on the people’s behalf. To illustrate this, the study consider two examples of self-styled populist leaders from different eras – Benito Mussolini and Donald Trump – that have used sport to promote narrow, ideologically laden, conceptions of “the people.” Through these examples the study argue that the concept of populism on its own does not provide a comprehensive understanding of political and cultural struggles in sport today, nor does it provide adequate guidelines for oppositional political strategies.

Fish Letters, Memoirs of General Hamdani: Iranian Patronage over Syria [Iranian]