Latest Articles

Book Title: The Women of Palestine in the Struggle to Live [Arabic]

​The Arab Spring caught its breath in Tunisia after political, syndicalist, and legal forces reached a series of agreements that shaped the features of a second republic. In these matters, Tunisians made great strides on the path of establishing democracy for their country. This has been manifested through the practice of peaceful alterations of power and the transformation from rule based on electoral legitimacy to one based on consensual legitimacy and the formation of a new constitution. This will put the country on par with developed countries at least in terms of normative constitutional matters. However, the new democratic experience faces many economic and social difficulties that should be taken into consideration in order to avoid the possibility of losing all of these gains. The aim of this paper is to observe these concerns and explain them through description and analysis. First by examining important features of the Tunisian transitional prototype, and then presenting the important difficulties facing this new experience.

​The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies devoted its second Annual Conference for Arab Policy Research Centers to studying the Palestinian cause. “The Palestinian Cause and the Future of the Palestinian National Project” brought together representatives from over 60 research institutes from across the Arab region on December 7-9, 2013.

Rights groups and social movements in Egypt, including the April 6 Youth Movement developed the Transitional Justice Law based on previous experiences worldwide such as the South African one. Tunisia, which was the starting point of the Arab revolutions, beat Egypt to it by cooperating with the Ministry of Justice in South Africa. In 2003, Morocco established the Equity and Reconciliation Commission to look into human rights abuses from 1956-1999. This paper discusses the possibility of implementing the notion of transitional justice in Egypt and tries to use an approach that puts the national reconciliation and transitional justice mechanisms in their wider framework, i.e. democratic transition and institutional reform based on negotiations with political forces. The paper explores the philosophy of transitional justice, the organizational qualities that contribute to its success and the conditions that help overcome any arising challenges or possible resistance.

Book Title: The Virtual Public Sphere in the Syrian Revolution [Arabic]

Iraq’s former foreign minister Naji Sabri al-Hadithi provides an account of the details of the campaign led by the United States against Iraq on August 2, 1990. He explains the measures Iraq took in the period between March 1991 and March 2003 to avoid a second war that was clearly on the way. According to this testimony, the United States began its preparations to wage another war on Iraq the day after the end of the first war, which was brought about by Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. The testimony includes details of the egregious measures that prepared Western public opinion to accept waging another war on Iraq despite the cooperation the country exhibited with American demands. It also explains how many of the measures employed under the cover of international legitimacy aimed to impoverish Iraq and destroy its foundations.

This article discusses the failure of the Iraqi political elites to resolve the key problems brought about by the occupation of Iraq in April 2003, even after the declaration of the Iraqi constitution in 2005. The article holds that the new constitution could not be implemented and was unsustainable for purely internal reasons. It was unable to provide answers to the new questions and facts, and the new tactical alternatives it created to produce hybrid regimes from 2006 were incapable of overcoming the structural crisis of the regime. This was especially the case since the attempts described as consensual, aimed to preserve the delicate political situation on the basis of the existing balance of power—rather than on the basis of a governing frame of reference accepted by all—did not transform into binding political conventions for the political groupings representative of the ethnic and religious components of Iraq, and at a minimum did not transform into agreements respected by all sides.

Book Title: De quoi la Palestine est-elle le nom? [Translated into Arabic]

In the past two decades of the twentieth century, global politics witnessed significant transformations in the structures of international actors and their patterns of interaction. Among these was the rise of decentralized governments that were granted greater powers and authorities, enabling them to advance their economic, cultural, and political interests and to participate alongside the central government in managing foreign affairs. This phenomenon, known as paradiplomacy, contributed to restructuring relations between the center and the peripheries on the one hand and between the peripheries and the outside world on the other, posing new challenges to the state system established by the Treaty of Westphalia, upon which the modern international order is based. The paper concludes that this phenomenon can offer the state an opportunity to achieve the desired balance between control and guidance as part of its efforts to maintain its traditional functions and its status as a Westphalian actor within a system of multi-level and multi-layered global governance characterized by complex and overlapping relationships.

Scholars studying the Middle East often challenge the IR discipline's Eurocentric framings of the world by emphasizing the particularities of the Middle East, which defy and challenge the universality of Western-rooted IR theories. Social constructivism, focusing on agency and processes, has been regarded by many as an approach with the potential of taking into consideration specific historical, ideational, and cultural contexts in the Middle East region. Social constructivism, as developed by Alexander Wendt (1992 , 1994 , 1999), seems to lend itself especially well to adaptations to provide insights for the Middle East. This article revisits some aspects of Wendt's constructivism and explores its applicability in the Middle East. The article examines Wendt's cultures of anarchy to show how cooperative relations transform into conflict through processes of interaction. I examine how the Middle East provides both a potential and challenge to his argument by examining the case of Saudi relations with Hamas, with a particular focus on the episode of the 2009 Gaza war. The article examines the puzzle of how Saudi Arabia changed and evolved over the years from supporting Hamas and the Palestinian resistance to identifying it as an enemy, despite sharing pan-Islamism as a collective identity.