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Book Title: The Lost Narrative [Arabic] Author: Farouk Sharaa Edition: 1st Year of publication: 2015 Publisher: ACRPS, Doha/Beirut Pages: 495

Looking at the results of the mid-April 2015 presidential and parliamentary elections in Sudan, the paper reviews the changes that have occurred amid the last presidential cycle under al-Bashir (2010-2015). The election results are analyzed against a background of the South's succession when Sudan lost two-thirds of its oil revenues and entered a severe economic crisis, and a period when war erupted in the South Kordofan and the Blue Nile states, and unrest continued in the Darfur states. This will also be put into the context of a collapse of Islamist powers in Sudan, the decline of the role of the Islamic movement in the political process, President Bashir's exclusion of Islamist leaders who defected form Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi, the rise of generals to power, and their control of the leadership of the Islamic movement itself. Further, the implications of the broad boycott of the elections, the loss of trust in the national electoral commission, and the implication of the growing number of independent candidates are taken into account. Finally, the paper examines Sudan's disengagement with Iran its attempt to return to the Arab fold as a last attempt to buy additional years for the ruling regime.

Examining the Egypt's military coup against an elected president on July 3 2013, this paper compares these summer events with similar experiences of countries that were also in the early stages of democratic development, including Venezuela in 2002 and Algeria in 1992. It looks in particular at the relationships between the "deep state," the "street," and the media in shaping the course of a coup's aftermath. In Egypt, the paper shows, it was the alliance liberal and secular forces with private media companies as well as military institution's reliance on its "deep state" network, which played a central role in mobilizing the street against the elected president Mohamed Morsi. This led to a counterrevolution that brought the tyrannical state and its figures back to power. Reading into the post-coup models Egypt's internal circumstances, regional situation, and the nature of the organization itself (different in many respects from the nature of the Islamist political movement that went through the same experience in Algeria), the paper draws out possible scenarios for the future of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

This study sheds light on European-Russian relations in the energy field, a complex relationship where the political, economic, and social interact. Russia, today, is a key partner in European security issues, and it is impossible to talk about European security without addressing the Russian role and its effect on the European security system. Russia is also the largest exporter of energy to Europe and its main trading partner. The EU, conversely, is the largest consumer of Russian energy exports, and the EU states have important trade relations with Russia. All this makes European-Russian relations in the energy sphere subject to tension between pressure for cooperation and conflict over interests in the balances of power in the international order.

The Gulf states, as a center for oil and gas production, face the challenge of adapting to an increasingly uncertain energy landscape as new resources arrive in the market, and the reverberations of unstable demand and turbulent geostrategic conditions. The great challenge for these countries, in which social peace depends on unlimited consumption of subsidized energy, is to reduce consumption and develop alternative energy sources to conserve traditional fuels for export. The effects of these transformations are significant today, and the economic, social and political stability of these countries, as well as their ability to remain major players in the global energy system is at stake. Renewable energy policies, tailored to the unique political, economic and social conditions of each country, need to translate aspirations into swift practical action to succeed and rejuvenate the option of cooperation within a productive institutional framework.

This section lists the most prominent political documents related to the democratic transition in the Arab world. In this issue we publish documents related to the reaction of Tunisian political currents on the issue of dissolving parliament and dismissing the government, the reaction of the coordination framework of Shiite forces rejecting the election results in Iraq, and the reaction of the Sudanese government and the Sudanese Association to the coup measures taken by the President of the Sudanese Sovereign Council, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan . We will stop when the documents are published between September 1 and October 31, 2021.

The notions of superpower and unipolarity are seriously questioned by heavy trends: non-fungibility and dissemination of power; complexity of transnational interactions and interdependencies. The article argues that because of these mutations, China's rise, achieving the rank of "emerging potential superpower", and the narrowing of the gape on global power resources, the United State, who still have unmatched capacity, will probably be the last superpower in a Cold war era sense. The article concludes that unipolarity is not challenged because the operating interstate dynamics, in which involved actors which are supposed to work for building a multipolar world, contribute in fact to reproducing unipolarity.

This study reassesses the experience of political openness in Algeria within the analytical and explanatory categories of political economy. It is built on the premise that the transition from a totalitarian authoritarian regime to a democratic one presupposes the transition from a rentier economy linked to the external market and dominated by rentier groups, to a productive economy based on the national bourgeoisie exploitation of local labour to create wealth. The study argues that the experience of democratic transition in Algeria faltered due to the failure of the rentier groups to undergo capitalist transformation that could have allowed the emergence of the two main sides of the democratic equation: the bourgeoisie and the working class. The political elites that control the rentier economy were willing to accept political but not economic reforms that could have led to a reconsideration of the hegemonic relations within society and liberated it from the grip of power. In this regard, the failure of the economic reforms introduced by the Hamrouche government (1989 - 1991) was a prelude to the disruption of the democratic transition and prevention of the development of a civil society capable of gaining its independence from authority and, on the other hand, the independence of the Algerian state from the global market.

Yemen’s Comprehensive National Dialogue document presents a key moment in the nation’s contemporary political situation. This paper examines the document with the aim of answering questions like: What are the document’s real outcomes? To what extent does the National Dialogue document meet the objectives of February 2011 revolution and the ambitions of the Yemeni people of building a civil democratic modern country? What are the winning and losing powers in this dialogue? To what extent can the damaged powers hinder the implementation of the dialogue’s outcome? To what extent can the political and social beneficiaries apply pressure on different official and unofficial actors to implement the outcomes of the conference? What are the outcomes that might be implemented and those of which implementations might face obstacles? Giving background to the document and the situation in Yemen, the paper makes an analysis of the document and forecasts its chance of success.​

The fall of Mosul on June 10, 2014 following the assault by armed factions, with ISIL at the forefront, represented a major point of transformation for the political scene in Iraq, particularly following the withdrawal of the Iraqi military and police, and the succession of cities in northern and western Iraq that fell to ISIL. This paper looks at the accelerating developments in the Iraqi crisis since 2014. It tries to understand and describe the event, and presents two current narratives: the first is that ISIL is the only actor responsible for the planning and implementation of what happened and is happening; and the second observes the revival of the Sunni opposition movements in the context of the Anbar uprising against the Iraqi government. The paper reviews the positions of the forces active internally: the Iraqi government and its allies, the armed factions and their allies, and the Iraqi political forces participating in the political process, and externally in the region and on the global scene.