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The changing structure of International Law has always been a contentious issue because of the analytical and practical contradictions imposed by the concept of Solidarity whether its international or humanitarian sense.

The causal link between economic and political freedom is a complex and interesting debate in the domain of social sciences. To enrich the academic debate on this issue, we have examined the Arab context based on econometric instruments, especially the test of causality. Based on the results of the study, the interactions between economic and political freedom in the Arab world appear to be generally in line with the thesis strongly defended by liberal thinkers, in particular Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek, that there is a unilinear causality in which the first variable leads to the second. This result may seem self-evident in a transformed Arab context, but the reality seems to be more complex. Economic freedom indeed guarantees freedom, the constructing of the national identity and the conditions necessary to ensure individual well-being. However, such freedom is not understood in isolation from political freedom and its social context interactions and cultural structures, in contrast with restricted collective consciousness.

​Qatari foreign policy presents a challenge for students of international relations. Whereas major theories within the field tend to privilege structural factors in explaining the action of states, and particularly small states, in the case of Qatar, the quality of leadership and the strategies that leadership employs to navigate through the structural constraints—primarily geography—are equally important. One of the main findings of this paper is that the strategies adopted by the Qatari elite since 1995 did alleviate many of the structural constraints which the country would otherwise have faced. Moreover, during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2011-2013, Qatar tried to reshape the political landscape in the Middle East to its favor, challenging the two regional hegemons Saudi Arabia and Iran, in Egypt and Syria respectively. Yet, the paper concludes, geopolitical factors and the relative capabilities of states remain instrumental in assuring a state’s sustained capacity to continue playing a key role. This is particularly true in a region where elite thinking continues to be defined by realpolitik.