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This paper presents an overview of trends in public opinion in four Arab countries—Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine (covering the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) towards events in the Syrian crisis. The data presented in this paper draws on opinion polls, comprising of face-to-face interviews with representative samples within each of the countries named above, and conducted as part of the 2012 Arab Opinion Index. The results of the survey demonstrate that there is no sharp divide in public attitudes towards the Syrian crisis, with firm majorities across all countries believing that an ideal solution to the Syrian crisis lies in the overthrow of the current regime. Only 8% of respondents held the view that the best solution to the crisis in Syria would lie in the total vanquishing of the opposition.

This study deals with the Iranian presidency from two main angles: the first is related to the theoretical and historical givens that surround the foundation of the office of president and its practices in the regime of the Islamic Republic.

Title (original): Transformed by the People: Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham's Road to Power in Syria.

The study criticizes the general framework that has governed the broader current of the researchers in civil-military relations, their method of thinking about the military institution since the inception of the field, the paper presents the theoretical and practical gaps in that literature, in particular the researchers of "Coup-Proofing". The study shows the weakness of the explanatory capabilities of the field in extrapolating and analyzing the historical era that the research seeks to reveal its theoretical and historical ambiguities, which is the phase of political pluralism in Syria between 1954-1958, which the researchers viewed as a democratic phase. The paper examines why did the army step down from the presidency and allowed civil forces to engage in political action at the time, in spite of that phase is in the midst of two series of coups. The paper is based on a basic premise that the army as a military institution do represent wings, sectors, units, brigades, and power relations, before it is an expression of any other social segments, which is in contrast to what the literature says in examining the sociological backgrounds of the officers.

Since the publication of Horowitz's Ethnic Groups in Conflict, comparative political scientists have increasingly converged on their classification of ethnic identities. But there is no agreement on the definition that justifies this classification— and the definitions that individual scholars propose do not match their classifications. I propose a definition that captures the conventional classification of ethnic identities in comparative political science to a greater degree than the alternatives. According to this definition, ethnic identities are a subset of identity categories in which membership is determined by attributes associated with, or believed to be associated with, descent (described here simply as descent-based attributes). I argue, on the basis of this definition, that ethnicity either does not matter or has not been shown to matter in explaining most outcomes to which it has been causally linked by comparative political scientists. These outcomes include violence, democratic stability, and patronage.

This study investigates the role of the police apparatus in Egypt during the 2011 revolution and the subsequent counter-revolution following the 2013 coup. It begins by examining the relationships between the Military Council, President Mohamed Morsi, and the police apparatus. The study then explores how the Ministry of Interior and its security agencies reverted to their previous repressive practices, including extrajudicial killings and torture. The research highlights that the security apparatus remained fragmented, marked by overlapping authorities and a focus on resource competition rather than coordination. However, the existential threat posed by the 2011 revolution compelled the apparatus to unify against the tangible threat of popular unrest. Following 2013 , the military, security and intelligence agencies furthered the suppression of opposition in various forms, largely evading accountability.

This paper presents in-depth, eyewitness testimony to the progress of events through the earliest stages of the Syrian revolution, and chronicles how the protests spread. Specifically, it covers the junction when a de-escalation of the protests became difficult, once demands for regime change were solidified on the part of the protestors.

This paper attempts to study a wider trend of jihadist groups with a globalist outlook, a phenomenon which was not entirely clearly understood when the Syrian revolution broke out. Since only the broad outlines of this trend are apparent, leaving many of the details as yet unclear, the author shall attempt to illuminate the environment in which these groups operate. Specifically, the paper examines “Nusra Front” (known in full as the “Nusra” or “Salvation” Front for the People of Syria). The paper follows the foundation of the group and the circumstances which allowed it to flourish and spread across Syria through to the internal divisions which led to its fragmentation before it made way for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The conclusion of this paper surveys some of the immediate and secondary consequences of the spread of both of these groups.

This study advances a new approach to theorizing the Arab state after the popular uprisings. It does this in two steps. Suspending the western European model of state formation and bringing the Arab world's experience in conversation with other parts of the Global South, it examines alternative state formation and state building sequences, trajectories, and temporalities in the making of Arab states. It thus historicizes the process of state formation and state building in the Arab world as compared to the western European one and other regions in the Global South. This first step liberates us from explicit and implicit comparisons with the European model of state formation. The second step surveys alternative theorizations of the Arab state after the uprisings. Tracing the causal assumptions embedded in these theories reveals how much they rely on the European model of state formation and state building as an implicit point of analytic departure and critical comparison. This survey unpacks the assumptions these theories make about the state, the difference between states and regimes, state and non-state actors, the private and public realms, and the formal and informal sectors. The objective of this study is to not only de-exceptionalize states in the Arab world, but, more importantly, borrowing from Gurminder Bhambra, 'unmake' our understandings of state formation and state building in the Arab world and thus contribute, following Walter Mignolo, to a knowledge production that serves a form of 'epistemic reconstitution' of alternative historical trajectories and possibilities.

​The Contemporary Syrian Studies Unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies held a two-day workshop on November 17 and 18, 2013 during which a group of distinguished Syrian academics, statesmen and political activists discussed a proposed plan for the democratization of Syria which was published earlier in 2013 by the Syrian Expertise Bureau in coordination with the Syrian Studies Center.