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This section monitors the most prominent political documents related to the democratic transition in the Arab world. In this issue, we publish a collection of documents from Tunisia, Sudan, Iraq, and Syria, covering the period from March 1 to April 30, 2023.

Hardly a day passes without seeing or hearing the terms 'extremism' or 'extremists.' Used today to describe political views and attitudes, or methods in political action, the terms today are linked to particular images, and hold specific implications charged with prejudice, half-truths, and presumption. This paper asks: Is the term extremism useful to understand the ideas, views, or practices of those who are labeled as such? Are there common traits among those labeled as extremist that renders this label a useful concept in the classification of the ideas of political groups and their objectives and methods? Or, is 'extremist' simply an expression of a negative attitude agreed to by those with a specific view with the aim of ostracizing specific groups? It then poses an even larger and more critical question: How do groups of people reach the point of burning bridges with existing reality in order to carry out a fight using violent methods? The paper argues that analyzing ideology per se to reach an answer to this question is futile, be this ideology nationalistic, religious, classist, or otherwise.

​This study traces the evolution of the sporting boycott of Israel from its inception and its impact on the colonial system of Israeli apartheid. It contextualises the development of this boycott in major international sports tournaments over the past decade, and how the outbreak of the Arab revolutions in late 2010 gave additional impetus to Arab youth to boycott Israel and sports in particular. Their boycott went hand in hand with their demands to end tyranny and autocracy, giving Arab athletes an opportunity to transform major international sports tournaments into a space for political action. The paper argues that the sporting boycott of Israel emerged in the last decade as a political tool for athletes and assesses the impact of this campaign in international sports tournaments on Israel's international reputation, its sports brand, and its diplomatic efforts related to marketing its emerging sports entrepreneurship.

​This report highlights some of the major milestones of the Arab democratic transition from 1/5/2016 to 29/6/2016

This paper discusses the proposition of the rise of social Islam in Morocco by studying the country's two largest political Islam movements, the Justice and Charity Association (jamāʿat al-ʿadl wa-l-iḥsān) and the Unity and Reform Movement (ḥarakat al tawḥīd wa l-iṣlāḥ). It focuses on the concept of social Islam which implies the provision of financial and in-kind assistance and healthcare, education, athletic, artistic, and pedagogical services to a variety of social strata. The study proceeds from the rise of social Islam, how it relates to the concept of the urban poor under the development "crisis" Morocco has faced since the 1980s, and highlighting the social implications for the most important social stratum: the lower middle class and the poor. The study shows that the Islamist movements under study have managed to form new and old bonds of solidarity on a religious or tribalist basis, which have replaced traditional forms of solidarity that previously used to embrace the lower and lower middle classes.

​It was mostly British colonisers who came to consolidate the political, economic and military interests of the motherland and did what they used to do: play football. Apart from spending their time, football worked as a colonial instrument both "civilising" and "disciplining" the colonised populations. The first clubs in North Africa and the Levant restricted membership for non-Westerners and non-whites, but soon football also became a transnational transmitter of independence movements, the stadiums becoming important social spaces on the local and national levels. Such was the emancipatory force of football that it has been preserved across the region ever since the colonial era, prominent again in the Arab Uprisings. However, the massive wealth of the Gulf States and their decision to invest in football's soft power has changed the equation. The article thus describes emancipatory and counter-emancipatory trends in MENA football history from a longue durée perspective.

Documents of Democratic Transition in the Arab World

This study examines the role played by the youth of Morocco, turning this generational group into a political and social force capable of proposing alternative solutions to Morocco's political impasse, introducing dynamism and alternatives along the path to democracy. The question which frames this study is: to what extend did Moroccan youth contribute to the reshaping political culture in the country? How do Moroccan youth conceptualize the transition to democracy, and what happened to their demands? The author adopts a sociological definition of a "generation," meaning that it does not define a generational cohort as a homogenized social group but rather represents a set of people with a shared set of anxieties surrounding their position in relation to other (previous) generations.

This article draws from structurationist and symbolic interactionist sociology, seeking to build a bridge between the realist–liberal and rationalist–reflectivist debates in the field of international relations. In doing so, it argues against the neorealist claim that self-help is given by anarchic structure exogenously to process. It further argues that self-help and power politics do not follow either logically or causally from the anarchic structure of the international system, but are generated by process rather than by structure. There is no logic of anarchy apart from the practices that create and instantiate one particular structure of identities and interests rather than another. Self-help and power politics are institutions, not essential features of anarchy – anarchy is what states make of it. The article explores three ways in which identities and interests are transformed under anarchy: by the institution of sovereignty, by an evolution of cooperation, and by intentional efforts to transform egoistic identities into collective identities.