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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 study addresses the issue of armament and the security dilemma in the Maghreb region, focusing on the rivalry between Algeria and Morocco. It argues that the armament level of the two countries has risen significantly in recent years, in the context of structural rivalry, making the Maghreb region one of the most heavily armed regions in the world, despite the absence of existential inter-Maghreb threats. The study attempts to examine the armament issue in the Maghreb and to understand its determinants and developments, focusing on the factors that influence it and on its likely consequences. Adopting the realist approach as a theoretical framework, it analyses SIRPI's data to demonstrate the high volume of Maghreb military expenditure and its evolution, and examines the Maghreb armament and its determinants and military risks. The study concludes that: the armament of the two countries reflects their competition over leadership and their threat perceptions; the armament dynamic is independent from the inter-Maghreb political tensions; the existence of a potential military confrontation between the two regional powers due to the interaction between emerging factors and structural ones.

This report chronicles some of the most significant developments relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict during 28/2/2015-30/4/2016.

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.