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International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity [Translated into Arabic]

​According to Jonathan Grix and Fiona Carmichael, when implementing national sport policies, one of the governments' main objectives is to invest funds into gaining international prestige. Although these national sport policies' objectives have also been identified by several other leading scholars in sport governance, research proposing a measurement of these policies' success or failure remains scarce. In fact, to evaluate if countries have reached international prestige through sports, researchers tend to generally refer to the Olympic Medal Table, while the newly created soft power indicators, the "Soft Power 30", "Soft Power Index" and "Global Soft Power Index" have not managed to use appropriate sport rankings to measure countries' capacities to use sport as an instrument of soft power. The objective of this paper is to identify the inaccuracies of these commonly used indices and propose a new ranking that would evaluate whether the national sport policies implemented by governments have succeeded in developing soft power.

This study examined representations of the Israeli military establishment in the U. S. elite press, focusing on aspects of power and morality. it poses a key question: How did the Israeli military establishment appear to be represented in the American elite press after October 7 , 2023. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) techniques alongside a review of relevant literature and secondary sources to uncover the characteristics of the representations constructed by media narratives. This is achieved through reflective thematic analysis of in-depth reports from a sample of American elite press outlets, represented by three major publications: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy. The findings reveal that much of the journalistic discourse has focused on the moral dilemma surrounding the Israeli military's actions. The moral reputation of the Israeli military establishments, once central to its image, has suffered significant erosion. Additionally, the analysis highlights notable shifts in the perception of power, self-defense, technological and qualitative superiority, and the image of victory.

Revolution is coupled with the state, and thinking about the former is linked to investigating the other, whether in history or political theory. Therefore, the Arab revolutions, as they were overthrowing the authoritarian regimes, had to evoke ideas about the state. This evocation would necessarily lead to an interrogation of the reality of the “nation state” and its future. The problematic dealt with directly in this paper, therefore, is whether the nation state was a subject for the revolution or a framework for it? On this analytical horizon a great many ironies and questions become apparent: is the revolution a sign of the decline of the national state and a decisive closure to a whole period when the state declared the impossibility of modernization and democracy? Or is it a late consolidation of the legitimacy of the nation state as the institutional expression of a national group, with the event of the revolution forming the pinnacle of its coalescence as a political nation? Does the idea of the nation state require burying once and for all, or does it need reconstruction? Was the Arab Spring a revolt against nationalism(s) or was it their maturation and the culmination of their consolidation?

Developments in the international system have led to a diminishing role of nations within international affairs.

Cyber-attacks are considered a new battlefield to be added to the list of conventional threats facing the world. This paper analyzes this growing phenomenon of internet cyber-attacks and sheds more light on the virtual world. The dimensions and effects of this threat transcend political and geographic borders, and its repercussions jeopardize states’ national security and biosecurity. The study exposes issues and consequences of hacking and cracking operations initiated by internet pirates or hackers and “anonymous” groups. The study also touches on the reach of this virtual world that has overcome distances and that should be taken as a guiding light to better address the new threats of this phenomenon on real life.

This paper offers insights into the Crisis of Liberal International Order by combining Ibn Khaldun's theory of change with scholarship on liberalism and race. We argue that the crisis emerges from the incongruence of two features of liberal order: a binding feature (or 'assabiyya) of white supremacy and liberalism's principles of equality. The crisis is an outcome of a normative political order that can no longer balance a material and discursive reality of racialised hierarchy with ideals of equality. The crisis cannot be reduced to bad leadership or a technical failure to enact liberal values. Instead, attempts to think beyond the crisis must acknowledge the incongruence between white supremacy and liberal equality. Through this diagnosis, we gesture towards the constructive use of "non-Western" theory in the discipline of International Relations.

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.