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This paper discusses international competition in Latin America between the United States, Russia, and China. Whilst the United States aims to maintain its traditional influence in the region based on the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 , which made Latin America a zone of exclusive influence for the US due to its geographic and economic significance. Russia and China instead seek to challenge this influence, on the one hand in the face of American expansionism in their respective vicinities, and on the other to bring about a multipolar global order. Moreover, the region is of economic importance to those states. The study arrives at the basic conclusion that the US still has the greatest military and economic presence in Latin America, but Russia and China have managed to penetrate the region by establishing military relations with anti-US regimes, most prominently Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Moreover, China has become an important trade partner to countries such as Brazil and Argentina, surpassed the US in trade volume with these states.

An analysis of the strategic documents produced by the United States can play a significant role in understanding the comprehensive visions of successive administrations in dealing with the outside world. However, these documents cannot present a day-to-day picture of what a given administration might do amid rapidly evolving crises. In analyzing each document, these day-to-day strategic concerns, which in fact govern each US strategic document, must be taken into account. This study attempts to analyze the text of the 2015 UN national security strategy by taking into account the international context, its goals, priorities, and governing principles. The analysis carries out an assessment of six key strategic indicators in the strategy document, as well as nine indicators of change compared to the 2010 document. This paints a picture of the larger vision of the Obama administration and the White House, which will shape US foreign and security policy until the end of his term.

The purpose of this paper is to document Qatar's recent contribution of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. We consider Qatar as an example of a mini state that relies on its wealth and soft power to further its interests in the Middle East and support a beleaguered Arab-Muslim state. The paper carries out analysis of Arabic newspapers and other documentary evidence to contextualize and estimate Qatar's financial contribution from 2010 to 2016. Contextualizing Qatar's aid necessitates considering Israel's military control of the Palestinian Territories, and its ability through hard power to regulate the inflow of aid to Palestine. The paper concludes by calling for adopting the political economy perspective in dealing with humanitarian aid.

This book offers an in-depth examination of Qatar's hosting of the 2022 World Cup through an international relations lens. It explores Qatar's objectives, mostly at the international level, that drove the decision to host the event.

This article is a contribution to the ongoing debate regarding the changing dynamics of global power relations, which seem to be heading toward an inevitable end of the unipolar world order dominated by the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. It demonstrates that through highlighting the rising global power of China and Russia, which is currently causing a substantial threat to the US hegemony. As such, the continuation of this trajectory in the upcoming decades will likely lead to the emergence of a tri-polar world order, whereby the international system will be shared among the US, China and Russia. Methodologically, this article primarily relies on content analysis and thorough scrutinization of recent official foreign policy and national security documents issued by these actors in order to provide an in-depth understanding of the respective strategic vision underpinning.

Beside the military and external challenges, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are facing serious domestic non-conventional challenges, i.e., the demands of political reform, social mobilization, demographic imbalance, environmental deterioration, resource depletion, the transformation and diversification in post-oil economy, terrorism and radicalization etc. In particular one of these new kinds of threats has started to be significant in the last decade. The massive immigration and demographic imbalance between local citizens and foreign residents in countries like the U.A.E, 10 percent; Qatar, 15 percent. This imbalance and the massive immigration into the GCC countries increased the vulnerability of these states, especially since it relates to other critical security issues such as human security (food security for example, in UAE is an example, the country import almost 95 percent of its food consuming) radicalization, energy security, and domestic unrest especially after 2011.

The aim of this Study is to provide policy options for Pakistan in relation to the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) dispute with India. A special focus is on the crisis following the Indian revocation of J&K's special status in August 2019. Since then there is not just a complete blackout in J&K but also another low in the India-Pakistan relationship. Based on the analysis of the diplomatic support that Islamabad has received from the international community in general and the Muslim world in particular, this paper argues that Pakistan has to mainly rely on what it can do on its own. By examining how the present crisis is a direct outcome of how this conflict has transpired and evolved over the last seven decades, this paper draws a series of measures which the Pakistani government can take at its own and in collaboration with international actors to obtain support for a sustainable solution to the J&K dispute.

In an effort to understand the characteristics of "virtual communities" and specifically "information societies," this study attempts to test the argument that virtual communities, with their networked structure, pose a challenge (or represent an alternative) to traditional hierarchical structures, due to the former's ability to self-organize, and settle their internal disputes without the need for authoritative intervention. The study uses the case study approach, applied to 3 Wikipedia's edit wars. The chosen cases are related to a number of Middle East informational crises. The study concludes that mechanisms of virtual societies (e.g. self-organization) can work efficiently in cases of limited disputes, but in cases of sharp disagreements, traditional (hierarchical) mechanisms that include authoritative intervention and exercising some form of power, in a "top-down" approach, remain essential for conflict resolution. This implies that the factor of "authority" remains significant even in the context of virtual communities.

Multiple International Relations theories brand the international system as anarchist. What is meant by anarchy here is the absence of a central authority at international level to settle conflicts between actors in the international system. This is why states always seek to attain more power, but to do so they cannot adopt idealist policies in the global arena. This theory applies to the way international powers dealt with the Arab revolutions in 2011. International interests in some cases played a key role in the revolutions' development and outcomes. This study characterizes the nature of the international system on the eve of the Arab revolutions and analyzes the degree to which these revolutions interacted with the international system and their outcomes based on the characterization it infers.

This book examines the political, economic, historical, cultural, and linguistic relations between GCC countries and the Horn of Africa, highlighting the region's strategic significance to the Gulf.