Latest Articles

This study aims to define the interests and goals of the United States in the Arab region by answering two main questions: how does the Obama administration differ from its predecessors in view of its promises of change, particularly following the tragic transformations raging in the Arab region at present? And to what extent does the strategy of this administration reflect its public diplomacy regarding democracy, freedom, and justice in the region? The study explains how Obama raised the ceiling of expectations when he did not limit his promises to a change in American policy only, but included putting an end to the mentality that had pushed the United States into war. Despite the difference in style and method between the Obama and Bush Junior administrations, the overall goals and the regional strategy can be summarized in terms of three key interests: the priority of ensuring free access to energy supplies in the region; maintaining American supremacy over all other global powers; and the containment of all Arab objections to ensure the dominance of the US strategic agenda in the Arab region, including the guarantee of Israel's security.

​The study is premised on the assumption that the US-Iranian tensions under the Trump administration represents a new chapter in the crisis in the US-Iranian relationship. This extreme hostility was related to US domestic politics and the bordering on personal rivalry of President Trump with his predecessor, President Barack Obama, in domestic and foreign policy. One of the most important policy manifestations of this administrative divergence concerns the Nuclear Agreement with Iran, signed in 2015. Opposition to the Nuclear Agreement united Gulf players such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, who considered shared hostility towards Iran as a bridge to strengthen their relations with the US on the one hand; while also forming a strong front, in the presence of Israel, to weaken the Iranian regime without necessarily replacing it.

A chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime on August 21, 2013, led to a massacre of civilians in the towns of East Ghouta and West Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus and marked a turning point in the Syrian conflict. US President Barack Obama had previously undertaken to respond militarily if such an attack took place, provided that Congress would support such a decision. Such a direct US military intervention remained likely despite opposition among the American public and within Congress itself, up to and until a Russian proposal, quickly accepted by the Assad regime in Damascus, which would place all of Syria’s chemical weapons under international supervision before they were destroyed by Moscow. This paper examines how the Obama White House dealt with the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime. The paper also deals with declining international interest in a diplomatic resolution to the Syrian crisis, with the world community now shifting its focus from punishing the Assad regime to accepting the destruction of those weapons.

This study breaks from the prevailing discourse portraying minorities as victims, presenting them as multi-dimensional historical actors and analysing their relationship with political modernity and national construction. It demonstrates how sectarian differences were sharpened and Ottoman culture facilitated the manipulation of minority groups by religious elites and the ruling clan. The Assad regime, supported by Alawi clientelism, fuelled fear of Sunni Islam. In addition, the revolution that began in 2011, accompanied by severe violent repression, has turned into a civil war. The Assad employs sectarian vocabulary that targets the Sunni majority in favour of the Shia minority and Iran. It views Damascus as the capital of minorities, seeking to restore demographic change in Syria. The study discusses factors to encourage a pluralist future Syria and focuses on the issue of the state model that must be redefined, taking into account the existence of all sects that share the same political culture, and all of them, including the Sunnis, demand guarantees.

An agreement signed by the Russian Foreign Minister and his US counterpart in Moscow has taken observers by surprise due to its timing and the surrounding circumstances. The agreement in Moscow was the natural culmination of a series of events impacting the situation in Syria, including changes to the composition of Barack Obama’s Administration and an overall shift in American attitudes towards the Arab Spring. This has presaged a change in American vision towards its interests in the wider Middle East region and Washington’s relations with both regional powers and global players with influence on the Syrian conflict. Finally, the agreement can be regarded as an expression of American uncertainty, as well as the Obama Administration’s inability to formulate a coherent policy towards Syria two years into the revolution.

Since the mid-1990s Morocco has traversed several stages of political and constitutional reforms. These were characterized by a restructuring of the political field in keeping with constitutional methodology and political consensus and were the precondition for the process of rapprochement between political actors. However, if this rapprochement or political openness transformed the electoral process into something diminished in practical terms, it in turn intensified the expansion of the protest arena, the accumulation of skills and experience among protesters, the development of more independent coordination capabilities, and the weakening of the regime's polarizing tendencies. This development imposes upon the political class a renewal of its discourse and means and modalities of communication, in the short and medium terms, to prevent continued erosion of its credibility.

This study examines how international economic and political matters are interrelated within the context of the Covid- 19 pandemic's outbreak as well as its serious effects on global economy. It argues that the International Political Economy (IPE) may provide answers to how the pandemic shapes (or fails to shape) international economic relations. The paper explores how, as a transdisciplinary field, IPE helps to understand patterns of change and continuity in global economics and politics in the wake of the pandemic, and IPE's contribution to global health research as well. The study defends the hypothesis that the state has been and is still present at the heart of neoliberal capitalism, and that it has preserved its foundations within a heterodoxy neoliberal trend heading towards more authoritarian neoliberalism, and steadily moves from market to state neoliberalism. The study also advocates positioning the Political Economy of Health at the center of health research; as long as health is considered a transnational issue. It goes on to discuss the failure of international institutions to enable international cooperation to confront the pandemic, a failure forged by the rise of nationalist populism.

This study builds on the assumption that any change in the structure of the international system in the foreseeable future cannot be immediately ascribed to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, even if the pandemic is purely incidental and unable to change the existing distribution of power, this does not mean it has not introduced a dialogue within International Relations on the impact of epidemics on the structure of the international system, and their ability to intensify some essential - economic, social, and political - factors that contribute to international system change. International power balances before the outbreak of the pandemic indicate the beginning of change of the international system, as if it has been moving towards multipolarity, particularly with many rising powers, such as China, Russia and the European Union, whose international interests challenge those of the US, especially as the latter persistently impedes any rise of rival powers in the foreseeable future.

This study builds on the assumption that any change in the structure of the international system in the foreseeable future cannot be immediately ascribed to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, even if the pandemic is purely incidental and unable to change the existing distribution of power, this does not mean it has not introduced a dialogue within International Relations on the impact of epidemics on the structure of the international system, and their ability to intensify some essential - economic, social, and political - factors that contribute to international system change. International power balances before the outbreak of the pandemic indicate the beginning of change of the international system, as if it has been moving towards multipolarity, particularly with many rising powers, such as China, Russia and the European Union, whose international interests challenge those of the US, especially as the latter persistently impedes any rise of rival powers in the foreseeable future.

​The study is premised on the assumption that the US-Iranian tensions under the Trump administration represents a new chapter in the crisis in the US-Iranian relationship. This extreme hostility was related to US domestic politics and the bordering on personal rivalry of President Trump with his predecessor, President Barack Obama, in domestic and foreign policy. One of the most important policy manifestations of this administrative divergence concerns the Nuclear Agreement with Iran, signed in 2015. Opposition to the Nuclear Agreement united Gulf players such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, who considered shared hostility towards Iran as a bridge to strengthen their relations with the US on the one hand; while also forming a strong front, in the presence of Israel, to weaken the Iranian regime without necessarily replacing it.