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The purpose of this paper is to study the Algerian experience with the Arab spring by identifying the nature of the protests movements in Algeria, to search the adaptation mechanisms of the Algerian political regime with the protest act and to answer the question: why the change in Algeria is so hard to happen? Next, this paper will expose a range of the most important political bets to understand better the Algerian exception by searching the roots of the crisis which has been overcomed in searching a radical and real reform. Finally, this paper will be concluded by addressing the prospects of political, institutional and economical changes and by exposing a future scenarios of the hard transition in light of internal and external challenges.

The Islamic Republic's foreign policy, grounded in a revolutionary commitment to Shi ʿ i transnationalism, has long been viewed as a central mechanism for securing Iran's regional influence and post-revolutionary identity. Yet recent developments, most notably the June 2025 war with Israel, raise critical questions about the sustainability of this approach. While much scholarship has explored Iran's identity-driven foreign policy, less attention has been paid to the chronic contradictions it generates within Iran's ontological security framework, or how these contradictions both shape and constrain Iran's regional conduct. This study approaches the problem by theorising Iran's predicament as an ontological trap, a condition in which identity-affirming foreign policy routines produce chronic insecurity rather than stabilisation. It introduces the concept of a security dilemma of influence to explain how transnational networks (once strategic assets) now provoke nationalist contestation and narrative fatigue in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

This paper adopts the assumption that the series of foreign interventions which served to transform the Syrian crisis from a domestic revolution into a regionalized, and later globalized, conflict were not the result of factors intrinsic to the revolution itself, but rather the consequences of dramatic changes sweeping across the entire Middle East following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The fallout from 2003 included the collapse of the former tripartite of Arab regional powers: Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. For the first time, the non-Arab regional powers of Turkey and Iran came to be directly involved in intra-Arab affairs. The latter effectively had an overland border tying it to Syria's Mediterranean coast once the US withdrew the bulk of its military forces from Iraq in 2011. While the Syrian regime had worked to strengthen its ties to both Ankara and Tehran in the wake of its losses following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Syria would fall victim to regional power politics between its two regional neighbors. Once the Syrian revolution was militarized, in response to the Damascus regime's iron-fisted approach to peaceful popular protests, Turkish-Iranian rivalry over the future of Syria quickly became bloody. In an attempt to limit the extent of influence not only by Turkey but also its ally Iran, the Syrian regime resorted to seeking out additional foreign support, latterly from Russia.

The seventh Annual Conference on Democratic Transition focusing on External Factors and the post-2011 Democratic Transition in the Arab Region. The conference, which is being held by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies on 21-22 September 2018, examines the nature of regional and international roles and their impact on the transition to democracy in the Arab countries following the revolutions of 2011.

Iraq’s former foreign minister Naji Sabri al-Hadithi provides an account of the details of the campaign led by the United States against Iraq on August 2, 1990. He explains the measures Iraq took in the period between March 1991 and March 2003 to avoid a second war that was clearly on the way. According to this testimony, the United States began its preparations to wage another war on Iraq the day after the end of the first war, which was brought about by Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. The testimony includes details of the egregious measures that prepared Western public opinion to accept waging another war on Iraq despite the cooperation the country exhibited with American demands. It also explains how many of the measures employed under the cover of international legitimacy aimed to impoverish Iraq and destroy its foundations.

The fall of Mosul on June 10, 2014 following the assault by armed factions, with ISIL at the forefront, represented a major point of transformation for the political scene in Iraq, particularly following the withdrawal of the Iraqi military and police, and the succession of cities in northern and western Iraq that fell to ISIL. This paper looks at the accelerating developments in the Iraqi crisis since 2014. It tries to understand and describe the event, and presents two current narratives: the first is that ISIL is the only actor responsible for the planning and implementation of what happened and is happening; and the second observes the revival of the Sunni opposition movements in the context of the Anbar uprising against the Iraqi government. The paper reviews the positions of the forces active internally: the Iraqi government and its allies, the armed factions and their allies, and the Iraqi political forces participating in the political process, and externally in the region and on the global scene.

The National Index for Democratic Transition in Iraq is a local initiative to measure democratic progress in Iraq, in an environment marked by multiple foreign indicators, which — despite their importance — are mostly based on general information derived from media or political reports. Some of their sources are neither documented nor qualified. National Index for Democratic Transition in Iraq is conducted by the Governance Center for Public Policies, a think tank based in Baghdad, to meet the need for an index based on a local perspective. A team of Iraqi academics from different disciplines contributed to building the index, and it has been conducting annually since 2018, with four reports published to date. Prepared specially for Siyasat Arabiya, this text represents a summary of the results of the four reports, and the state of democratic transition in Iraq, nearly two decades after the US invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

This study distinguishes between three Interrelated theoretical approaches prevalent in writings of researchers seeking to understand the emergence of the Islamic Resistance Movement, "Hamas". The first of these approaches examines the movement from the portal of ideology, stressing the importance of international and regional dimensions and the rise of political Islam after the "setback" (Naksa) of the 1967 Six Day War. The second approaches Hamas as representing a social movement seeking to revisit the historical narrative of Palestinian society. The third considers it to be the heir of the Palestinian national liberation movement, attributing its rise to transformations witnessed in Palestinian identity and the Palestinian community's definition of itself. Although the three readings do not contradict each other, a focus on one of them can lead to oversimplification or exaggeration: emphasis on the first approach is at risk of overlooking transformations in the movement in its later stages and a marginalization at the micro level of local dimensions; emphasis on the second approach can result in the overestimation of the effectiveness of collective action; exaggerated emphasis on the third approach deprives social actors of their effectiveness. Hence this study proposes situating Hamas in the intersection of these three approaches.

This article discusses the failure of the Iraqi political elites to resolve the key problems brought about by the occupation of Iraq in April 2003, even after the declaration of the Iraqi constitution in 2005. The article holds that the new constitution could not be implemented and was unsustainable for purely internal reasons. It was unable to provide answers to the new questions and facts, and the new tactical alternatives it created to produce hybrid regimes from 2006 were incapable of overcoming the structural crisis of the regime. This was especially the case since the attempts described as consensual, aimed to preserve the delicate political situation on the basis of the existing balance of power—rather than on the basis of a governing frame of reference accepted by all—did not transform into binding political conventions for the political groupings representative of the ethnic and religious components of Iraq, and at a minimum did not transform into agreements respected by all sides.

ISIL is the legitimate child of the crisis of the political regime that developed in Iraq after 2003. The eight-year rule of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki instituted a monopoly