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Any attempts to interpret the Tunisian Revolution of 2011 through the prism of generational shifts raises four major questions. The first two concern the difficulty of attributing to young Tunisians any kind of generational or political consciousness, particularly before the outbreak of the revolution in 2011. The third and fourth questions relate to the concept of the "Generational Theory" itself and its ability (or otherwise) to explain a wide spectrum of social factors. Can the demographic approach sufficiently describe the Tunisian Revolution of 2011? This paper will demonstrate that a demographic approach can illuminate not only an understanding of the Tunisian Revolution, but also of the wider social and political changes which have shaped the country in recent times.

This article explains underlying drivers of the general contours of Chinese foreign policy. Since the Cold War, China has increasingly been playing the role of a major power but demonstrates hesitancy in some theatres and has not developed its full capacities to that end. This article attends to the study of “Strategic Culture”, a framework which helps explain ideas generated from the history, culture, and societal narratives of a state, and which place general parameters that indicate preferred foreign policy options. Strategic Culture does not cause action, but helps define potential acceptable options. It is complementary to other explanations around the importance of factors such as distribution of material capabilities, decision maker’s idiosyncrasies, and alliance commitments. In particular, strategic culture helps understand long-term foreign policy patterns.

This study explores a major predicament afflicting political science, focusing on the impact of ideology on knowledge. The study examines the influence of the "teleological" or ideological dimension, whether associated with the emergence of political science as a field of knowledge in the late eighteenth century, or one which continued during the Cold War era, on the knowledge and methodological structure of political science. The study argues that there is a cognitive predicament facing political science because it has become a "teleological" science in which the relationship between power and knowledge is clearly manifest. Therefore, it seems clear that ideology has an impact on the cognitive and methodological structure of political science. The study is divided into five parts: the first discusses epistemological and conceptual problems, the second describes the controversy and manifestations of the concept of ideology, the third studies the movement of political science between the ideological and knowledge, the fourth presents critical theses on the relationship between the ideological and cognitive in political science, and the fifth forecasts "post-ideology" political science.

The study presents the problems of structural politicization in political studies, and the danger of methodological debates transforming into political confrontations, a situation that has been repeated in the ongoing debate between the advocates and opponents of secularism. The study demonstrated that the necessity of the political dimension, and/or the political dependencies of every "scientific" approach to politics does not necessarily mean acceptance of unrestricted politicization. It is possible to acknowledge the political content of treatment without slipping into politicization. From this standpoint, criticism of underlying or structural politicization, as in Edward Said's criticism of Orientalism and Western Centralism, cannot be compared to the way that Israel's supporters crudely politicize US Middle East studies in their battle to hold it hostage to the interests of Israel and the extreme right. In the same vein, the study critically addresses the opinion that "area studies" in political science is marked by theoretical poverty and academic inferiority. The study itself leans towards the opinion that so called "theoretical studies" are in fact "area studies" that take western countries as the testing ground for political experiences and seek to generalize the results in the form of "theories" that enjoy universal validity.

This study conducts research on the traditional academic methods used in the Arab scholarly community. Specifically, it employs the case of legal science when addressing the following questions: Is the Arab academy in its field suffering from academic dependency? What forms does this take and what are the reasons behind it? Where does reviewing theoretical or conceptual frameworks of legal science fall in this? This study focuses on law as a method of social control in the methodological crisis undergone by the social sciences. This study refers to two crises examined by Arab legal science: identity crisis and functional crisis. These are illustrated by two main indicators: The gap between the quantitative growth of the number of law students and the weak production of legal research knowledge, the gap between the quantitative development of the educational institutions of law and of legal structures.

This study discusses several hypotheses proposed by political culture literature, especially those that adopt a structural approach to understanding the relationship of social structures and institutions to actors, and the values generated by the nature of this relationship that inspire political action. The paper posits that research into the pattern of political culture arising from the relationship between social structures and actors is not limited to studying this direct relationship, but rather requires an examination of intermediary factors. Hence, the study outlines a supportive conceptual interpretive framework, through Pierre Bourdieu's Social Theory. It begins by reviewing the concepts discussed by Bourdieu to explain the relationship between social structures and actors. The second section presents a comparative analysis of concepts taken from political culture and those of Bourdieu that explain the emergence of political culture through the reciprocal relationship between social structures and actors. The third examines the outcomes of this comparison in light of the 2007 Palestinian political division.

This study examines the ability of network technology to challenge despotism regimes. It thus applies two theoretical approaches. The first is the "Prisoner's dilemma" and the "despot/jailer's dilemma" and the second is the "case study", which studies a number of cases of "network technology", whether used by protest groups or by authoritarian regimes, to determine the extent (and direction) of their impact in practice. The study concludes that network technology — through challenging the logic of the "prisoner's dilemma" and reversing it to become the "jailer's dilemma" — can, theoretically, pose an element of weakness for despotism regimes. However, in reality, network technology can be used by these regimes with the same effectiveness, to respond to mass protests supported by technology. This indicates that network technology can be seen as a neutralizing factor, the impact of which should be studied relative to the impact of other factors.

The success and widespread deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) have raised awareness of the technology's economic, social, and political consequences. Each new step in the development and application of AI is accompanied by speculations about a supposedly imminent but largely fictional artificial general intelligence (AGI) with (super-)human capacities, as seen in the unfolding discourse about capabilities and impact of large language models (LLMs) in the wake of ChatGPT. These far- reaching expectations lead to a discussion on the societal and political impact of AI that is largely dominated by unfocused fears and enthusiasms. In contrast, this article provides a framework for a more focused and productive analysis and discussion of AI's likely impact on one specific social field: democracy. First, it is necessary to be clear about the workings of AI. This means differentiating between what is at present a largely imaginary AGI and narrow artificial intelligence focused on solving specific tasks. This distinction allows for a critical discussion of how AI affects different aspects of democracy, including its effects on the conditions of self-rule and people's opportunities to exercise it, equality, the institution of elections, and competition between democratic and autocratic systems of government. This article shows that the consequences of today's AI are more specific for democracy than broad speculation about AGI capabilities implies. Focusing on these specific aspects will account for actual threats and opportunities and thus allow for better monitoring of AI's impact on democracy in an interdisciplinary effort by computer and social scientists.

How is International Relations (IR) taught in the Arab World? What happens to what was once labelled an 'American Social Science' when it enters classrooms in the Arab world and is taught in Arabic? Despite the predominance of Western approaches and theories on the teaching of IR in the Arab World, there is tension between the need to train students in the classical theories as a prerequisite for knowledge production, and the need to adapt them to various political, social, and economic contexts across the globe. This study examines the different approaches to how IR is taught in Arab universities, and how Western theories are considered critically by the teaching of alternative approaches. The paper argues that the different approaches to teaching IR are more versatile theoretically than the range of published papers in leading academic journals in the West. As such, they may prove to be the starting point for new forms of knowledge production that better reflect the realities of international relations in the Arab world.

​​​This study examines virtual public reactions on X regarding BRICS expansion to include three Arab countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It uses a deep learning approach for sentiment analysis to understand reactions expressed by individuals in the 22 Arab League countries. The study aims to understand public opinion towards this expansion and assess how it was received at the bottom-internal level. Given the difficulty of measuring public opinion in non-democratic contexts, the study tracks public reaction to the expansion on X. Tweets from August 24, 2023, to January 7, 2024, are analyzed. The methodology involves collecting a large dataset of tweets, cleansing and tokenizing the data, and attributing sentiment scores using specialized Arabic text-processing tools. The results are presented through data visualization and machine learning models, ensuring a comprehensive analysis while addressing ethical considerations. The findings indicate that public sentiment is predominantly neutral (38.91%), compared to positive (31.72%) and negative (30.09%). This highlight concerns about education, political disengagement, and the technical limitations of applying a data science approach to political science research. It also suggests the inherent challenges of using this method to reflect internalization or engagement in the way surveys and referenda can.​