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Documents of Democratic Transition in the Arab World in Algeria and Sudan.

This study examines the role played by the youth of Morocco, turning this generational group into a political and social force capable of proposing alternative solutions to Morocco's political impasse, introducing dynamism and alternatives along the path to democracy. The question which frames this study is: to what extend did Moroccan youth contribute to the reshaping political culture in the country? How do Moroccan youth conceptualize the transition to democracy, and what happened to their demands? The author adopts a sociological definition of a "generation," meaning that it does not define a generational cohort as a homogenized social group but rather represents a set of people with a shared set of anxieties surrounding their position in relation to other (previous) generations.

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.

Why is the GCC, which is now in its fourth decade, still a weak defensive organization? This paper tries to explain the dilemmas of collective security in the Arab Gulf region. The paper first elucidates the concept of collective security, which forms the theoretical framework for this study. It then reviews the main sources of threat to Gulf security. It then offers a discussion of security dimensions and defense cooperative between the GCC states, and a detailed analysis of the dilemmas of collective security in the GCC, as well as of the features of the proposed collective security system.

Civil society rests on the principle of economic independence from politics, deemed to be a long-standing precondition to limiting the despotism of a political authority and its ability to wreak havoc on society. The paper poses the question of why civil society has thus far failed to materialize in Algeria, despite the existence of political pluralism in the country dating to the 1989 Constitution. The author contends that the persistence of rentierism in the Algerian economy has enabled the country’s government to prevent the rise of a genuine civil society in Algeria, despite the de jure acceptance of political pluralism in the country. The government has been able to use the levers of a rentier economy to subdue the political elites and dominate society, effectively controlling the political fallout of economic liberalization. The paper goes on to survey the political economic context, which led to the failure of a democratic transition in Algeria, by exploring how private capital was unable to echo the catalyzing role played by the European bourgeoisie in the democratization and political modernization of their continent.

The pattern of authoritarianism in Arab states has popularized the view that elections are a mere formality with no real political weight and are thus unworthy of study. Therefore, the field of electoral studies, in Arabic, has not received enough attention, despite being one of the most important thematic branches in contemporary political science. This paper defends the importance of exploring this field in Arabic, and employing approaches advanced by social sciences. It briefly presents the historical development of elections in the region since the 19 th century, which shows that elections are not a political act alien to the region, rather a well-established practice in several Arab contexts, if not always an expression of democratic rule. It introduces questions raised by contemporary Arab elections, which require answers that go beyond the standard descriptive and legal approaches that have dominated research on the matter so far. The presentation demonstrates the potential of structural approaches to provide analytical theoretical frameworks for understanding voter turnout and participation in the Arab context.