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The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, in Doha, organized two seminars dealing with the reality of the popular movement and its prospects and the mechanisms of democratic transition in Sudan and Algeria within the framework of a series of seminars held by the Center for Political Studies at the Center.

Trends in Arab public opinion regarding the role of the external factor in democratic transition show a great deal of importance, in spite of the fact that citizens of the Arab region do not believe that the external factor is the fundamental impediment to democratic transition there. This paper presents trends in public opinion on the Arab Spring revolutions, focusing on Arab citizens' evaluations of the revolutions themselves and their subsequent standstill. It also presents trends in assessment of the policies of world and regional powers by analyzing the results of polling regarding the USA, Russia, Turkey and Iran, with the aim of investigating Arab citizens' opinions on issues of democratic transition.

Book Title: The Syrian Kurds: Reality, History, Myth [Arabic]

​This introductory essay highlights the considerations that prompted this in-depth look at the state of political science in Arab academic institutions, and made it essential. For political science, and the humanities and social sciences more generally, play a central role in any societal renaissance. Our experience of teaching graduate level political science at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies has already indicated to us that the situation of the discipline in Arab universities was not at all rosy. This impression was confirmed by many studies, conferences, and forums organized by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, which revealed a huge gap of knowledge in the field. This made it imperative to undertake an evaluation of what Arab universities were offering in their efforts to guide students to master the discipline up to global standards. The studies in this special issue, and the following one, highlight a multi-layered crisis in the field, impacting teaching, research, and employment prospects. The studies point to the late arrival of the discipline in the region, the limited areas covered, inadequate resources, and a lag behind international achievements in the field. The crisis is complicated by a number political, economic, social and structural obstacles that hold the discipline back from achieving its potential. This introduction summarizes and assesses the findings of the studies included in this special issue, and the second part in the following one, one emergence, evolution and achievements of the discipline, and the impediment obstructing its progress and maturity in the region. It focuses on case studies from Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, and Tunisia, adding surveys and reflections on methodologies and theoretical challenges. It concludes that despite some major achievements and progress, the biggest obstacle to progress in the discipline remains the absence of viable scholarly communities, both regionally and nationally in in each country. The essay offers proposals to address this problem.

Book Title: Syria’s Via Dolorosa to Freedom: An Attempt at Contemporary History [Arabic]

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 experience of the Troika in government in Tunisia is a unique one when compared with developments in other Arab Spring states during the transitional period. The Troika was based on an alliance between more than one party, with the forces making up the Troika coming to power via the ballot box. The government formed represented the free will of the Tunisian people and represented them in the constitutional assembly. The experience of the Troika in Tunisia no doubt faced various obstacles, but it recorded some important successes. This study tries to examine the nature of the tripartite ruling alliance, its composition, the level of concord or discord between its components, how solid the alliance is, and its ability to endure in the face of the challenges of the coming political stages and milestones. It concludes that the Troika was able to survive despite factors pulling it apart, dissonance between its components, and the difficult political obstacles that warned of a real split in its structure. It is expected that the experience of a tripartite rule will be repeated in different circumstances, perhaps most significantly in terms of the Tunisian opposition forming a united front to take on the Troika.

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.

This paper presents in-depth, eyewitness testimony to the progress of events through the earliest stages of the Syrian revolution, and chronicles how the protests spread. Specifically, it covers the junction when a de-escalation of the protests became difficult, once demands for regime change were solidified on the part of the protestors.

In September 2018 it will have been thirteen years since the referendum on the reconciliation plan in Algeria. This paper considers the details and achievements of the plan by investigation of the concept and objectives of national reconciliation and the historical framework of the Algerian crisis, critiquing the plan in order to establish new horizons for reconciliation. It examines the historical context of Algeria's national reconciliation, and then the chronology of the path to national reconciliation. It then moves on to study the Algerian journey of reconciliation through a thorough reading of the draft Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation. Finally, the paper determines the extent of the advances made in establishing peace and coexistence in the Algerian homeland and also identifies some of the gaps in the reconciliation experience, and suggests ways to unlock potential achievements.