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The 2016 Arab Opinion Index is the fifth in a series of yearly public opinion surveys across the Arab world. The first survey was conducted in 2011, with following surveys in 2012/2013 and 2014. The 2016 Arab Opinion Index is based on face-to-face interviews conducted with 18,310 individual respondents in 12 separate Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. Sampling followed a randomized, stratified, multi-stage, self-weighted clustered approach, giving an overall margin of error between +/- 2 % and 3% for the individual country samples. The overall samples guarantee probability-proportional-to-size (PPS), ensuring fairness in the representation of various population segments. With an aggregate sample size of 18,310 respondents (50% of whom were men and 50% women). The Arab Opinion Index remains the largest public opinion survey covering the Middle East and North Africa. The fieldwork was carried out by an overall team of 840 individuals (half of whom were women), who conducted 45,000 hours of face-to-face interviews, covering a total of 760,000 kilometers across the population clusters sampled.

The paper provides indications and analysis of the positions of the most influential Shia powers and parties in Iraq after the fall of the predominantly Sunni city of Mosul and the rise of the Islamic State group in 2014. In addition to the Najaf-based supreme Shia religious authority led by ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shia parties represented in government since 2003, the paper shed light on the increasingly powerful Iran-backed armed groups Popular Mobilization (Hashd Sha'abi) and how their appeal, visibility and influence had changed after the fall of Mosul. The question of the Iraqi national identity and how it interacts with the Shia identity is addressed in the paper in light of the discourse of the Shia powers and relations between Shia Iraqis and other communities.

This paper presents an overview of Arab public opinion towards US policies in the Arab region at a turning point between two US administrations. The findings, taken from the 2016 Arab Opinion Index, show that the Arab public has a complete lack of trust in US policies towards their region. The paper explores the evolution of Arab public perceptions of US policies through successive polls of the Arab Opinion Index, and analyzes the factors driving negative Arab public perceptions of US foreign policy in the region, asking whether these are driven by religious, cultural, political or ideological reasons. With the Obama Administration handing over to Trump, the author examines the Arab public expectations of a change US foreign policy towards the region.

​Arab narratives of the June, 1967 War remained limited in scope even today, 50 years after the cessation of hostilities. “The June, 1967 War” was held in Doha, Qatar from June 20-22, 2017, the three-day meeting was devoted to studying the events of the war and its ongoing repercussions through the prisms of military history and strategic analysis.

​Qatari foreign policy presents a challenge for students of international relations. Whereas major theories within the field tend to privilege structural factors in explaining the action of states, and particularly small states, in the case of Qatar, the quality of leadership and the strategies that leadership employs to navigate through the structural constraints—primarily geography—are equally important. One of the main findings of this paper is that the strategies adopted by the Qatari elite since 1995 did alleviate many of the structural constraints which the country would otherwise have faced. Moreover, during the short-lived Arab Spring of 2011-2013, Qatar tried to reshape the political landscape in the Middle East to its favor, challenging the two regional hegemons Saudi Arabia and Iran, in Egypt and Syria respectively. Yet, the paper concludes, geopolitical factors and the relative capabilities of states remain instrumental in assuring a state’s sustained capacity to continue playing a key role. This is particularly true in a region where elite thinking continues to be defined by realpolitik.