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External influence has played a central role in the Yemeni conflict. Powers seeking to extend power and establish dominance have manipulated Yemen’s diversity as a way to gain influence. Other powers seem to be using Yemen as a way to step into regional power vacuums. At the same time, diplomatic activity has been used as a way to maintain interests and sustain polar uniqueness. Each of these areas of influence are key to understanding the current conflict and for determining a path ahead. This paper examines these avenues and specifically looks at key developments leading up to the current conflict. These include the six wars waged by Ali Abdullah Saleh against the Houthis, the political game shifts in Yemen, the weakening of the state and other factors that led to the take-over Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa.

Oil is not just related to economics but is also connected to political development. This paper looks at the effect of oil on democracy by relying on a theoretical and empirical study using the tools of descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and statistical tests in the light of political economy in the form of the “resource curse.” It studies how authoritarian regimes have used hydrocarbon resources to prevent democratization by means of a range of mechanisms such as the tax impact, group formation, the effect of spending, and repression. The statistical analysis reveals that there is a statistically-significant inverse relationship between democracy and oil production. It can be said therefore that the oil states are less likely to become democratic. Although most Third-World states have been afflicted by the resource curse, it is not possible to view it as inevitable, but rather the result of dependence on the track represented by the inability to diversify resources or weakness in doing so. The resource curse does not apply to all states rich in natural resources, such as Norway.

In recent years, phrases such as “migrant crisis” and “illegal migration” have gained increased currency as means of describing larger waves of migration to Europe. International law rests on the assumption that refuge and asylum are always “legitimate”, thus failing to provide a justification for the use of terms such as “illegal migration”. As a response, in this paper the author adopts the term “illicit migration” to refer to undeclared migration which does not pass through official channels, and which, he argues, is a clearer expression of the phenomenon currently underway, in which large numbers of migrants seek to secretly enter the borders of their destination countries. The topic under discussion has particular importance due to the reflexive way in which European countries tie migration to extremism. This has spurred European nations to increase reliance on an “iron shield” erected to isolate themselves from those landing on their shores from the southern end of the Mediterranean, and with no distinctions made between refugees legitimately seeking refuge from armed conflict and those seeking to “ride the wave”.

This paper addresses the implications of the transformation of the international system from a bipolar to a unipolar system for realist theory. The paper demonstrates and analyzes how realists react to this external challenge. The paper demonstrates the traditional response to the "attack" on realism, in an attempt to preserve its basic premises. It then proceeds to explain the different revisionist orientations undertaken by the theorists of this school in an attempt to harmonize the foundations of this theory with unipolarity. The study deals with four revisionist approaches: "balance of threat", "soft balance", "balance of interests" and "external balancing". This paper presents a new addition, "internal balancing" which, while derived from the liberal theory opposed to realism, comes with a realist adaptation to explain the length of the current unipolar era.

​عنوان الكتاب: الجيوبوليتيك الكونفوشيوسي: تصوّرات الصين الجيوبوليتيكية للحرب الأميركية على الإرهاب. عنوان الكتاب في لغته: Confucian Geopolitics: Chinese Geopolitical Imaginations of the US War on Terror المؤلف: نينغ أن Ning An. الناشر : Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. سنة النشر: 2020. عدد الصفحات: 194 صفحة.

عنوان الكتاب في لغته: The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations : Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers. عنوان الكتاب: النّضال من أجل الاعتراف في العلاقات الدولية: القوى الراهنة والتعديلية والصاعدة. المؤلّف: ميشيل موراي. سنة النشر: 2019. النّاشر: Oxford University Press. عدد الصفحات: 280 صفحة.

The Strategic Studies Unit Conference of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies held a symposium on August 29, 2022, entitled "Ukraine: Conventional and Unconventional Military Developments and Foreign Fighters", attended by three researchers specialising in security and strategic studies, Omar Ashour, director of the Strategic Studies Unit and head of the Critical Security Studies Graduate Programme (MCSS) at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Kacper Edward Rekawe, postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, and Hamish de Bretton-Gordon are chemical weapons advisers to NGOs working in Syria and Iraq. He is a former commanding officer of the UK Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment and NATO's Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion. It was chaired by Sidahmed Goudjili, Assistant Professor in Critical Security Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.

Looking at the results of the mid-April 2015 presidential and parliamentary elections in Sudan, the paper reviews the changes that have occurred amid the last presidential cycle under al-Bashir (2010-2015). The election results are analyzed against a background of the South's succession when Sudan lost two-thirds of its oil revenues and entered a severe economic crisis, and a period when war erupted in the South Kordofan and the Blue Nile states, and unrest continued in the Darfur states. This will also be put into the context of a collapse of Islamist powers in Sudan, the decline of the role of the Islamic movement in the political process, President Bashir's exclusion of Islamist leaders who defected form Sheikh Hassan al-Turabi, the rise of generals to power, and their control of the leadership of the Islamic movement itself. Further, the implications of the broad boycott of the elections, the loss of trust in the national electoral commission, and the implication of the growing number of independent candidates are taken into account. Finally, the paper examines Sudan's disengagement with Iran its attempt to return to the Arab fold as a last attempt to buy additional years for the ruling regime.

We seek, through this special issue, to contribute to the broader scholarly effort aimed at rethinking the trajectory of the formation of the Arab state and its evolution into its current form, by deconstructing its internal structure and analyzing its dynamics in light of its own conditions and contexts. The studies included in this issue also aim to move beyond ready-made and complete interpretive frameworks by approaching the Arab state as a historical, political, and social entity with its own internal logic and distinct paths of development, rather than reducing it to imported explanatory models or external normative projections.

The changing structure of International Law has always been a contentious issue because of the analytical and practical contradictions imposed by the concept of Solidarity whether its international or humanitarian sense.