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​نشرت إدارة الشرق الأوسط وآسيا الوسطى في صندوق النقد الدولي، عام 2018، تقريرًا حول "الاندماج الاقتصادي في المغرب العربي"، واصفة إياه بمصدر النمو الذي "لم يُستغلّ بعد" . ينقسم التقرير إلى ثلاثة فصول في نحو 40 صفحة، وهي: فصل حول العلاقات الاقتصادية بين بلدان المغرب العربي، وفصل حول المنافع المترتبة على تعزيز الاندماج الإقليمي في المنطقة، وفصل حول الأهداف المشتركة على مستوى السياسات في بلدان المغرب العربي. وكعادة منشورات صندوق النقد، جاء التقرير ثريًّا بالجداول والأشكال البيانية، فضلًا عن الملاحق البيانية.

​​​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.​

​In this section you will find the most important documents on democratic change in the Arab world. In this issue, we publish documents highlighting the political movement in Tunisia demanding democracy and look at the main political changes in Sudan, Iraq and Jordan in March and April 2022.

The debate continues over the "Arab Spring" revolutions and the evaluation of their results continues, especially within the framework of the "success-failure" dichotomy, based on sociological analysis tools that generally emphasize their shortcomings. This study argues that these revolutions have reformist goals with value-oriented and normative contents touching on the core of the political question, which are no less important than material goals such as regime overthrow. Attempting to provide an alternative interpretation of the Arab situation through a different epistemological approach, this study aims to demonstrate the non-material political content of the Arab revolutions by incorporating normative and sociological ideas and conceptions into a new conceptual and methodological approach. Accordingly, the study adresses the political dimensions of revolutionary demands: the decisive rejection of authoritarianism and affirmation of political rights. While attempting to refute the assessment of the Arab revolutions as a failure to achieve democratic transition, it posits that the non-material revolutionary purpose is to highlight a "return to politics" as a basis for future political and democratic change. This is a call to rethink all aspects of Arab politics and to establish new foundations for a contractual relationship between the state and society that meets the conditions of the time.

This study measures Arab public opinion regarding Palestine, whether it is considered a central Arab issue or only a Palestinian one. It analyses how Arab citizens define themselves as either “one nation”, meaning that every Arab populace is part of a larger nation with shared concerns and destiny or as belonging to individual “nation states”, where country is defined by its own specific characteristics and concerns. It also analyses the relationship of this belief to their outlook on the Palestinian issue. This study focuses on the ACRPS Arab Opinion Index results since 2011.

This study examines the role of identity, ideas, norms, and interests in shaping the Arab regional order across different historical periods, building on Alexander Wendt's constructivist approach. It critically evaluates both the explanatory power and inherent constraints of this approach in explaining regional dynamics within the Arab region. The study focuses on pivotal junctures linked to major events such as the Baghdad Pact (1955), the 1967 defeat, the Gulf War (1990), the Iraq invasion (2003), and the Arab Spring (2011). It demonstrates how these events reshaped regional identities through competing narratives and dominant dichotomies, where actors' legitimacy depended on their ability to impose narratives and redefine core issues. The study concludes that identity politics and normative frameworks played a central role in shaping regional policies and dynamics. Regional conflicts mainly manifested as struggles over ideational factors and positional roles rather than crude power maximization. Although constructivism offers valuable insights into how identity shapes regional interactions, its explanatory scope remains partial. As with all IR theoretical perspectives, it emphasizes certain dimensions while neglecting others.

This paper compares the results of the Fragile States Index issued by the Fund for Peace, a charitable organization, with indicators established in the Arab Opinion Index, an annual survey undertaken by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in a number of Arab countries. These indicators reflect the assessments provided by Arab respondents of economic, social and political issues and what their views mean in light of the specific country contexts. The paper also examines whether citizens' views can be relied upon as indicators of the vulnerability of the state and the extent to which the indicators of state vulnerability are accurate by comparing them with the opinions of citizens in different areas. In this context, based on the Arab Index survey, the paper relied on nine indicators out of 12 adopted by the Fragile States Index in order to interpret economic, social and political opinions expressed by respondents.

This presentation reviews the development of public administration research in the Arab world and its relationship to public policies, with a focus on research that relied on studying the development of the field in the US experience. It suggests that the political, economic and social environment, as well as values remain essential determinants of academic and practical work in public administration, and that the pursuit of global frameworks and models remains subject to an understanding of environmental factors. The same applies to the field of public policy. Siyasat Arabiya thus devoted this special issue to shed light on the field of public administration and public policies in the Arab world. It presented comparative perspectives of the status of public administration research and public policies, with a view to asking questions, inviting researchers and those interested in public administration in the Arab region to consider issues and research methodologies in matters of public affairs, and calling for the development of a research and teaching agenda that engages with points of intellectual and methodological discord that characterize the field in the West.

This study evaluates the strength of the legislative bodies in three Arab countries both on paper and in public opinion. It utilizes an existent measure, the parliamentary power index, to gauge the strength of parliamentary bodies, before comparing that with public perception. The study asks if the power given to legislative bodies reflects the actual impact on policy from the point of view of Arab citizens. This study uses the questions in the ACRPS Arab Opinion Index on the legislative councils of Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait, in comparison with the parliamentary power index, to make this assessment.

This paper explores Arab public attitudes towards the proliferation of nuclear weapons across the Middle East. The results of the Arab Opinion Index presented here indicate that a majority of the Arab public has an in-principle opposition to the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Nonetheless, there are important caveats to this opposition: Israel’s present-day monopoly of nuclear weapons is a limiting factor to this principled opposition. Respondents to the survey, who also overwhelmingly view Israel as the country which poses the single greatest to regional security, contend that Israeli possession of nuclear weapons justifies other states in the region seeking to obtain them.