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This paper investigates the factors that have led to the collapse of Baath-ruled Syria. It argues that the abandonment of the rentier – distributive economic system that had traditionally propped up the social base of the Baath party (labourers, farmers, and rural populations) and the adoption of liberal economic policies was key to the crisis. The end of the Cold War, the passing of resistance discourse, with the start of the Middle East peace process, and the information revolution have contributed to weakening the cultural and ideological hegemony of the Syrian Baath-ruled state. This led to increasing reliance on the security apparatus to control an increasingly young and educated society. The loosening economic grip of the state resulting from the abandonment of the public sector, and the rise of crony capitalism accompanied by the declining role of political socialisation (in schools and universities), and the loss of control over the flow of information, left the regime with no other option but resorting to violence to deal with the crisis. The peaceful opposition movement hitherto was transformed into an armed revolution, and then into a regional and international proxy war, with the rising role foreign interference in the crisis.

​The fall of authoritarian regimes across the Arab region has uncovered a range of structural fissures within Arab society, unleashing unprecedented, pernicious exploitation of identity politics adopted by a range of local and international actor. Today, sectarian prejudice and stereotypes have seeped into not only the media in the Arab region, but also its academic discourse.

The recently announced discovery of gas off the coast of Palestine will turn Israel from an importer of gas into a producer or even an exporter. This study casts light on the likely geopolitical implications of these discoveries for Israel, for the Middle East, and for the course of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In light of a comprehensive overview of the regional energy map, the study considers the main regional implications of these discoveries, including economic and financial effects for Israel, its strategic position in the region, the effect on the dispute between Lebanon and Israel over maritime borders, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Another significant effect concerns the dispute between Turkey and Cyprus which has led to economic, political, and military rapprochement between Israel, Cyprus, and Greece in recent years, and has the potential to develop into a new strategic axis between those three states. The study also deals with the American-NATO dimension and the efforts of the United States to dampen down the crisis in the region. There is also a Russian dimension reflected in the concern of Russian energy companies with these discoveries and their efforts to participate in exploiting them. In conclusion, the paper puts forward a vision of the future around the importance of Arab coordination to confront the future challenges arising from these discoveries for the Arab region and for the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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 article traces routes taken by social and political research to explain the state's role in relation to economy and society, and in explaining policies and government activities. Pluralist and structural functionalist approaches commanded the landscape of political science and sociology in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, and before that in nineteenth century Europe, all centering around society. But a shift occurred with the "Keynesian revolution" culminating in current research that emphasizes the state as a powerful and influential actor in political and social processes, by virtue of its policies and typical relationships with social groups. The emphasis of contemporary study on the state is a theoretical reclamation of the role it played in familiar works of leading German scholars such as Max Weber and Otto Hintz. This article discusses the role and capacity of the state, as detailed through various texts.

The Islamic Republic's foreign policy, grounded in a revolutionary commitment to Shi ʿ i transnationalism, has long been viewed as a central mechanism for securing Iran's regional influence and post-revolutionary identity. Yet recent developments, most notably the June 2025 war with Israel, raise critical questions about the sustainability of this approach. While much scholarship has explored Iran's identity-driven foreign policy, less attention has been paid to the chronic contradictions it generates within Iran's ontological security framework, or how these contradictions both shape and constrain Iran's regional conduct. This study approaches the problem by theorising Iran's predicament as an ontological trap, a condition in which identity-affirming foreign policy routines produce chronic insecurity rather than stabilisation. It introduces the concept of a security dilemma of influence to explain how transnational networks (once strategic assets) now provoke nationalist contestation and narrative fatigue in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

The basic hypothesis of the study is summarized in Israel's ongoing efforts to maintain its monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East for as long as possible, and its various political, diplomatic, security, military, and economic activities to prevent Iran and any other country in the Middle East from obtaining nuclear weapons. The study examines Israel's policy, which calls for imposing the maximum international economic sanctions on Iran, manifested in its complete abandonment of the nuclear project or the overthrow of the Iranian regime. It presents Israel's policy towards the negotiations to return to the Iranian nuclear deal and the strategic confusion in which Israel finds itself due to many mistaken assumptions adopted by the Benjamin Netanyahu government regarding the Iranian nuclear project. It also discusses Israel's goals in the "war between wars" it wages against Iran and the major strategy against Iran advocated by the Israeli military establishment, as well as Israel's efforts to establish an Israeli-Arab-American military alliance against Iran. The study also presents the Israeli vision of the Israeli military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and the risks and problems it faces.

This study explores the origins of Qatari-US relations, the foundations on which they are based, and the rules that govern them. It begins by examining relations between the two countries from the 1970s up until the Trump era. The paper finds that Qatar's need for US security assurances did not prevent it from adopting independent policies that occasionally contradicted US strategy. Accordingly, the Qatari-US relations have been upended, and exposed to crises due to diverging interests, concerns and challenges. While Qatar has embraced a foreign policy independent of Washington, it has also tried not to alienate it and has established itself as an asset for the US, both in terms of the military facilities it provides and the unique role it plays through maintaining ties with parties that the US cannot communicate with directly. Mutual dependency has enabled Qatari-US relations to overcome all the challenges they have faced over the past three decades, including those that emerged under the Trump administration.

Despite the state attracting considerable attention as a topic of study from Arab thinkers and intellectuals since the 19th century, the study of individual-level orientations toward the state using survey data has remained relatively marginal, both in English and in Arabic scholarship. Indeed, we still do not know much about Arab citizens' positions toward many of the debates that have long been present in Arab intellectual circles regarding the ontological nature of the so-called "Arab state" and the preferable ideological form it should take. This study seeks to fill this gap by focusing on the post-2011 period. It analyses how Arab citizens understand the state, the extent to which they distinguish it from the ruling regime, their orientations toward the ideological debate around the unified Arab state versus the nation-state, as well as around the religious Islamist state versus the civil state. It also examines the individual-level determinants of these orientations.

Book Title: US policy and the Management of International Crises (Iran—Iraq—Syria—Lebanon as examples) [Arabic] Author: Abada Mohammed Tamer Year of publication: 2015 Publisher: ACRPS Pages: 288