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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 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.

​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.

عنوان الكتاب: الطائفة، الطائفية، الطوائف المتخيلة. المؤلف: عزمي بشارة. سنة النشر: 2018. الناشر: المركز العربي للأبحاث ودراسة السياسات. عدد الصفحات: 822 صفحة.

In 2015, Lebanon witnessed the emergence of a massive contentious movement, known as "You Stink", in response to the unfolding of the waste crisis when the main landfill known as "Naameh" was closed. Though other opposition movements preceded it in the post-war period, "You Stink" succeeded in positioning itself as a threat to the continuity in power of the informal pillars of political power- the "politically relevant elites". Accordingly, the aim of the paper is to identify first those who are influential in framing national political agendas, hence targeted by the movement itself. Second, based on semi-structured interviews conducted with key activists within "You Stink", the paper provides an exploratory analysis of the zu'ama's receptivity to it, unpacking the strategies employed to neutralize the movement. It concludes that in addition to obstructive strategies put into play by the zu'ama, certain operative caveats within the movement itself, acted as "political opportunities" to the former's capacity to neutralize and weaken the movement.

The premise of this study is the belief that there is a crisis in contemporary liberal democracy resulting from the tension between two traditions: one democratic and the other liberal. The spread of right-wing populism in the West is not a new phenomenon, but rather a new manifestation of what may be called a permanent crisis of democracy. The study distinguishes populism from totalitarian ideological movements that gain popular support through demagogy and incitement against the other and reviews existing tensions in the structure of liberal democracy. The paper finds that populist rhetoric is channeled through tensions in the structure of liberal democracy and translates social anger into criticism of the democratic system itself, by using one component of a complex democratic system against another.

Donald Trump's election as President of the United States came as a surprise for many. His positions on international trade, climate change, the future of the EU, NATO, and relations with Russia have sent shockwaves throughout the western world. Although these ideas never constituted a coherent philosophy, if transformed into policy directions, they would threaten the very foundations of the Liberal World Order as commonly understood today. Even if Trump does not act on the most radical pledges made during his election campaign, by positioning himself as the antithesis of the Obama administration he would still bring notable change to US foreign policy. The extent of that chage is now open to question as leaders and publics around the world are bracing themselves for what comes next.

The paper investigates and analyzes the regional and international interactions with the conflict in Libya, focusing on the period following the December 2015 political agreement in Skhirat, Morocco. The paper argues that this agreement is the result of a limited consensus among domestic and regional forces. These forces have moulded their foreign policies, over the course of the conflict, based on a balance between concerns over the political and economic effects of the Libyan democratic transition and their interests and ambitions for greater control and influence. The conflict of interests between the external forces was a substantial factor along with other internal determinants that have contributed to obstructing the democratic transition process. Therefore, this paper explores a series of research questions, mainly focusing on the role and behavior of the influential external forces in Libya's domestic politics.

Military interventions in Sudanese politics can be attributed to a number of factors, most pertinently: excessive politicization throughout society, social institutions, trades unions and syndicates as well as educational and religious institutions. In this sense, the Sudanese was not an exception, merely one of many highly politicized institutions. This paper concludes that the three different military coups which took power in Sudan were only able to do so with the aiding and abetting of civilian political forces, such as the National Umma Party, the Islamic Front and an array of leftist forces all—to varying extents—colluded with the military to further their political aims. With the military ranks reflecting wider societal politicization, military coups were effectively an extension of the political process by other means.

Since the mid-1990s Morocco has traversed several stages of political and constitutional reforms. These were characterized by a restructuring of the political field in keeping with constitutional methodology and political consensus and were the precondition for the process of rapprochement between political actors. However, if this rapprochement or political openness transformed the electoral process into something diminished in practical terms, it in turn intensified the expansion of the protest arena, the accumulation of skills and experience among protesters, the development of more independent coordination capabilities, and the weakening of the regime's polarizing tendencies. This development imposes upon the political class a renewal of its discourse and means and modalities of communication, in the short and medium terms, to prevent continued erosion of its credibility.