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In his paper Yilmaz reviews the main events since Turkey’s June 2015 elections prior to the rerun in November, the main results of the elections, the factors behind the result, and the implications of this for Turkish domestic and foreign policy.

The Moroccan February 20 protest movement came with the mobilization of the Moroccan street through peaceful demonstrations demanding constitutional reforms in the framework of a parliamentary monarchy. The king, keen not to replicate what happened in neighboring states, could not ignore the February 20 movement. This pushed him to announce the program for constitutional reform in his speech on March 9, 2011. The strategy of the political regime to contain and defuse the February 20 movement led every initiative, including the project for the 2011 constitution, to become a resource and weapon in the hands of the authorities, and means for the symbolic and material suppression of the February 20 movement. The constitutional referendum of July 1, 2012, which was backed by the people, and which February 20 called to boycott, represented the beginning of the rapid demise of the movement, because it reinforced the legitimacy of reform, and hence the monarchy. The February 20 Movement represents an opportunity to rethink the meaning of opposition in Morocco, particularly when set against analysis formulated in the 1970s by pioneers such as John Waterbury and Rémy Leveau, who concluded that the opposition, despite its differences and variety of protests, served in the end to reproduce the existing political regime.

The current Sinai issue poses many questions on the nature of the escalating violence there, the reasons for its emergence

This article poses the question of reform of the security sector in the period of Arab democratic transition by looking at the terms of reference for reform, the intersection between security policies and the political regime, and the enabling factors for security reform within an Arab context. The fundamental question facing Arab states concerns how to couple security and freedom and security and rights and justice. That is, how can the security agencies carry out their job without impinging on fundamental individual rights and freedoms? How can the state guarantee security and defend liberties at the same time? The article takes the view that security sector reform is part of the political transition process in Arab countries. Because the security establishment was a means to strengthen the regime and endorse its authoritarianism, any democratic transition aspiring to overcome the elements of the crisis must take into account the need to review the security sector.

Book Title: The Spirit of Democracy: Fight to Build Free Societies [Arabic] Original Title: The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World Author: Larry Diamond Translation: Abdelnour Khorafi Year of publication: 2014 Publisher: Arab Network for Research and Publication, Beirut Pages: 208

Book Title: The Question of the Syrian Kurds: Fact, History, Myth [Arabic]

A convergence of interests between the Houthi militia and former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh have served to undermine the National Dialogue for the country, which had earlier formed an implementation mechanism for the GCC Initiative. Previously, the aims of that Dialogue were intended to further the cause of a federalist, democratic state which decentralized power. This would have changed the status quo, in which power was concentrated in what Yemenis call the “Holy Center”, a tribalist-sectarian concentration of political and financial power which been in place for a millennium and which survived into the reborn, unified and modern-day Yemen of 1994.

Sponsored by the “Safer World” foundation, based in the United Kingdom, this meeting held at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies examined possibilities for the spreading of peace and stability across conflict hotspots around the globe.

​This report highlights some of the major milestones of the Arab democratic transition during 1/11/2014-31/12/2014

This study attempts to identify the roles of economic diplomacy actors inside and outside capital cities. By presenting international examples it creates a comparative study to explain the evolution of economic diplomatic action, not only in Morocco – the subject of the study – but also globally. To carry out this analysis the present study argues that there are no longer pure national issues, even those that represent the core of national sovereignty, such as budget, taxes, or development. It suggests that nothing can isolate a country from its surroundings, and that economic diplomacy necessarily involves a country’s essential internal issues. This challenges existing Arabic writings, which put economic diplomacy in the context of traditional diplomacy without differentiating between the various areas of the field.