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This paper seeks to understand Arab public attitudes towards Turkey. The author goes beyond Arab perceptions of Turkey’s regional policies, taking in the general Arab perception of the Turkish people, and the evaluation of Turkey’s democracy and political advancement among Arab respondents. The author reports that one-third of the Egyptian public has a broadly positive view of Turkish society and of Turkish policies. The results also suggest that divisions in Arab attitudes towards specific issues, such as the conflicts in Iraq and in Syria and the Sunni-Shia divide, contribute to a similarly fractured Arab attitude towards Turkey across the wider region. Most Arab respondents voiced the view that Turkey treats the Arab peoples with dignity and respect, while acknowledging that Ankara used its regional policies to advance its own interests.

Globally, many countries are implementing decentralization programs as a means of promoting both democratic and developmental objectives. Unfortunately, however, scholarship has yet to offer a comprehensive framework within which to assess and reform central-local relations. This article seeks to overcome the "division of labor" that has long separated analyses of administrative and political structures, and to provide stronger conceptual vocabulary for describing and analyzing the complexities of centralization and decentralization in both administration and politics. After developing two distinct continua of administrative and political centralization/ decentralization, the paper then combines them in a single matrix able to highlight the wide range of strategies and outcomes that emerge from the complex interplay of the two spheres. Depending on where a country lies within the matrix, it is argued, decentralization strategies may do more harm than good. Devolution strategies are especially problematic in settings with strong local leaders, and should never be attempted without careful analysis of the preexisting character of central-local ties.

This study addresses the extent to which the "participatory" framework is compatible with the networks of Tunisian elites since the Revolution of 2011. The author seeks to understand, analyze and interpret the theoretical approaches which allowed Tunisian politicians to reduce the level of political divisions within the country. The author further illustrates how Tunisia's formal political parties adapted and developed in the post-revolutionary setting, despite the revolution unraveling the vast extent of a societal rift in Tunisia which has dominated the country's political debates since that time. Finally, the study explores in depth the role and influence of Tunisian political elites as it relates to the praxis of participatory democracy, something which could not have been possible without the consciousness and awareness of these elites and their duty to fulfill their roles.

In an effort to understand the characteristics of "virtual communities" and specifically "information societies," this study attempts to test the argument that virtual communities, with their networked structure, pose a challenge (or represent an alternative) to traditional hierarchical structures, due to the former's ability to self-organize, and settle their internal disputes without the need for authoritative intervention. The study uses the case study approach, applied to 3 Wikipedia's edit wars. The chosen cases are related to a number of Middle East informational crises. The study concludes that mechanisms of virtual societies (e.g. self-organization) can work efficiently in cases of limited disputes, but in cases of sharp disagreements, traditional (hierarchical) mechanisms that include authoritative intervention and exercising some form of power, in a "top-down" approach, remain essential for conflict resolution. This implies that the factor of "authority" remains significant even in the context of virtual communities.

This paper argues that hybrid regimes help to create an environment that encourages the transformation of political disputes into identity conflicts. In such regimes, there is no resolution to the advantage of a particular party, since there is neither full authoritarianism that prevents the existence of any form of competition, rivalry, or conflict, or full democracy that permits the existence of democratic competition according to principles of pluralism, the peaceful transfer of power, and legal guarantees. In the environment of these hybrid regimes there are some features of democracy and many features of authoritarianism, and so political competition usually begins as a dispute over points of view and intellectual assumptions and ends up as an identity conflict leading to the dissociation of society.

The youth revolution in Yemen at the beginning of 2011 kindled a ray of hope that the walls of tyranny could be broken down and the country could be pulled back from the clutches of narrowly defined identities. It sharpened the will that formed a “historical bloc” capable of rendering democratic transition successful. However, the youth revolution never transcended the ecstasy of a romantic revolutionary act to reach the stage of building institutions capable of enforcing respect for the law and accommodating ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political pluralism. This study addresses the impact of the Saudi-Iranian role on Yemen's transition. It is premised on considerable importance attached regional factors, which perhaps have even greater influence than domestic factors on the outcome of the Yemeni revolution. The study stresses that the effects and limits of regional factors are related to several variables, such as the vicissitudes of international politics; international and regional balances and interests; as well as the strategic location of the country subject to interference; its resources; its internal dynamics; the maturity of local elites; the weight of political opposition; and the quality of institutions.

​​This essay argues for a paradigm shift in the study of the Internet and digital/social media. Big data analytics is the dominant paradigm. It receives large amounts of funding, is administrative and a form of digital positivism. Critical social media research is an alternative approach that combines critical social media theory, critical digital methods and critical-realist social media research ethics. Strengthening the second approach is a material question of power in academia.

​It was mostly British colonisers who came to consolidate the political, economic and military interests of the motherland and did what they used to do: play football. Apart from spending their time, football worked as a colonial instrument both "civilising" and "disciplining" the colonised populations. The first clubs in North Africa and the Levant restricted membership for non-Westerners and non-whites, but soon football also became a transnational transmitter of independence movements, the stadiums becoming important social spaces on the local and national levels. Such was the emancipatory force of football that it has been preserved across the region ever since the colonial era, prominent again in the Arab Uprisings. However, the massive wealth of the Gulf States and their decision to invest in football's soft power has changed the equation. The article thus describes emancipatory and counter-emancipatory trends in MENA football history from a longue durée perspective.

​​​​This article examines the "intuitive knowledge" as one of the most important sources for understanding the trajectories of the Arab revolutions, despite the scarcity of studies that focus on it. We explore intuitive knowledge by examining its observable manifestations, such as its role as an alternative to "ideology" in expressing social and political views, its practical application in shared traditions, its flexible interpretation of relational life emphasising its habitual and voluntary aspects, its pragmatic evaluation of social and political phenomena, and its expression of distrust in "elites" who distance themselves from ordinary people's lives. Building on these premises, we explore the relationship between intuitive thought and charismatic phenomena or volatile populism, as well as the formation and dissolution of loyalty relationships, particularly in the neoliberal era. In this context, we emphasise the importance of viewing intuitive knowledge as a starting point for analysing the relationship between political and social revolution. We argue that the separation of these two types of revolution has created additional opportunities for counter-revolution.​

The causal link between economic and political freedom is a complex and interesting debate in the domain of social sciences. To enrich the academic debate on this issue, we have examined the Arab context based on econometric instruments, especially the test of causality. Based on the results of the study, the interactions between economic and political freedom in the Arab world appear to be generally in line with the thesis strongly defended by liberal thinkers, in particular Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek, that there is a unilinear causality in which the first variable leads to the second. This result may seem self-evident in a transformed Arab context, but the reality seems to be more complex. Economic freedom indeed guarantees freedom, the constructing of the national identity and the conditions necessary to ensure individual well-being. However, such freedom is not understood in isolation from political freedom and its social context interactions and cultural structures, in contrast with restricted collective consciousness.