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Rights groups and social movements in Egypt, including the April 6 Youth Movement developed the Transitional Justice Law based on previous experiences worldwide such as the South African one. Tunisia, which was the starting point of the Arab revolutions, beat Egypt to it by cooperating with the Ministry of Justice in South Africa. In 2003, Morocco established the Equity and Reconciliation Commission to look into human rights abuses from 1956-1999. This paper discusses the possibility of implementing the notion of transitional justice in Egypt and tries to use an approach that puts the national reconciliation and transitional justice mechanisms in their wider framework, i.e. democratic transition and institutional reform based on negotiations with political forces. The paper explores the philosophy of transitional justice, the organizational qualities that contribute to its success and the conditions that help overcome any arising challenges or possible resistance.

The contemporary Yemeni state is characterized by strife and complications involving all aspects of the state and society. These complexities go back to the era of its inception and continue today, leaving serious implications for the political, geographic and social unity of Yemen. There are very clear intersections between the internal (political, economic, social) and external components, which contribute to the sustained crisis in the Yemeni state. Successive Yemeni governments have failed to fulfill their assumed duties and functions, thus preventing them from dealing with all kinds of foreign interventions. Moreover, tribal and sectarian roles in Yemen have historically prevailed over other Yemeni political roles, which have not succeeded in transferring Yemen to civil rule. Nor have they managed to build a democratic model that achieves stability and allows Yemenis to participate actively in the political and economic process, consolidate the concepts of citizenship and the rule of law, and safeguard the various rights and freedoms of all members of Yemeni society.

​Five years prior, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies brought together a group of young activists whose dedication and courage gave ris eto what would become the Arab Spring. The group of activists, gathered again in Doha on January 15-16, 2016, appeared to have been completely changed by the intervening months. With the initial ecstasy of the fall of tyrants across the region now faded, the young revolutionary activists had matured ideologically and politically. It was a maturity born of suffering and setbacks, and revealed a realism towards the coming battle for freedom. One unchanging fact was their continued hope for freedom, and their belief in its possibility.

​This report highlights some of the major milestones of the Arab democratic transition. The countries covered include Tunisia, Egypt, Libya,Syria and Yemen.

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, in Doha, organized two seminars dealing with the reality of the popular movement and its prospects and the mechanisms of democratic transition in Sudan and Algeria within the framework of a series of seminars held by the Center for Political Studies at the Center.

Revolution is coupled with the state, and thinking about the former is linked to investigating the other, whether in history or political theory. Therefore, the Arab revolutions, as they were overthrowing the authoritarian regimes, had to evoke ideas about the state. This evocation would necessarily lead to an interrogation of the reality of the “nation state” and its future. The problematic dealt with directly in this paper, therefore, is whether the nation state was a subject for the revolution or a framework for it? On this analytical horizon a great many ironies and questions become apparent: is the revolution a sign of the decline of the national state and a decisive closure to a whole period when the state declared the impossibility of modernization and democracy? Or is it a late consolidation of the legitimacy of the nation state as the institutional expression of a national group, with the event of the revolution forming the pinnacle of its coalescence as a political nation? Does the idea of the nation state require burying once and for all, or does it need reconstruction? Was the Arab Spring a revolt against nationalism(s) or was it their maturation and the culmination of their consolidation?

A literature review of the major writings that covered the Arab Spring during the last five years

This paper discusses the escalation of the refugee crisis following the revolutions of the Arab Spring, which triggered a mass exodus of people fleeing the countries witnessing revolution, including Syria.

In association with the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies held a three-day conference (January 21-23, 2016) to study the developments associated with the Arab Spring in the intervening five years.

​Pierre Bourdieu published this paper in correlation with France hosting the World Cup in 1998, marking the last of his contributions to sports sociology going back to the 1970s. These texts worked to address social class at the core of sports practice, decided as much by cultural and social capital as financial. The text translated here by Siyasat Arabiya contrasts with Bourdieu's earlier methods in the study of sports, as it deals with the relationship of the state to the economy, detailing the 'commodification' of and the extension of neoliberal logic to sports, to become a 'commercial spectacle' and a medium for advertisement. Sporting events and timings are now controlled by the market. Bourdieu thus laments the creep of neoliberalism into a country with a traditionally centralised state, such as France, permeating sports, and presents his case against neoliberalism through the example of sport.