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This study discusses Saudi-Iranian rivalry in the Persian Gulf, focusing on political, economic, strategic, historical, and religious dimensions. It details the escalation of tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran since 1979 up until 2019, before delving into the agreement to restore diplomatic relations between the two countries in March 2023. The study concludes that countries in the international system tend to maximize their capabilities and enhance their power; which sometimes leads to escalation in hostilities and the pursuit of an arms race. Iran's security strategy also includes enhancing its power and capabilities in pursuit of regional hegemony. Saudi Arabia sees Iran as its greatest security threat, whereby Iran poses multiple air, sea, and cyber security challenges to the Kingdom.​

This report documents the key milestones in the democratic transition in the Arab world from July 1 to October 31, 2023.

This discussion aims to refocus attention on those historical facts—both known and overlooked—and to highlight the enduring power of words and terminology, coinciding with the resistance of the people of the Holy Land against the Zionists in Palestine.

​Digital communication technology plays a central role in broadening the scope of political participation by allowing most social groups to express their views and positions on issues, thus contributing to shaping the local or national political culture. It seems that all the political elements related to political culture (representation and mediation, media, parties, etc.) were greatly influenced by the emergence of digital social networks and experienced profound changes that became real challenges to classical political culture theory. This paper aims to explore the characteristics of political culture in the digital age and discuss its .challenges to orthodox political culture theory.

The paper studies the Iraqi-Syrian-Turkish conflict over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, from a geopolitical perspective. It argues that this conflict has historical and political roots, not solely tied to the natural availability of water in the Tigris and Euphrates, but rather connected to the policies of different parties in managing water resources. The paper includes three essential elements. The first examines the geographical and hydrological characteristics of the Tigris and Euphrates. The second explores the political and academic discourse in the 1990s regarding the "water war" theory. The third and final element analysed the characteristics of the new conditions that have distinguished the three countries since the beginning of this century, imposing on Syria and Iraq the need to devise a new vision for managing their available water resources. The research concludes with the inevitability of negotiation for the joint management of the Tigris and Euphrates water resources as it is not in Turkey's interest to ignore the interests of downstream countries. Moreover, Syria and Iraq cannot achieve any results without negotiation and water diplomacy.

​Over the past decade, political science in Algeria has faced a profound crisis, characterized by a decrease in student enrollment due to shrinking job opportunities for graduates. This follows a period of significant interest in this specialty, leading to its rapid spread across nearly half of the Algerian universities. After conducting interviews and analysing survey data from a sample of political science professors in Algerian universities, several findings emerged that underscore the existence of several crises facing the discipline related to identity, dissemination, and outcomes. Based on these findings, researchers have proposed solutions and alternatives to address the crisis and link political science to the job market and align it with Algeria's economic and social realities, ensuring the discipline remains globally relevant and adapts to evolving international developments.

This paper examines the rise of modern social sciences that deal with sports phenomena. It begins with the first formula that paved the way for sports science to become an independent scientific field. This is found in European intellectual discourse in the first half of the twentieth century, which linked sport to what was then known as the "crisis of European values." It then deals with the endeavours of the social sciences to make sport a research and knowledge topic, which was devoted to and institutionalised in the 1960s. It investigates the first theoretical paradigms in the field, the first designed by Norbert Elias, and deals with the position of sport in the development of modern European societies. The other, designed by Pierre Bourdieu, is based on viewing sport as an independent social field. Finally, the paper looks at the interest in cultural studies in sports in the late seventies of the twentieth century, which saw it as a field revealing the distinctions on which Western societies are built.

This paper shed light on the impact of the sports phenomenon on international politics and how it can be thought of through the lenses of positivist approaches in the field of international relations, especially since sports in today's world are no longer just a hobby or form of entertainment but have become a globalised phenomenon that has been institutionalised globally. This necessitates careful consideration of its influence on the movement of theorising within the field of international relations in the future because of the impact it carries on the masses in various parts of the world, which are no longer, as globalisation heralded, a small village but rather have become today more like a large residential tower as a result of the revolution of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the associated widening spread of the use of social media.

​This study traces the evolution of the sporting boycott of Israel from its inception and its impact on the colonial system of Israeli apartheid. It contextualises the development of this boycott in major international sports tournaments over the past decade, and how the outbreak of the Arab revolutions in late 2010 gave additional impetus to Arab youth to boycott Israel and sports in particular. Their boycott went hand in hand with their demands to end tyranny and autocracy, giving Arab athletes an opportunity to transform major international sports tournaments into a space for political action. The paper argues that the sporting boycott of Israel emerged in the last decade as a political tool for athletes and assesses the impact of this campaign in international sports tournaments on Israel's international reputation, its sports brand, and its diplomatic efforts related to marketing its emerging sports entrepreneurship.

​According to Jonathan Grix and Fiona Carmichael, when implementing national sport policies, one of the governments' main objectives is to invest funds into gaining international prestige. Although these national sport policies' objectives have also been identified by several other leading scholars in sport governance, research proposing a measurement of these policies' success or failure remains scarce. In fact, to evaluate if countries have reached international prestige through sports, researchers tend to generally refer to the Olympic Medal Table, while the newly created soft power indicators, the "Soft Power 30", "Soft Power Index" and "Global Soft Power Index" have not managed to use appropriate sport rankings to measure countries' capacities to use sport as an instrument of soft power. The objective of this paper is to identify the inaccuracies of these commonly used indices and propose a new ranking that would evaluate whether the national sport policies implemented by governments have succeeded in developing soft power.