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This paper highlights the mental and political changes that took place in Russian society after the fall of the Soviet Union. An examination of these changes is significant because it fills a gap in research that relies on original sources written by Russians in Russian. This shift is analyzed with particular focus on the Russian position in Syria following its Revolution, a position that surprised analysts. This surprise in itself is evidence that Russia, in relation to the Arab world, remains a mystery. In order to assess the decisions taken, a look into emerging political forces in Russia and their overall objectives seems necessary. These forces hold strong subjective power, and after the years of weaknesses after the collapse of the Soviet Union, forces in the country are again looking internationally. This study is an initial attempt to determine the general view of the intellectual and political shifts in Russia.

​This report documents the most significant Palestinian developments and events related to the Arab-Israeli conflict during the period from November 1 to December 31, 2024.​

Analyses differ on the impact of illiteracy on political consciousness, in particular when it comes to understanding the result of the referendum on Egypt’s new constitution. The constant correlation between these elements in Egyptian political discourse seems unfounded. The assumption of this argument is that an illiterate person cannot achieve consciousness and awareness of key elements of the constitutional debate in the same way an educated individual might. This study takes a close look at the facts surrounding this debate, and conclusively demonstrates that there was a correlation between illiteracy and the “yes” vote in this referendum in a number of Egyptian provinces. It cautions, however, that one must deal carefully with this conclusion. This is in particular due to low voter turnout and the fact that the correlation between illiteracy and the “yes” vote did not exist in all of the provinces of the republic. As such, the study recommends that politicians and state institutions exert more effort to urge people to participate actively in the political process and work to raise political awareness among all sectors and segments of the population.

Despite the state attracting considerable attention as a topic of study from Arab thinkers and intellectuals since the 19th century, the study of individual-level orientations toward the state using survey data has remained relatively marginal, both in English and in Arabic scholarship. Indeed, we still do not know much about Arab citizens' positions toward many of the debates that have long been present in Arab intellectual circles regarding the ontological nature of the so-called "Arab state" and the preferable ideological form it should take. This study seeks to fill this gap by focusing on the post-2011 period. It analyses how Arab citizens understand the state, the extent to which they distinguish it from the ruling regime, their orientations toward the ideological debate around the unified Arab state versus the nation-state, as well as around the religious Islamist state versus the civil state. It also examines the individual-level determinants of these orientations.

This study monitors the role of external factors in the stability of Moroccan authoritarianism and controling the liberalization methods pursued by the government over two stages: the final years of the Cold War and the 2011 Arab Spring. As much as these factors contributed to widening the margin of liberalization in the Moroccan political arena, they also contributed to limiting this liberalization (September 11, the post-2013 counterrevolutionary movement), especially given the lack of internal will to mature it. While it is true that these factors have made an impact, this remained within certain limits that allowed actors abroad (the United States, the European Union and donor institutions) to control the transformations of Moroccan politics and to manage contradictions, thus creating an environment hostile to democratic transition in Morocco.

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.

​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.

This paper seeks to uncover the roles played by truth commissions in Latin America in establishing transitional justice, in a comparative study that draws upon three main experiences: Argentina, Chile, and Peru. It highlights the contexts that allowed these experiences to adhere to the democratic transformation and absorb its complexities, by questioning the dynamics that accompanied the establishment of truth commissions, and identifying the roles of actors in managing tension between the demands of victims and the requirements of reconciliation and civil peace. The paper demonstrates that the establishment of truth commissions was linked to the nature of the challenges faced by Latin countries undergoing democratization and transcending the legacy of previous violations. Inasmuch as these challenges reduced the crisis of legitimacy that ravaged these systems and led them to engage in this transformation, they also highlighted the potential that these committees have provided for actors to manage the sequence of this shift.

This study addresses the methodological dimension of the gap between social research and public policymaking in the Arab region. It demonstrates several intertwined factors that contributed to this phenomenon, the most important of which are: lack of trust between researchers and decision makers, methodological dependency, the absence of a scientific culture that promotes research based evaluation, the lack of intellectual and moral courage among researchers and weak demand for the use of multifaceted holistic approaches. The study concludes that the success of enhancing coordination between social science research and policymaking in the Arab region depends on the extent to which academic freedoms are respected, considering this constitutes one of the most important elements of scientific research and competency. Academia must also be allowed to fulfill its role in developing serious and applicable scientific research.

Using a realist approach, this study explains the development of international institutions in the Arab system, taking the Arab League and the Arab Monetary Fund as case studies. It puts to the test realist assumptions regarding states as major actors in the international system and examines how the principle of chaos and the absence of central authority affect their behaviour. In this context, the prisoner's dilemma is used as a mirror for security interactions and chaotic structures in the Arab and international systems. The study shows that realist assumptions are not sufficient to explain the development of Arab institutions; they need to be modified to explain the variation in international behaviour in the region. The conclusions of the paper are based on an analysis of the reward environment in which Arab countries interact, and its division into a security-military sphere and a political-economic sphere.