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​The Contemporary Syrian Studies Unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies held a two-day workshop on November 17 and 18, 2013 during which a group of distinguished Syrian academics, statesmen and political activists discussed a proposed plan for the democratization of Syria which was published earlier in 2013 by the Syrian Expertise Bureau in coordination with the Syrian Studies Center.

​عنوان الكتاب الأول بلغته الأصلية: The End of American World Order. عنوان الكتاب: نهاية النظام العالمي الأميركي. المؤلف: أميتاف أشاريا Amitav Acharya. دار النشر: Polity. سنة النشر: 2018. عدد الصفحات: 138. عنوان الكتاب الثاني بلغته الأصلية: Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order. عنوان الكتاب: اللفياثان الليبرالي: أصول وأزمة وتحول النظام العالمي الأميركي. المؤلف: جون إكنبري Gilford John Ikenberry. دار النشر: Princeton University Press. سنة النشر: 2011. عدد الصفحات: 372.

The 2016 Arab Opinion Index is the fifth in a series of yearly public opinion surveys across the Arab world. The first survey was conducted in 2011, with following surveys in 2012/2013 and 2014. The 2016 Arab Opinion Index is based on face-to-face interviews conducted with 18,310 individual respondents in 12 separate Arab countries: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. Sampling followed a randomized, stratified, multi-stage, self-weighted clustered approach, giving an overall margin of error between +/- 2 % and 3% for the individual country samples. The overall samples guarantee probability-proportional-to-size (PPS), ensuring fairness in the representation of various population segments. With an aggregate sample size of 18,310 respondents (50% of whom were men and 50% women). The Arab Opinion Index remains the largest public opinion survey covering the Middle East and North Africa. The fieldwork was carried out by an overall team of 840 individuals (half of whom were women), who conducted 45,000 hours of face-to-face interviews, covering a total of 760,000 kilometers across the population clusters sampled.

This study adopts a comparative approach to investigate the impact of the reciprocal fears of internal and external parties on the stances of key actors during the 2011 transitions. Apparently, the uncertainty that accompanies any democratic elections has not been a local factor in the Arab cases because regional and international forces have an interest in hindering democracy, being a potential threat to the status quo. The study examines four interrelated problems related to external factors. It concludes that the external factors that have hindered democracy in non-Arab cases were not inevitable because addressing them seems to have been related to changes in the international system and the emergence of domestic democratic blocs that are able to exert pressure on external forces and get them to change their positions.

This study provides a discussion and analysis of the circumstances that led to the military occupation of the core of the state and government in contemporary Algeria, and the ramifications for the process of building political and legal institutions, and the democratic transition experience. The study employs the concepts of populism and neopatrimonialism to paint a picture of the path taken by the government in Algeria since independence. Populism describes the ideology that sanctified the one-party state and revolutionary legitimacy, while neopatrimonialism is the resulting shape taken by the exercise of political power. Framing these two concepts within their historical context provides an understanding of the circumstances of the army's seizure of power and its identification with the state. It clarifies the reasons for its refusal to redistribute power within the society after the establishment of political pluralism in the 1989 Constitution.

The economic indicators which define inter-Arab economic, political and social diversity, as well as the differences between the Arab countries and their neighbouring countries serve to define the relative economic strengths of each of these countries. This paper adopts a quantitative-statistical approach to arrive at a series of mathematical relationships which serve to fulfil the purpose of this paper. Specifically, the paper seeks to arrive at a ranking of Arab states based on their relative economic power. In doing so, the paper will also seek to determine what the sources of economic strength or weakness for a given country.

The book focused on the study of the US case, examining the approaches of the force on which it relied to control the course of change in the international system, and analyzing it for its own strengths.

The relationship between Morocco's military and the country's political elite – in particular its monarchy– was formed alongside the state's very apparatus immediately following independence. The military came to take a neutral approach to the rapidly developing pattern of partisan jockeying between the various political camps vying for power, and tended to find ways that would allow military positions to remain firmly within the royalist camp. These early patterns, established at the very birth of the modern Moroccan state, formed the basis on which these two powers would get along in the years to come. In tracing this relationship, the paper writes of a historic battle for power in the country, and identifies longstanding reasons for the vested interested of the Moroccan elite in ensuring the tranquility of relations between the Royal Court and the military establishment.

We seek, through this special issue, to contribute to the broader scholarly effort aimed at rethinking the trajectory of the formation of the Arab state and its evolution into its current form, by deconstructing its internal structure and analyzing its dynamics in light of its own conditions and contexts. The studies included in this issue also aim to move beyond ready-made and complete interpretive frameworks by approaching the Arab state as a historical, political, and social entity with its own internal logic and distinct paths of development, rather than reducing it to imported explanatory models or external normative projections.