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​This paper examines Arab public attitudes towards state institutions, determined from a series of questions asking respondents about their opinions towards the states of their home countries in general. The survey questions address governmental performance in a number of specific areas, including the performance of legislative assemblies; economic and foreign policies; administrative and financial corruption and the application of the rule of law and access to a fair trial. The results show that respondents’ attitudes become more negative when asked questions focused on specific policy areas or matters of concern, as opposed to questions which are worded to ask about government performance in broad, general terms..

Changes in the methods and tactics of terrorist groups have triggered continuous and permanent legislative change nationally and internationally.

This seminal article is one of the founding texts of Critical Theory in International Relations. In this article, Robert Cox advances a critical alternative to traditional International Relations theory by foregrounding the dialectical relationship between social forces, forms of state, and structures of world order, rather than limiting analysis to interactions among states as isolated units. Cox further distinguishes between problem-solving theory, which takes the existing order as a given and seeks to preserve and improve its functioning, and critical theory, which questions the historical conditions that produced that order, exposes its underlying power relations, and illuminates the possibilities for its transformation. He develops the concept of historical structures as continually evolving configurations composed of material capabilities, ideas, and institutions, and reconceptualizes hegemony as a congruence between power, ideology, and institutions, rather than as the mere material preponderance of a single state.

​Through literature reviews (mainly in English and German), this review sheds light on the analytical approaches prevalent in the study of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and their outcomes before and after the Arab revolutions, and explores previous and current theoretical reflections on them. Using all of this, the study attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the various issues in the region. The first part presents the various analytical concepts and their results before the revolutions, and the second part provides an overview of the analyzes of the Arab revolutions. The third part reviews the theoretical reflections on the previous analytical approaches. Finally, the researcher makes some concluding observations.

The wave of democracy, peaceful or violent, has up till now dispelled many of the illusions prevalent in the West, in Europe especially, including so-called "Arab exceptionalism"—that is the notion that Arabs are not interested in democracy, are indifferent to whether it is present in their lives or not, and are basically not ready for it. A second dismantled illusion is that of the "good dictator" that is based on the claim that dictators loyal to the West are a better bet than the Islamist alternative. A third illusion concerns the idea that the Arab world is itself a construct and that the attractiveness of a supranational Arab identity has gone. The Arab revolutions, however, have proved the above theories wrong. It is not a coincidence that the wave for change broke out in a number of Arab states at the same time and in the same fashion with more or less the same slogans shouted out in the same language, and were able in a very short time to bring down four regimes. The Arab revolutions took academic circles by surprise and made some academics claim that understanding the future of Middle East politics required that academics carry out a serious reassessment of the restored importance of Pan-Arab identity.

This section lists the most prominent political documents related to the democratic transition in the Arab world. In this issue we publish documents related to the reaction of Tunisian political currents on the issue of dissolving parliament and dismissing the government, the reaction of the coordination framework of Shiite forces rejecting the election results in Iraq, and the reaction of the Sudanese government and the Sudanese Association to the coup measures taken by the President of the Sudanese Sovereign Council, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan . We will stop when the documents are published between September 1 and October 31, 2021.