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This study attempts to understand the concept of the "deep state" given its increasing use in political literature and analysis. This happens especially in comparative studies and, specifically, when multiple political systems are addressed. Through an analysis of the literature in which the term is used, it is clear that the concept of the "deep state" is ambiguously understood and applied. This study is based on a critical view of the concept. It assumes that the vagueness of its definition is tinged with secrecy. Its fragmented usage in a variety of political systems (democratic, semi-democratic and authoritarian), render it an analytical tool that is not useful nor capable to expand knowledge of comparative political science. In lieu of this hypothesis, the study reveals discrepancies in the usage of the concept of "deep state", in an attempt to refine the concept.

Academic studies on Somalia lack focus on analyzing the gaps and problems facing the state-building project. Drawing on an in-depth literature review of post-war and conflict state-building frameworks and models, this study highlights the structural gaps that continue to hinder Somalia's state-building project by seeking to identify and describe them, in addition to discussing their root causes and impacts on the future of the state-building project. The study concludes that these gaps can be summarized into three categories: 1 -Political: As a result of the problematic aspects of both the tribal quota system 4. 5 and the federal system, 2 -Social: represented in the weakened role of civil society in the process of state-building, and 3 -Economic: driven by the controversial business interests of influential businessmen, and the impact of foreign assistance on economic recovery. Thus, the success of the state-building project in Somalia depends on all relevant actors' abilities to deal with these structural gaps.

​In this section you will find the most important documents on democratic change in the Arab world. In this issue, we publish documents highlighting the political movement in Tunisia demanding democracy and look at the main political changes in Sudan, Iraq and Jordan in March and April 2022.

This study advances a new approach to theorizing the Arab state after the popular uprisings. It does this in two steps. Suspending the western European model of state formation and bringing the Arab world's experience in conversation with other parts of the Global South, it examines alternative state formation and state building sequences, trajectories, and temporalities in the making of Arab states. It thus historicizes the process of state formation and state building in the Arab world as compared to the western European one and other regions in the Global South. This first step liberates us from explicit and implicit comparisons with the European model of state formation. The second step surveys alternative theorizations of the Arab state after the uprisings. Tracing the causal assumptions embedded in these theories reveals how much they rely on the European model of state formation and state building as an implicit point of analytic departure and critical comparison. This survey unpacks the assumptions these theories make about the state, the difference between states and regimes, state and non-state actors, the private and public realms, and the formal and informal sectors. The objective of this study is to not only de-exceptionalize states in the Arab world, but, more importantly, borrowing from Gurminder Bhambra, 'unmake' our understandings of state formation and state building in the Arab world and thus contribute, following Walter Mignolo, to a knowledge production that serves a form of 'epistemic reconstitution' of alternative historical trajectories and possibilities.

This article draws from structurationist and symbolic interactionist sociology, seeking to build a bridge between the realist–liberal and rationalist–reflectivist debates in the field of international relations. In doing so, it argues against the neorealist claim that self-help is given by anarchic structure exogenously to process. It further argues that self-help and power politics do not follow either logically or causally from the anarchic structure of the international system, but are generated by process rather than by structure. There is no logic of anarchy apart from the practices that create and instantiate one particular structure of identities and interests rather than another. Self-help and power politics are institutions, not essential features of anarchy – anarchy is what states make of it. The article explores three ways in which identities and interests are transformed under anarchy: by the institution of sovereignty, by an evolution of cooperation, and by intentional efforts to transform egoistic identities into collective identities.

​This article seeks to understand the secession of Somaliland by exploring its historical, political and legal motives and rationales. It suggests that the secession is a notable outcome of the structural, political and cultural factors surrounding the emergence and unification of the Somali state post-independence. The article argues that the historical perspective offers a better understanding of not only the secession of Somaliland, but also why Somalia is a textbook case for the failure of the nation-state. The article starts with a general background on the modern socio-historical history of the Somali peninsula and analyses four key moments, starting from the history of the formation of the modern state in British and Italian Somaliland, leading to the establishment of Somalia as a unified nation-state. Accordingly, the article explains the rationale behind the secession of Somaliland from Somalia in 1991, as well as the obstacles to this secession, and concludes with an evaluation of the attitude and approaches of the international community.

​This study fits into a broad category of scholarship concerned with transitional periods in various political systems. Specifically, it examines the political transition in post-revolutionary Tunisia since 2011. It does so by comparing the legal provisions of the post-revolutionary transition - the major texts, which define the transitional stage - and the political realities, which take the shape of events, actions and political discourse. A point of particular focus is the 2011 elections to the National Constituent Assembly, which the author analyzes through the rubric of "electoral engineering". One more conclusion of the paper is that electoral engineering remains a feature of Tunisian politics, although it has gone from "authoritarian electoral engineering" to "democratic electoral engineering," reflecting changes which have taken in the country as a whole.

The 2011 Arab uprisings sparked hopes for positive change in the regional politics of the Middle East. The uprisings not only challenged the authority of states at the domestic level but seemed poised to disrupt regional geopolitics and alter the position of the Middle East in the international system. With the outbreak of civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Sudan, military interventions in Bahrain and Yemen, and the unprecedented proliferation of armed non- state actors in the region, the uprisings seem to drive important changes in the nature of the state and its regional and international role. Despite its artificial inception and its puzzling survival throughout the 20 th century, the Arab State faces challenges in the post- 2011 era and its vulnerabilities have been exposed. While the uprisings may have weakened Arab states, changes at regional and international levels created permissive conditions to challenge the regional state system. Hamas's 7 October 2023 operation and Israel's ensuing wars in the region have further exacerbated state erosion and reinvigorated post- 2011 regional dynamics. This paper examines how structural international and regional conditions have reshaped statehood and agency in the region post- 2011. It also explores how the responses of Arab states to international conditions and the regional reverberations of the uprisings have further generated disintegrative effects for the Arab state.

This study adopts the regulatory state thesis to highlight the changes that have occurred in the economic and social role of the state and then the way in which public policy problems are addressed. The discussion focused on the regulatory policies of the telecommunications sectors following the economic liberalization of these markets and their opening to competition, through examining three cases in the Arab region: Egypt, the UAE and Qatar. The study is based on the hypothesis that the shift in the role of the state from the welfare state model, whereby the state and its institutions played the main role in the operations of providing communications services, to the regulatory state model, whereby the country adopts strategies to liberalize those markets, has necessitated making room for non-state actors to play an expanding role as a telecommunications service provider and operator. At the same time, the state has become the regulator that controls the behavior of new actors by designing regulations and legislation that control the rhythm of service delivery processes in liberalized telecom markets, in a manner that guarantees the quality of the services provided, and in a way that benefits the users.

This text was fundamental to the crystallization of structuralist theory in international relations. It addresses one of the discipline’s major dilemmas: the dialectic of the relationship between actor and structure. It reveals the shortcomings of the interpretations offered by the prevailing structuralist theories (neorealism and world-system theory), which failed to grasp the mutually constitutive nature of human agents and system structures, reducing the international system either to constraints imposed on actors or to structures generating behavioral patterns. However, by employing the “structuration theory” borrowed from sociology, US political scientist Alexander Want offers an expanded perspective that avoids reducing system structures to state actors (as neorealism does) or their reification in world- system theory. The scientific realist/structuration approach thus investigates the properties and dispositions of state actors and the system structures in which they are embedded, contributing to the reformulation of theoretical debate in the field of international relations, opening up broad horizons for understanding international dynamics and establishing a new research agenda that combines philosophical-scientific analysis with political-historical analysis.