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Nearly five years have passed since the political upheaval that swept through many Middle East and North African (MENA) countries began. Syria was caught in the grip of this revolutionary moment, one that drove the country to a civil war with no apparent way out. Analysts advanced a number of explanations for this event, which included the demographic profile of the younger generations and the economic difficulties they experienced, corruption of the government, the use of techniques from successful campaigns and the coordination of dissent through traditional/offline and new/online forms of contention. The employment of the new media by anti and pro-government groups has reached an unthinkable scale, to the point that the media have become instruments not limited to the purpose of informing, planning and coordinating the protest, but “performing” in the conflict, exacerbating the fight, instilling fear in the enemy and intimidating the adversary, while proselytising. By going beyond the dichotomy that frames the media as a deus ex machina of the uprising or, conversely, as a means of its expression, this thesis demonstrates how the new media did not simply play a crucial role at the time of the uprising and subsequent civil war, but an even more decisive role in the years that predated the uprising. The underlining argument of this research is that during the decade leading up to the uprising in Syria a (silent) form of mobilisation got underway as an effect of contextual factors (economic, institutional and social conditions), conditioned by people’s access to the new media. The new media became the mobilising structures of Syria’s pre-uprising social movement, the tools that changed people’s access to information and encouraged civic engagement in a period of structural friction and social ferment. The media are here contemplated as a microcosm, which affects and is affected by other different, hitherto unrelated (f)actors. Ultimately, in light of the growing popular mobilisations that are taking place around the globe and the leading role that the new media technologies are playing within these, the thesis offers perspectives of analysis on the role that the new media technologies are offering citizens to contest political authority as well as opposing social and economic inequalities worldwide.

The ensuing study will devote itself to an analysis of the League as the first permanent attempt at institutionalizing modern Arab thought with respect to the extent of the Arab political community, its aims, and the means to be used in achieving these aims. [...]

In its approach to the Palestinian-Jordanians’ issue, this dissertation employs a security-based theory and technique, which deal with the issue as a securitization case-study. It employs a modified version of the securitization theory offered by the Copenhagen School to evaluate the classical Jordanian national security strategy toward Palestinian-Jordanians. It addresses, reviews, weighs and evaluates the four strategies and tools of the Jordanian securitization model toward Palestinian-Jordanians: exclusionism, tribalism, cooptation and ideologization, which present the independent variables of this study. This evaluation process is based on a multi-standard strategy, which discusses the goals, the evidence, the outputs and the structure of the Jordanian securitization model since Black September 1970. In terms of methodology, the dissertation adopted a multi-method strategy, which used field research, participant observation and elite interviewing as primary methods for data acquisition. In its security-based re-reading of the modern Jordanian history and its evaluation of the Jordanian national security strategy, the dissertation concludes that the Jordanian securitization model has led to a number of dangerous adverse reactions and hazards, which threaten Jordanian national security. The awakening of the extreme versions of nationalism, the rise of social/tribal violence and the emergence of the radical Islamist Salafi-Jihadi movement are examples of the hazardous outputs of the classical Jordanian national security strategy. Although the classical strategy has succeeded in maintaining the physical survival of the state/regime in Jordan since 1921, it has failed to cure the structural crises of statehood and nationhood, which the Jordanian state suffers from. Also, the classical strategy has failed to decisively answer the strategic questions of "what is Jordan?" and "who are Jordanians?". This strategic failure of the classical Jordanian national security strategy toward Palestinian-Jordanians rings alarm bells about the strategic and urgent need for an alternative national security strategy based on egalitarianism, modernism, populism and democratization.

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This study analyzes various perspectives of modernization theory in some Middle Eastern countries and examines the impact of modernization, both in its western and eastern formula, on the legitimacy and stability of these countries. It also examines those external factors that influenced these countries' internal and external policies. The study's major hypothesis is that Modernization + Secularization = Instability, whereas Modernization - Secularization = Stability in Middle Eastern Islamic countries. Secularization is a component of both the western and eastern paths; consequently, a Middle Eastern country that attempts to modernize and secularize along either of these paths is doomed to instability. The hypothesis suggested herein is analyzed in regard to twelve Middle Eastern countries. The principal conclusions are that the collapse of the Shah's regime in 1979 was a direct result of his western and secular policies; Egypt's political and economic instability was a result of its unsuccessful oscillation between west and east; Lebanon's limited experience with liberal democracy was a failure because of internal secularization and sectarian politics, and external interference by foreign powers; the instability of the Ba'athist regimes of Syria and Iraq is a consequence of their secular socialist policies; and South Yemen's Marxist-Leninist policies were a major cause for its unstable political regime. Even though Libya's Third International Theory of Modernization, based on an Islamic framework, seems to generate political stability for Qadhafi's regime, his latest adoption of Marxist-Leninist ideology may delegitimize his rule; on the other hand, the latest external pressures by the United States and Western European powers on Libya have legitimized Qadhafi's rule and boosted his popularity, for the time being. In contrast, Algeria's pragmatic socialism has been carefully tailored to its Islamic tradition and therefore has resulted in one of the major stable political systems in the Middle East. Contrary to the pessimist modernization theorists who predict the demise of the traditional monarchies when attempting to rapidly modernize, modernization in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco seems for the most part to have been accompanied by political stability due to their exclusion of the secular component of the western path.

<p>This is a case study on the functioning of political parties and the aim was to explain “how” and “why” the Swedish social democratic party changed their policies in the Middle East politics. I wanted to explain this process of change by using Angelo Panebianco’s framework for the analysis of political parties. Angelo Panebianco´s hypothesis is that all parties must be viewed as organizations to understand their functions. With time they become more institutionalized and depending on their historic development they will end up as more or less institutionalized. If this change showed that the social democratic party acted as a bureaucratic and institutionalized organization, Panebianco’s organizational theory would explain the change of their Middle East politics. In my case study I have used a qualitative analysis of the content to interpret my material of measuring parties’ institutionalization level as “high” or “low” within the two different areas; organizational dilemmas and the dominant coalition. My conclusion is that the social democratic party has indications both of a “high” institutionalized organization and as a “low” institutionalized organization, still they have a relatively dominant coalition. My study demonstrates that Angelo Panebianco´s organizational theory can not fully explain “how” and “why” the Social democratic party changed their Middle East politics.</p>

More than sixteen years have passed since the launch of the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel. Looking back, the state of Arab media and its relationship with the political sphere was different from what we see nowadays. The launch of Al Jazeera in 1996 was a significant event that led to subsequent changes both in the media and politics. Among these changes, the Arab spring, which started in Tunisia in December 2010, is certainly the most remarkable one. This ongoing event has already resulted in the fall of four dictatorships and is expected to unleash a democratization wave and reshape the face of the Arab region. This research analyzes the Al Jazeera democratizing effect and looks at the political implications of the new Arab public sphere. In doing so, it seeks to fill a gap in the existing literature, which tends to ignore the Arab world that remains largely under-researched. Contrary to the top-down approach inherent in the dominant narratives on democratization, that pay almost no attention to the growing role of the media in political change, I adopted a bottom-up approach arguing that, particularly in the Arab setting, it has become almost impossible to separate changes in the media landscape from those in the political field. The Arab spring provides us with a telling empirical example where this interplay is remarkably manifest. In this context, Arab democratization is no longer an abstract; it is rather a developing process that needs our attention and requires concerted scholarly efforts. To develop an original approach to understanding Arab democratization and analyze its complex dynamics, I used grounded theory and its powerful tools in theory building. Based on this theoretical framework I opted for qualitative methodology to elaborate the empirical part of this research, which consists primarily of analyzing and interpreting in-depth interviews conducted with a sample of Al Jazeera’s staff in various managerial and editorial positions.

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This dissertation addresses the puzzle as to why some regions in the world are engulfed in militarized disputes among member states, while other regions live under peaceful conditions. It argues that domestic regime-societal management strategies have significant explanatory value to understand variance in regional orders. These domestic factors have largely been ignored in International Relations (IR) literature. A domestic politics-based analytical framework explains how states with inclusionary governing regimes (those which account for the interests of societal actors in policy formulation and consequently give them stakes in the survival of the regime) are more likely to move the regional order towards stability. On the other hand, states with exclusionary regimes (those which do not account for the interests of societal actors in policy formulation and consequently do not give them stakes in the survival of the regime) are more likely to push the regional order toward instability. / The dissertation also addresses a frequently underexposed dimension of IR theory: exactly how do major powers influence regional orders? It argues that major powers penetrate regional states in support of either societal actors or regimes (and sometimes both). In that process major powers help alter the power asymmetries inside regional states affecting their preferences and strategies, and hence their behaviour towards the regional order. / The analytical framework is used to explain variations in Middle East regional orders through four paired comparisons of six states: Israel-Egypt, Israel-Turkey, Israel-Syria, and Iran-Saudi Arabia. The time frame under study is from 1950 to 2000. The change in the Middle East regional order post-1990 did not correspond in magnitude to the change in the international system, adding credibility to this framework which prioritizes domestic level variables in shaping regional orders.