Ali Hijazi

Executive Summary This paper argues that, after 2026, Jordanian foreign policy entered a phase that requires a shift from managing balances to managing Jordan’s own position within the regional conflict system. Over the past decade, Amman succeeded in preserving stability, defending its red lines on Palestine and Jerusalem, and consolidating security and economic partnerships that gave the state a high…

Digital transformation projects in Jordan’s public administration are accelerating as one of the pillars of the administrative modernization project. Yet digitizing a closed bureaucracy does not necessarily produce openness – it may instead produce an administration more efficient at controlling the flow of information than at making it available. The issue here is not about the speed of service delivery…

The experiences of the past decade-from the outbreak of the Arab uprisings in 2011, through the Syrian war, the rise of jihadist organizations, global economic crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Gaza war, and most recently the war with Iran-demonstrate that Jordan has not existed on the margins of regional shocks, but rather at the center of their political, security, and…

The problem with major wars is not simply that they leave questions unanswered, but that they often invite explanations that appear more complete than the evidence allows. The wider the war becomes and the more complex its trajectories grow, the more likely it is that narratives will emerge promising to explain it through a single cause. With repetition, that cause…

The military escalation between Washington and Tehran in June and July 2026 was neither merely a successive exchange of strikes nor simply the abrupt collapse of provisional understandings reached only weeks earlier. Framing the crisis exclusively through the lens of military operations produces an incomplete reading. What is unfolding in the Gulf extends beyond a contest over military targets or…

In the winter of 1950, Ankara dispatched a force of approximately 5,000 soldiers to the Korean Peninsula-a war that was not its own-for one reason alone: to convince a newly emerging Western alliance that Türkiye deserved membership. The price was steep. Nearly 700 Turkish soldiers lost their lives in exchange for an admission ticket that would not be granted until…

Introduction: Why Has Intelligence Become an Instrument of Regional Power? The Middle East is no longer governed, as it was during the twentieth century, solely through the balance of conventional armies, the size of military arsenals, or formal diplomatic alliances. The deeper transformation witnessed across the region over the past two decades lies in the shift of the center of…

What is actually advancing is a more disciplined style of decision-making organized around one overriding objective: protecting the regime. If that objective requires hardline policies, the system will produce hardline policies. If it requires negotiations, the system will produce negotiations. The overlap of authorities functions as a mechanism of survival rather than a sign of weakness. Ghalibaf’s importance lies in…

The hypothetical absence of Iran’s Supreme Leader can be understood as a potentially pivotal moment, though not necessarily as an automatic collapse of the regional balance of power. Since the 1979 revolution, the Iranian political system has not been constructed around a single individual; rather, it rests on a complex institutional–security–ideological architecture in which power is distributed among the religious…

The appointment of former Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor Akin Gürlek as Minister of Justice carries deep political implications, given his association with sensitive judicial files related to the opposition. The Turkish opposition interpreted the move as a politicization of the judiciary, while international analyses linked it to the redeployment of legal instruments in managing political conflict. The simultaneous change in…