Commentaries

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 question today is no longer whether Israel’s war on Gaza has changed Israel’s image in the West — that much is already evident in opinion polls, on university campuses, in the streets, and in the media, and most clearly among younger generations. The more important question is: has this shift moved from the moral and protest arenas into the…

The results of the seventh round of Lebanese-Israeli negotiations show that the track has entered a phase far more complex than a simple dispute over a ceasefire or withdrawal from specific points. The core of the problem is now bound up with the shape of the security arrangements Israel wants to impose in south Lebanon, and with the limits of…

The Iraqi government has recently intensified its rhetoric about its intention to “restrict arms to the state” once the withdrawal of the US-led international coalition forces from Iraq is completed by September 30 of this year, alongside Baghdad’s repeated rejection of Iraq being used as a launchpad for attacks on regional states or as an arena for proxy war. These…

Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa’s recent interview on Al Jazeera came at an exceptionally sensitive juncture — coinciding with the completion of the process to form the People’s Assembly, the renewed talk of a possible Syrian military intervention in Lebanon, and pressing domestic files, chief among them the Damascus–Deir ez-Zor road incident, which claimed the lives of 35 people. This unfolded…

Digital sovereignty is one phrase hiding two different things. Few who invoke it say which one they mean. The first kind is declared. A state passes a law, forms a committee, issues a directive, and announces that its digital space is “governed.” This kind of sovereignty is available to everyone. Any state can have it. The second kind is built.…

The latest World Cup was not simply another major sporting event, nor merely an occasion on which Arabs celebrated the qualification of an unprecedented number of their national teams or the remarkable performances some of them delivered. More than that, it revealed a deeper shift in the Arab public mood. The scale of popular engagement in streets, cafés, homes, and…

After several years of political, economic, and administrative modernization initiatives, the most important question today may be less about the laws enacted or institutions established, and more about how ordinary citizens-particularly young people-actually perceive these reforms. The success of any reform project is measured neither by the number of legislative measures adopted nor by the scale of the official discourse…

The newly constituted Syrian People’s Assembly enters public life as one of the defining milestones of the country’s transitional period. It marks a moment in which the new authorities are testing the contours of political representation, while Syria itself is testing its capacity to move from the legacy of the revolution toward the project of state-building. The announcement by the…

Today, Hamas announced the dissolution of the governmental body that has administered the Gaza Strip, represented by the Government Emergency Committee headed by Mohammad al-Farra, in preparation for transferring administrative authority to the Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, chaired by Eng. Ali Shaath. While this decision can be understood within the immediate context of Gaza or Palestinian…