Commentaries

Executive Summary      Morocco’s legislative elections are set to take place on 23 September 2026 in a context markedly different from that of the 2021 elections. Inflation fell from 6.6% in 2022 to 0.8% in 2025, yet this decline has not dispelled public perceptions of eroding purchasing power. Unemployment stands at around 13%, rising to 37.2% among young people. The…

A few days ago, Al-Umma Party — formerly the Islamic Action Front (IAF) — elected Muath al-Khawaldeh as its new secretary-general, in the party’s first leadership elections since changing its name. The election comes at a fundamentally different moment from previous leadership transitions, following the legal ban on the Muslim Brotherhood, with which the party was historically associated and which…

The Russian-Ukraine war in 2022 exposed how structurally vulnerable the resilience of Italy’s energy security apparatus was to external shocks. Near total dependence on Russian gas forced compelled Rome to rethink its strategic autonomy, a process the European Union only made legally binding nearly four years later, through the agreement banning all imports of Russian gas by autumn 2027. Yet…

What is happening today in the West Bank and Jerusalem may appear to be simply an escalation of the familiar policies pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government: expanding settlements, undermining the Palestinian presence, altering realities in Jerusalem, and using legislative, administrative, security and political tools to impose new facts on the ground. Yet such a reading risks overlooking a more consequential…

It is the practices of a party, i.e. how it is organized and how it campaigns in the first rounds of elections that in the end outlast the founders of a party. Thus for a country llike Jordan, parties experiment still formative, and reforming institutions is more important than anything else. The Royal Committee to Modernise the Political System was…

Southern Lebanon is entering a more complex phase in which developments on the ground are increasingly outpacing the political track. Three interconnected issues are now shaping the next stage: Israel’s attempt to establish new military facts ahead of the eighth round of negotiations, growing U.S. pressure over Hezbollah’s weapons, and the search for a new security arrangement in southern Lebanon…

On Thursday evening, August 6, 2026, the city of Jaramana in the Damascus countryside witnessed an improvised explosive device (IED) blast inside a public minibus operating on a local transit route near Al-Rawda intersection in the city center. Casualties reported during the initial hours varied; while preliminary reports indicated two fatalities and 13 injuries, the Directorate of Health in the…

The letter sent by more than one hundred former British and French diplomats on Palestine deserves close attention, not only for what it says, but perhaps even more importantly for who is saying it. These are not activists from pro-Palestinian solidarity movements, nor figures traditionally associated with the European left. They are former politicians, ambassadors and diplomats who spent many…

A recent study published by the Politics and Society Institute on Jordanian-Indian relations, titled “Jordan and India in a Changing Regional Order,” draws attention to an issue that goes beyond its immediate subject. While examining the trajectory of relations between Amman and New Delhi and the prospects for developing them, the study raises a broader question: to what extent do…

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…