Commentaries

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…

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…