Slide 1

The war that began on 28 February 2026 has outlived its ceasefires. The pattern is now diagrammable:[1] Iran interferes with shipping near the Strait of Hormuz; the United States retaliates; Tehran hits American assets across neighbouring Arab states — including Qatar, even as Doha mediates; mediators urge restraint; talks resume; a temporary understanding is reached; the underlying disputes remain untouched;…

The Jordanian government recently introduced the Local Administration Bill, whose defining feature is the institutional separation between elected political authority and appointed executive authority, vested in the elected municipal council, from the executive and financial authority assigned to an appointed Executive Director. The bill also introduces several significant reforms, including increasing women’s representation to 30 percent, requiring municipalities to adopt…

There is a kind of catastrophe worse than being blindsided: the one you were warned about, in plain language, by the people whose job is to know — and chose to discount. The 2026 war against Iran is of this kind. Its defining feature is not an intelligence failure but a failure of reception. The event the intelligence correctly predicted…

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…

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 Politics and Society Institute has published a new policy paper entitled “Jordan and the Gradual Annexation of the West Bank: Threat Assessment and Policy Options” The paper draws on the findings of a specialized roundtable organized by the Institute, which examined the trajectory of the gradual annexation of the West Bank and its potential implications for Jordan, Palestine, and…

In major wars, some developments appear, at first glance, almost impossible to believe—especially when they overturn long-held assumptions about individuals and states. Yet wars, particularly those dominated by intelligence operations, are not always conducted according to ideological alignment. Rather, they are driven by calculations of utility, vulnerability to penetration, and the ability to cultivate alternative leadership from within the very…

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…

The Politics and Society Institute has released a new policy paper titled “The King Hussein Bridge Crisis: From Managing Symptoms to Building a Sovereign Border Crossing System.” The paper examines one of the most pressing challenges affecting movement between Jordan and the West Bank and presents a practical framework for shifting from seasonal crisis management to a sustainable institutional model…

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…