It examines the wave of constitutions following the Arab Spring, considering when constitutional bargains are likely to yield democracy.

The popular protests in early 2011 were once seen as a turning point in the history of the Arab world, raising hopes for democracy, freedom, and justice in the Middle East. A decade after the uprisings, these hopes are largely dashed in each country swept by popular protests with the exception of Tunisia. Tunisia became the only democracy in the entire region while Egypt saw its first freely elected president and government thrown out by the army in a bloody coup which resulted in a regime that is no less authoritarian than Mubarak’s. This book provides a detailed analysis of the political, economic, and constitutional developments in Tunisia and Egypt. In the light of the existing literature on comparative democratization, the author explores why Egypt’s path to democratization was eroded by several transitional actors while Tunisian political elite managed to move the country towards democracy. The book centers its focus on the role of the political agents in designing the transition and explores the transitional period with respect to the interactions among the political elite and their cost-benefit assumptions, ideological interests, as well as their commitment to democratic processes.

"Noah Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia--the law of the traditional Islamic state--in the modern Muslim world. Feldman goes back to the roots of classical Islamic law, under which executive power was balanced by the scholars who interpreted and administered the sharia. That balance was destroyed under Ottoman rule, resulting in the unchecked executive dominance that continues to distort politics in so many Muslim states. Feldman argues that a modern Islamic state could provide political and legal justice to today's Muslims through sharia--but only if new institutions emerge that restore this constitutional balance of power. In a new introduction, Feldman discusses developments in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries since the Arab Spring and describes how Islamists must meet the challenge of balance if the new Islamic states are to succeed."--P. [4] of cover.

In The Syndicate (2004) Nicholas Hagger described how in the 20th century a Syndicate of élitist mega-rich families levelled down the leading Western countries by promoting revolutions, wars and independence movements against their empires, and planned a New World Order and world government that would control the earth's resources for their own benefit. In The Secret History of the West (2005) he traced the Syndicate's roots back to secret Freemasonic organisations and revolutions that undermined the West from the Renaissance to the early 20th century. In The Fall of the West (2022), the third book in his trilogy on the West, Hagger updates the story to include the pandemic and describes how Syndicate-driven 21st-century events from the War on Terror to Covid have brought the Western financial system to the brink of collapse and shifted power from the West to the East, and China. In this first impartial attempt to assemble all the evidence to date for the origin of Covid (like fitting together available pieces of a jigsaw to reveal the main picture) Hagger, the first to discover the Cultural Revolution in China in March 1966, finds that the three main features of Covid-19 were man-made by American NIAID-funded medics in 2002 and patented 73 times since 2008, and seem to have been surreptitiously used as a bio-weapon in a Syndicate plan to limit the rise of China and its expanding trade. A dangerous new Biological Age has been born, and the West faces being levelled down and a sudden fall. Hagger sees the post-Covid West's dream of creating a good New World Order - a vaccine-protected democratic, presidential, part-federal world government and World State with sufficient authority to abolish war and solve the world's post-Covid problems - as being challenged by the self-interested Syndicate's levelling-down; and to survive, it first has to go along with the Syndicate's plan for West and East to draw together into an authoritarian world government involving China, and democratise later. This is a thought-provoking work with a prophetic vision of the future.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - Topic: Peace and Conflict, Security, grade: 1,0, Ewha Womans University (Graduate School of International Studies), course: International Negotiations, language: English, abstract: Throughout history there have been many attempts to establish peace between Israel and Palestine but all of these attempts were to no avail. This term paper will examine the underlying problem why all these attempts could not lead to a mutually satisfactory solution and will then describe what needs to be done in order to establish a new and sustainable peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. To do so this paper firstly illustrates the historical background of previous peace negotiations before describing the complex relationship of Israel and Palestine on an internal, regional and external level. It will then look at the opposed positions of both parties and illustrates to what extent the model of the Prisoner’s Dilemma can explain the situation that both sides are facing. Based on these findings ways how to potentially resolve this dilemma will be presented. The most promising solution of a Hegemonic Coalition that can put pressure on both parties to negotiate with each other over interests rather than positions will be explained in detail. Especially the framework under what conditions the negotiations should take place to avoid mistakes made by the Oslo peace negotiations will be addressed. Under consideration of that framework this paper develops a potential solution how the agreement between Israel and Palestine could look like to achieve peace between both parties. The Israel-Palestine peace process can be seen as a series of attempts to establish a lasting end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some of these attempts were more promising than others but until now none of them could establish peace between both parties.6 The decision tree in the appendix (Figure 1) helps to give a short overview of the main stages taken towards peace in the region. Throughout that paper some of these stages will need to be examined in further detail but for now this overview is sufficient to see that negotiations between both parties continuously failed mainly due to the unstable political environment within Israel and Palestine.

The African continent is currently in the midst of simultaneously unfolding and highly significant demographic, economic, technological, environmental, urban and socio-political transitions. Africa's economic performance is promising, with booming cities supporting growing middle classes and creating sizable consumer markets. Despite significant overall growth, the continent continues to suffer under very rapid urban growth accompanied by massive urban poverty and many other social problems. These seem to indicate that the development trajectories followed by African nations since post-independence may not be able to deliver on the aspirations of broad based human development and prosperity for all. This report, therefore, argues for a bold re-imagining of prevailing models in order to steer the ongoing transitions towards greater sustainability based on a thorough review of all available options. That is especially the case since the already daunting urban challenges in Africa are now being exacerbated by the new vulnerabilities and threats associated with climate and environmental change.