The title of this report, ‘After the Arab Spring: Power Shift in the Middle East?’, deliberately ends with a question mark. The events over the year and a half since the death of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, have left the politics of the Middle East in tumult. The Arab Spring has certainly resulted in a change of regime in Tunisia and then Egypt. The uprisings against Gaddafi’s regime triggered...

The goal of this article is to place the role that social media plays in collective action within a more general theoretical structure, using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. The article presents two broad theoretical principles. The first is that one cannot understand the role of social media in collective action without first taking into account the political environment in whic...

Parliamentary elections in Egypt this month look set to change the political landscape. Former member of parliament and equity campaigner Hoda Rashad tells Fiona Fleck why the country's public health programmes need to take a social justice approach.

To counter the trend toward mechanization of research and aridity of critical analysis, this article makes a case for an interdisciplinary quest. To borrow Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze's phrase, we are convinced that 'everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.' With an eye to open-ended research questions, this article attempts to bui...

Motivated by the unusual patterns and dynamics of the Arab Spring, we construct a model explaining the vulnerability of the newly established incumbent to popular unrest. Using this model for the case of similar protests in Ukraine, we find that the current combination of availability of information, military capacity of the incumbent and his radicalization, together with the opportunity costs ...