The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies will host its seventh annual Conference on the Issues of Democracy and Democratic Transition in September, 2018. The theme of this next meeting, to be held in the Tunisian capital, will be devoted to understanding how external factors, on the regional and global levels, influence the course of the democratic transition in Arab countries.

Most authors writing on the democratic transition have concerned themselves with the internal factors influencing political change, leading to the neglect of external, factors in the literature. Since the 1990s however, an increasing number of scholars have moved beyond internal factors when seeking to understand the nature of the democratic transition. This new shift, which envisages an interplay between internal and external factors, also coincided with the end of the Cold War and the rise of a new phase in  international relations.

The Arab world was not immune to these global transformations. The region has long been subject to foreign influence, beginning with the rise of colonialism and the birth of Arab states and through the period of post-colonial independence and the Cold War up to and until the Arab Spring of 2011. 

Further details are available on the following documents(links in Arabic):