This volume presents essential aspects of Mediterranean politics to be reconsidered in the light of the Arab upheavals since 2010. The focal point of the book is the question in how far European-Mediterranean relations are challenged by the various developments. It explores the relationship between security and democracy within the Arab countries and in European-Mediterranean relations. The ambiguity between the promotion of democratic values and the preservation of common interests in cooperation in economic and security affairs is stirred up by changing political actors and new conflictual constellations inside the Arab countries. All these changes evoke new challenges for all areas of the European-Mediterranean cooperation. Thus, the volume assembles contributions from different angles on the re-formulation of the European Neighbourhood Policy as well as the Democracy Assistance towards the Southern Mediterranean. It discusses the major security issues of a cooperative security architecture, counter-terrorism action, migration control and security sector reform in order to explore the relevant challenges in the field. The contributions analyse the recent developments and challenges, provide critical insights into those fields and endeavour to provide some proposals for improving Mediterranean cooperation on democracy and security. This book was published as a special issue of Democracy and Security.

One of the world’s most prevalent political quarrels is the current geographical state of Ukraine, along with its relationships with Russia and the European Union. With the annexation of Crimea, Russian forces have gained control over most of Eastern Ukraine, igniting a clash between the two governments and triggering the European Union, United States, and several Post-Soviet states to involve themselves in the situation. As these engagements continue to unfold, significant research is needed to examine the current state of these administrations and the tensions that continue to intensify in this region of the world. Analyzing Political Tensions Between Ukraine, Russia, and the EU is a collection of innovative research on the recent developments inside this growing geopolitical conflict. While highlighting topics including neighborhood policy, NATO relations, and Eastern partnership, this book is ideally designed for politicians, policymakers, governmental strategists, researchers, educators, journalists, academicians, and students seeking further understanding of foreign relations and the current political struggles of these European territories.

The past few years have been a period of unprecedented political upheaval for the Maghreb. A protest which began in a provincial city in one of North Africa's quieter corners quickly engulfed the entire region. Presidents of decades standing were swept from office on waves of public discontent while their counterparts elsewhere nervously tried to calm the mob. In several places these protests are still being played out; in the law courts of Egypt, on the battlefields of Libya, and in the leaking tubs carrying migrants to Europe. And even where the winds of change have died down, the political and social landscape is altered from before. Herein lies a defining paradox of the Arab Spring; its ubiquity and singularity. Nearly all of the region's countries have been affected. But despite making similar demands in largely the same ways over much the same period, their respective protest movements have achieved different results. Drawing on Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way's celebrated model for examining political transitions, this book explains these discrepancies, why Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania have reached different outcomes. It does so by contextualising each country's experiences, by examining and comparing their political development over the past decade.

The self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December 2010 heralded the arrival of the ‘Arab Spring,’ a startling, yet not unprecedented, era of profound social and political upheaval. The meme of the Arab Spring is characterised by bottom-up change, or the lack thereof, and its effects are still unfurling today. The Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring seeks to provide a departure point for ongoing discussion of a fluid phenomenon on a plethora of topics, including: Contexts and contests of democratisation The sweep of the Arab Spring Egypt Women and the Arab Spring Agents of change and the technology of protest Impact of the Arab Spring in the wider Middle East and further afield Collating a wide array of viewpoints, specialisms, biases, and degrees of proximity and distance from events that shook the Arab world to its core, the Handbook is written with the reader in mind, to provide students, practitioners, diplomats, policy-makers and lay readers with contextualization and knowledge, and to set the stage for further discussion of the Arab Spring.

Prior to 2011, popular imagination perceived the Muslim Middle East as unchanging and unchangeable, frozen in its own traditions and history. In Life as Politics, Asef Bayat argues that such presumptions fail to recognize the routine, yet important, ways in which ordinary people make meaningful change through everyday actions. First published just months before the Arab Spring swept across the region, this timely and prophetic book sheds light on the ongoing acts of protest, practice, and direct daily action. The second edition includes three new chapters on the Arab Spring and Iran's Green Movement and is fully updated to reflect recent events. At heart, the book remains a study of agency in times of constraint. In addition to ongoing protests, millions of people across the Middle East are effecting transformation through the discovery and creation of new social spaces within which to make their claims heard. This eye-opening book makes an important contribution to global debates over the meaning of social movements and the dynamics of social change.

This edited volume offers an understanding of how the international community, as a collection of significant actors including major states and intergovernmental institutions, has responded to the important political and social development of the Arab Spring. Contributors analyze the response by international organizations (UN, EU, NATO), big powers (US, Russia, China, UK), regional powers (Turkey, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia) and small powers (Kuwait, Qatar). The book thus makes a sound contribution to the existing literature on the Arab Spring in form of foreign policy analysis and provides an overview of the current shape and outlook of global politics.

This volume offers a coherent analysis of the European Union’s security strategies within a comparative framework. If the EU is to survive and prosper as an effective security actor, it requires that greater attention be devoted to taking a cohesive and common position on the relationship between EU foreign policy means and goals. The major claim of this edited collection is that there is a European grand security strategy that disciplines member state security strategies. That grand strategy has two distinct substantive goals: (1) the preservation and expansion of the EU system of security governance; and (2) the implementation of specific strategies to meet internal and external threats and sources of insecurity. The EU has sought to develop a grand security strategy that not only accounts for the proliferation of threats possessing a military or non-military character and differentiates between core and peripheral regions of interest, but also addresses the requirements to bridge the increasingly blurred boundary between internal and external security threats and the necessary reconciliation of the competing security preferences of its member states. The empirical contributions to this volume examine the EU security strategies for specific issue areas and regional threat complexes. These case studies assess whether and how those strategies have consolidated or expanded the EU system of security governance, as well as their successes and limitations in meeting the security threats confronting the EU and its member-states. This volume will be of great interest to students of EU policy, foreign policy, security studies and IR.