Albania's 2025 parliamentary elections introduced postal voting for citizens abroad for the first time, enfranchising 245,935 registered diaspora voters. The Socialist Party won 61.14 per cent of valid diaspora votes despite holding only eight physical meetings abroad, while the Democratic Party organized 15 rallies yet secured just 23.55 per cent, a collapse of 10.69 per cent points relative to its domestic result. New-entrant formations held 43 in-person events across 26 cities, outperforming domestic baselines yet unable to cross the mandate threshold. This article argues that diaspora enfranchisement in competitive authoritarian contexts magnifies existing organizational asymmetries when participation is high-friction rather than equalizing the field. Drawing on 66 diaspora events, Central Election Commission data across 12 districts and 77 countries, and documentary evidence from a leaked party voter database, the article proposes a typology of three mobilization strategies: Structural, Symbolic, and Grassroots, differentiated by organizational depth and campaign visibility. The findings contribute to the emerging literature on organizational asymmetry and diaspora voting in hybrid regimes and qualify digital democratization claims about new entrants' capacity to compete in high-friction external voting environments.
This research article examines Spain's evolving role in the European Union's (EU) maritime security operations launched within the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) framework from 2008 to 2025. It posits that the Spanish leadership in EUNAVFOR Atalanta generated an 'Atalanta Effect', a paradoxical outcome where operational prominence reinforced rather than changed its traditionally cautious strategic culture. This study traces how Spain's self-perception as a 'middle power', its preference for multilateralism, and its risk aversion have persisted despite unprecedented command responsibilities. Through comparative case studies of Operations Atalanta, Sophia, Irini, and Aspides, it explores how the country's leadership in counter-piracy strengthened its legitimacy-oriented defence posture but also limited its willingness to support more assertive EU naval actions, such as the response to the Red Sea crisis (2023-2024). The findings suggest that Spain's operational leadership within the EU's Operation Atalanta significantly enhanced its institutional visibility but also restricted its strategic flexibility, revealing a deeper tension between ambition and restraint.
This article examines the resurgence of state-sponsored religious language as a technology of wartime governance in Syria's renewed conflict with Kurdish-administered regions since late 2025. Although Kurdish-led forces were pivotal partners in the defeat of the Islamic State alongside the U.S.-led coalition, they are now targeted by a state-backed military campaign that reframes Kurdish political agency as a religious and security threat. Focusing on a circular issued by Syria's Ministry of Awqaf, the article analyzes how Qur'anic citation and the language of 'conquest' are mobilized to sacralize military violence, produce ethno-religious boundary making, and normalize domination. Situating this episode within a longer history of mass violence against the Kurds authorized through religious idioms, the article develops the concept of religious necropolitics to explain how religious discourse helps organize ethno-religious hierarchies, designate legitimate targets, and render Kurdish lives conditionally protected and persistently vulnerable.
During the recent food crisis in Tunisia, President Kais Saied adopted a wait-and-see strategy that was not aimed at rapidly resolving the crisis, but rather at buying time. The article has two main aims. First, in order to understand the apparently counterintuitive behaviour of Tunisia's government, it calls for a politically and historically grounded understanding of food politics in the country. Tunisia's dependent and subordinate position within an uneven international order forced the government to balance the need to ensure affordable food for the lower classes and firms' competitiveness against stringent budgetary constraints. The impossibility of meeting both imperatives simultaneously without uprooting existing power relations helps to explain Saied's wait-and-see strategy. Second, the article explores how Saied legitimized his handling of the crisis. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews with domestic and international experts, it maps the intellectual debate in the country. By focusing on two key dimensions - the domestic/international context and the contingent/structural nature of the crisis - the analysis identifies four main discursive paradigms, which are termed as 'food modernist', 'food security', 'food sovereignty', and 'food regime'. By combining ideas and issues drawn from different paradigms, Saied constructed a sovereigntist-technocratic discourse that ultimately allowed the continuation of pro-market food politics.
Italy - T & uuml;rkiye bilateral relations are characterized by pragmatic yet asymmetrical cooperation, to T & uuml;rkiye's advantage. While Italy relies on T & uuml;rkiye to curb migration and safeguard its energy interests, Ankara leverages the relationship to expand its influence in the Mediterranean, NATO, and the EU. This Brief argues that this asymmetry is now amplified by the recent compartmentalized Leonardo - Baykar military drone partnership. Italy is relying on Turkish military technology for its most important weapons-system programme, the GCAP sixth-generation aircraft. This has profound implications for Italy - T & uuml;rkiye bilateral relations, Mediterranean politics, and broader international security. Despite increased cooperation, Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Albania remain areas where Italy-T & uuml;rkiye overlapping interests could spark confrontation. In such a scenario, the compartmentalized and asymmetric drone partnership risks fostering distrust, which may deepen geopolitical fault lines across the Mediterranean. Moreover, through participation in GCAP, T & uuml;rkiye could further extend its influence within NATO and the broader European security architecture, at a time when this is being reshaped to account for a reduced US role and greater European strategic autonomy. This Brief provides policy recommendations to rebalance a relationship that nonetheless serves common economic and strategic interests and can play a positive role in stabilizing the Mediterranean region.
This paper is based on an empirical observation derived from a field survey conducted in 2011-2012 in the regions where the Tunisian revolution was sparked. The spearhead of the protests consisted of unemployed rural graduates from Tunisian universities, guided by local leaders of the Regional Labour Union (which represents central syndicate (UGTT), who themselves were rural individuals with secondary education or university experience in the country's major cities. The protesters, generally the sons of idle peasants or civil servants who maintained a strong connection with their rural origins, did not demand land and did not denounce the exploitation of the proletariat's labour force; instead, they called for employment, freedom, and dignity. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, unlike the most famous and dramatic historical revolutions, the expansion of universities into rural areas made the Tunisian revolution peaceful and transformed its meaning.
Climate change communication is often impacted by political and economic actors. This phenomenon is magnified in politically restricted countries such as Jordan. The kingdom is highly vulnerable to climate change due to its exceptional freshwater scarcity, economic underdevelopment and its hosting of high numbers of refugees from neighbouring countries. This article critically examines climate change media coverage in Jordan to understand how national public discourse is shaped. We apply a corpus-based thematic analysis to 2588 news articles published in major Jordanian newspapers, and 34 interviews. We argue that there has been a substantial advancement in national climate change coverage in Jordan. Yet, despite climate change being a 'safe' topic in the kingdom, the country's socio-economic and political restrictions hinder the advancement of climate change-related discourses, with media coverage mostly sticking to non-confrontational themes, not questioning official approaches and providing little space for civil society voices. This hinders Jordan's ability to respond to the threats posed by climate change and promote economic and political stability in the kingdom.
Indonesia's relations with the Middle East and North Africa have taken a notable turn in the past few years. Previously Jakarta concentrated on economic and cultural matters in its dealings with the region; it now concerns itself with security and military affairs, and has adopted a more activist posture. The shift is evident with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Arab Gulf states and Iran, and Turkiye.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has garnered significant attention from geographers worldwide, yet few have focused on its communicative aspects. This article examines the BRI from a communication geography perspective that integrates media studies and geographical analysis. We focus on the role of media narratives in the spatio-discursive construction of a flagship BRI project-Piraeus Port in Greece. This construction involves a complex, competitive process among media outlets in different countries. Based on framing theory, we analysed 519 online news articles about Piraeus Port, written in Greek and English and originating from five countries (China, France, Greece, the UK, and the US), to reveal four major geographical frames: geopolitics, geoeconomics, local development, and governance. These frames operate at different scales, invoke different spatial imaginaries, and frame Piraeus Port differently as a symbol of peaceful coexistence, a geopolitical hotspot amid intensifying China-US tensions, a harbinger of economic prosperity, a local space of everyday life and production undergoing transformation, and a zone of exception marked by illicit activities. We further conducted a cross-country analysis and found that, while most news coverage adopted a positive view of the port project, Western media outlets were more critical than their Chinese counterparts.
While the corrosive effect of affective polarization on democratic norms is a major concern, existing research has largely overlooked its dynamics outside established democracies. This study addresses this gap by examining Turkey, a paradigmatic, highly polarized hybrid regime where democratic norms are actively contested. Drawing on original, nationally representative survey data from spring 2024, we investigate how affective polarization shapes citizens' willingness to endorse concrete violations of electoral fairness and civil liberties, moving beyond abstract measures of democratic support. We find that higher levels of affective polarization are strongly associated with greater endorsement of undemocratic practices motivated by both out-party discrimination and in-party favouritism, though the association is somewhat stronger for the latter. This relationship holds among both government and opposition supporters, challenging the assumption that tolerance for such practices is unique to incumbent partisans. Contrary to recent evidence from Western democracies, we find no curvilinear relationship: affective polarization in Turkey consistently predicts greater tolerance of democratic violations. By analysing a case of sustained democratic backsliding, we extend debates on affective polarization beyond consolidated democracies, showing how it can create a permissive environment for illiberal practices and undermine citizen commitment to democratic norms.
This paper challenges the perceived inevitability of the peripheral decline of social democratic parties (SDPs) in Europe by comparing the most dramatic case of collapse - PASOK in Greece - with a notable case of resilience - CHP in Turkey. Drawing on the Third Way (TW) debates as a theoretical lens, we present three key findings. First, we argue that despite their distinct ideological legacies, both parties converged through their adoption of traditional social democracy in the 1970s and TW in the 1990s and 2000s. Second, we posit that while TW initially appeared to address the electoral dilemmas facing SDPs, it proved politically costly over the long term, particularly for SDPs in government. Finally, we suggest that a strategic return to traditional social democracy - as exemplified by CHP - offers the most viable path to recovery, even under authoritarian settings.
The Arab Uprisings represent a critical juncture for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), even though they did not result in the democratic change that many expected at the time. To what extent do European development donors use aid to support democracy in MENA countries when faced by such a critical juncture? We examine the policy and operational responses of four major European donors: France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Institutions. Based on policy documents and development aid data from the OEDC-DAC database, our analysis shows that Europeans expressed rhetorical support for MENA democracy, but set very different country and thematic priorities and did not coordinate their aid responses with each other. Donors focused on an indirect developmental approach, rather than a direct political approach, to democracy support. Aid policies and practices became increasingly securitized, with the negative effect of strengthening authoritarian regimes. The lesson of the Arab Uprisings is the need for a coordinated approach among donors focused on political democracy support, in order to be prepared for future critical junctures that could lead to democratization.
Post-war governance in Lebanon underwent a decisive shift between 2006 and 2025. After the July War, Hezbollah's Waad programme rapidly rebuilt devastated neighbourhoods, restoring housing and infrastructure within a few years. Following a similarly destructive war in 2024-25, the same actor abandoned reconstruction and instead distributed short-term rental and furniture allowances, leaving displacement unresolved. Through a paired comparison of these two moments, this shift is explained via a tripartite constraint framework involving Hezbollah's reduced fiscal capacity, the bankruptcy and paralysis of the Lebanese state, and an international donor regime structured by stringent conditionality. Together, these constraints foreclosed capital-intensive rebuilding and rendered renewable cash compensation the only institutionally feasible form of intervention. The resulting governance outcome is one of planned temporariness - where 'planned' denotes systematic administrative regularity rather than unified design - in which populations are stabilized through recurring monetary support while permanent reconstruction is indefinitely deferred. This reframes reconstruction not as a timeless condition of incompletion, but as a historically specific shift from spatial rebuilding to temporal governance under constraint.
While Turkey is widely recognized for its deep polarization, less is known about how this dynamic unfolds in parliamentary discourse. This study provides the first longitudinal analysis of rhetorical polarization in the Turkish Grand National Assembly from 2011 to 2023, a period of democratic backsliding. We measure rhetorical polarization through a supervised machine learning approach with a confidence-weighted classifier metric. Analysing 487,862 parliamentary speech paragraphs (33.2 million words), we trace inter-party rhetorical distance over time and across dyads. Rhetorical polarization intensified especially following critical junctures such as the Gezi Park protests, the collapse of the Kurdish peace process, and the transition to a presidential system. Polarization dynamics overlap with political alliances: the governing de facto AKP - MHP coalition achieved significant rhetorical convergence, while main opposition parties remained fragmented despite forming a pre-electoral coalition. The junior coalition partner MHP, not the ruling AKP, emerged as the most polarizing actor. The AKP - CHP relationship closely tracked system-wide trends, acting as a bellwether for parliamentary discourse. Our findings underscore how coalition dynamics, rather than ideology alone, drive polarization in multi-party systems, contributing to broader debates on discourse, polarization, and opposition coordination in competitive authoritarian regimes across the Mediterranean and beyond.
The paper examines how public trust in Islamist parties has evolved since the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, focusing on perceptions of their institutional behavior and the extent to which they are seen as moderated actors. To demonstrate this, the analysis draws on Arab Barometer survey data and the results of the 2024 parliamentary elections in Jordan, arguing that political interest is the strongest predictor of trust in Islamist actors. In many respects, citizens do not evaluate Islamist parties on the basis of religious conviction or ideological orientation, but rather on their institutional behavior, mobilization capacity, and performance within highly controlled political environments. In settings where electoral competition is tightly restricted, such as Jordan, citizens may express support for Islamist parties not because they have undergone ideological transformation, but because they represent the most viable organizational alternative within an otherwise narrow political landscape. By emphasizing the conditional and strategic nature of public support, this study contributes to research on party politics and Islamist movements by showing that trust in Islamist parties increasingly reflects pragmatic evaluations shaped by structural constraints rather than deep ideological attachments.
This article examines how the discourse of Italy's right-wing populist government affects the integration of Muslim immigrants. Right-wing populist politics portray Muslim immigrants as a threat to social cohesion, using securitization discourse rooted in Christian nationalism. However, this study shows that the impact of right-wing populist discourse varies among Muslim immigrants and does not necessarily hinder integration. Based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 50 Muslim immigrants living in northern Italy in 2024, the study analyzes the religious, social, bureaucratic, and economic obstacles Muslim immigrants face during the integration process. The results show that integration issues arise not only from religious identity but also from language barriers, bureaucratic hurdles, and discrimination in the labour market. In summary, while right-wing populist policies make integration more difficult, individuals develop resistance mechanisms against these discourses. However, this does not mean that Muslim immigrants in Italy have become agents of change in discourse or structure.
