Transnational Civic Education Inquiry in the Lands of Contention

Transnational civic education as defined here refers to the systematic study of nations throughout the world as they struggle with lawlessness and recover governance values and ideas consistent with human dignity and the rule of law. Analytical reasoning is heralded as one approach to dissecting nations' civic cultures. One hundred Palestinian teachers examined the civic education documents and practices of seven nations, including Romania, the United States, and Palestine. They read original legal texts, conducted oral histories, learned content analysis, and learned horizontal human rights debate practices.     

Christian–Muslim Relations in Egypt in the Wake of the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring protests that brought massive and largely unforeseen political change to Egypt included all sectors of society, including the Egyptian Christian population, known as Copts. Copts participated in large numbers in the protests that brought about regime change in February 2011, but the broader implications of the revolution to Copts are unclear. In this essay, I address the changes in Christian–Muslim relations that attended the development of a new republican regime in Egypt as a result of the Arab Spring. While the former regime of President Hosni Mubarak had formed a stable elite partnership with the hierarchy of the Coptic Orthodox Church (a “neo‐millet” system), the 2011 revolution contributed to the erosion of this partnership in favor of a republican and pluralist model of citizenship in which individual Copts represent their own interests. The increasingly assertive public role of lay movements among Copts, coupled with the death of the Coptic Patriarch (pope) and his replacement by a younger successor, points to the continued erosion of the elite partnership in favor of the new model. Time will tell whether or not pluralist representation or a retrenched corporatism that favors the church will dominate Christian–Muslim relations in Egypt into the future.     

The Evolution of Administrative Systems in Kuwait,Saudi Arabia,and Qatar: The Challenge of Implementing Market Based Reforms

The dramatic plunge in oil prices since the second half of 2014 poses serious challenges for the oil dependent states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and revives their interest in accelerating the implementation of market‐based reforms such as outsourcing, privatization, and public–private partnerships. This article challenges the assumption that these reforms offer a panacea for administrative change, and argues that while they might appear to be a solution to the growing fiscal constraints in the three Gulf states, considerable administrative, cultural, economic, and political barriers hinder their effective implementation. The conclusion reached is that western labels of market‐based reforms offer limited options for the three states in the absence of strong political will to make fundamental reforms that could alter the state–society relations. It is suggested that further theorization of administrative change is required in cultural contexts, such as the Gulf region, where administration and society are intertwined, and where trying to minimize the role and size of the state, poses a direct threat to the political legitimacy of the ruling elites.