Contenu du sommaire : Iran : élections à risques

Iran is facing three simultaneous challenges : a crisis of regime, an economical crisis, as well as an uncomfortable external posture in view of forthcoming 2013 presidential elections. The political landscape arising from the Spring 2012 legislative elections is driving its evolution. With a marginalized Ahmadinejad, the Great Leader appears as both sole decision-maker, and unique person in charge. Conservative factions are fighting each other and the crisis in the economy is fed by disastrous management, worsened by financial strangulation due to international sanctions. The nuclear issue is slowed while Iran is isolated at the regional level because of its supporting the Assad regime in Damascus.

The policy of sanctions against Iran has failed since the Islamic Republic seems still strong and its nuclear program continues. The crisis reached a climax with the Israeli threat of bombing, the war in Syria and the growing antagonism between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The heart of the dispute is in fact the ideological conflict between Iran and the United States. 2013 may mark the end of the never-ending cold war between the two «devils» because of a new political landscape : Barack Obama's second term, weariness or despair of the actors of Iranian crisis, the political comeback of the Arab world, and the new U.S. priority for the Far East.

The root cause of the confrontation between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei is deeply analyzed here. It is shown that the power struggle between the two men began almost immediately after Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, not in 2011 over firing of minister of Intelligence Heydar Moslehi, as many believe.

Literature on the Green Movement is almost entirely concentrated on its failure and tends to somehow overrule an analysis of the protest dynamics, coalitions of actors, and the structure of these “dormant networks”. Where do we now stand almost four years later ? A fresh look at the genesis of this movement which provoked a rupture of “allegiance” in Iranian civil society and an alternative way of doing politics.

In 2012, after nearly nine years of occupation, Iraq opened a new chapter in its history, bearing both hopes and many risks and challenges. At a time when uprisings and transitions continue in the Arab world, the country begins its reconstruction while still facing communal, political and territorial discords, as well as structural violence that reveal the failure of a democracy imposed from the outside and by force.

A comparative regional approach from Ottomanism to the formation of the modern nation states in the Arab World while analyzing continuities and discontinuities, with special attention given to the Tunisian and Ottoman constitutional experiments. The impact of the early 20th Century's Revolutions and the post-independence period can contextualize the historical roots of the « Arab Spring » and of the constitutional changes in the Arab World in 2011.