After the Arab Spring: The Security, Stability and Geopolitics of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on the domestic and regional approaches of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia post-Arab spring, this paper explores the effects of the uprisings on Middle Eastern geopolitics and security. Ultimately, it highlights the challenges the Kingdom faces at home and examines the factors behind its exceptionally interventionist approach to recent regional conflicts. These factors can be explained by a regional Saudi-Iranian rivalry, driven by a domestic regime legitimacy theory rather than solely the conventional sectarian narrative. Using empirical and qualitative observations, this analysis concludes by prioritizing regional state order, the de-escalation of regional rivalries, as well as incremental, evolutionary changes by Arab states that accommodate public grievances in a way mindful of the domestic context, without resorting to the revolutionary changes that have resulted in the significant state failures observable today.\nMOUSTAFA EZZ is currently pursuing a BA with an Honors Specialization in Political Science at Huron University College. His primary research interests include international security, intelligence, counter-terrorism, political risk and diplomatic strategies. His geographic specialization is the Middle East and North Africa, having lived in the region for fifteen years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".