The research analysed the role of national parliaments in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia especially after the "Arab uprisings" in 2011, and assessed their contributions to the political transformation processes in their countries. Were legislative assemblies mere "rubber stamp institutions" within the region's authoritarian settings, the mass protests and eventual removal of various long-term dictators raised hopes for increased levels of democracy across the Middle East and North Africa. If higher levels of democracy would indeed be achieved, parliaments would indispensably gain importance within the respective polities. However, the project has revealed that since only Tunisia remarkably gained in its democratisation level, only here parliament has achieved higher importance and more recognition, while in the three other countries, the national assemblies have not achieved any meaningful growth in importance (Jordan, Morocco), or even lost it (Egypt). Given the overall dominance of the executives in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco, the project's underlying hypothesis, namely that Arab parliaments may have influence only in policy areas that (a) do not tackle national security and (b) are of domestic nature, can hence be verified.
The project has diminished an existing research gap since Arab parliaments had received almost no consideration in international scholarship until its beginning. Thus, a further aim of the project – behind the generation of fundamental research findings and enrichment of knowledge about the analysed countries' political systems – was the networking and linking of the ongoing research activities with similar scholarship conducted by fellow researchers, and the stimulation of further research on Arab parliaments. This has been achieved through the organisation of various theme-related panels at international conferences and the preparation of a "special issue", in which articles will analyse the "relevance" of parliaments in various Arab countries from a comparative perspective.
Lastly, the project aimed at bringing together practitioners (i.e. parliamentarians and administrative staff members) from Arab countries with scholars and experts in order to stimulate an exchange of ideas and the identification of best practices. This has been achieved by an international conference organised in Tunis in December 2018, in which parliamentarians from Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia engaged in discussions about "Parliamentary work and scientific counselling". In this conference, also experts of the scientific services of the European Parliament, the German Bundestag and the Hellenic Parliament of Greece participated.
The project has been conducted at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteis Brussel (IES-VUB) in Brussels, Belgium, with two larger visiting research stays ("secondments") at the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies of Southern Denmark University (SDU) in Odense, as well as one additional visiting research stay of two months at the University of Warwick (UK). Besides, various research stays in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia were conducted, during which semi-structured interviews with local parliamentarians, academics, NGO representatives, diplomats and similar decision-makers produced primary data which – after the definite conclusion of their evaluation – will lead to the publication of several peer-reviewed articles and a monograph, with which the the project's findings will be widely disseminated.
The findings will be of relevance for future research on contemporary Middle East politics, as well as Euro-Mediterranean relations. In addition, they might be consulted by journalists, diplomats, and practitioners in development cooperation, who work on questions of democratisation in the Middle East and North Africa.
