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The purpose of this paper is to examine the main contract principles which govern the international arbitration contract with special emphasis to examine contract principle found of the Middle East, how international principles of contract are perceived in the region, and whether there are any dominant contract principles.

A general exploratory research procedure used to give a better grasp of various aspects of socio‐legal approaches. The paper seeks to create knowledge that can be used to retrieve some pressing social and organisational understanding in the said region. The first part of the paper examines the role of ethics and tradition in understanding Middle Eastern contract principles. The second part examines the impact of Islamic Law on commercial contract principles. The third section analyses the regional perception of international contract principles. Finally, the paper addresses some contemporary issues of international contracts in the Middle East.

The paper showed that the legal perceptions of international contract principles reflect regional legal thinking which has been influenced by a mixed understanding of regional traditions, Islamic contract law principles as well as Western contract principles when these principles match regional legal culture. Overall, it showed that still under such mixed understanding, there are strong regional legal traditions and these are found in Islamic contract principles and affects commercial contract experiences. In general, a significant difference still exists between modern international contract principles and those in the Middle East.

The paper generates a knowledge that mixed understanding in regard to international contract arbitration principles due historical and cultural reasoning. Arab States does not share common understanding of international contract principles. Thus, it is very superfluous to propose the argument that there is sole Middle Eastern regional perception which dominates every Arab State. Therefore, special understandings and considerations should be given to every international arbitration contract from certain Arab State entity to another.

The paper provides a clear understanding of the guidelines for international commercial arbitration contract in the Middle East. Legal culture should be taken into consideration if a successful contract implementation has to be achieved.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the regional perceptions of the Middle East region in relation to international commercial arbitration and show how these perceptions influence the attempts to harmonise the modern international law in the Middle East region.

Legal positivism as a general philosophy, mainly influenced by John Austin, is used as an analytical tool in order to identify the general trends from Western and Middle East cultural perspectives that relate to international commercial arbitration.

The paper shows how the Middle East region has different social and legal values between the West and the Middle East region in respect to the primarily three general and important features of the law – namely, normative, institutionalised, and coercive. Positivism legal theory shows that such success in the context of western European commercial law is inappropriate in the Middle East where different cultural norms make its wholesale and unqualified transferability problematic, notwithstanding its acceptance in highly generalised terms.

The paper generates a proposition that reforms are more likely to succeed if adjustments to the cultural environment are made. Thus, it supports the argument that regional values can add to the global activities of the harmonisation process of international commercial arbitration law.

The paper provides a clear understanding of the guidelines for the reform and development of Middle East international commercial arbitration. Legal culture should be taken into consideration if a successful reform is to be achieved.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.