The Arab region currently suffers from protracted conflicts whose roots extend back to the era of global colonization and before, where the region was subjected to various forms of colonization that influenced its cultural, social, and political structure. This resulted in distorted national structures that interacted with internal factors within Arab society, leading to multiple national and regional conflicts. Almost no Arab country today is free from conflicts at various levels, some of which manifest in extreme violence, exacerbating fragmentation and weakness in Arab society as a whole. Some of these conflicts have political, societal, and cultural dimensions, taking various forms such as political partnership deficiency, sectarian and tribal divisions, relations with minorities, social gender issues, and many more. Despite the abundance of conflicts in Arab society, there is a severe scarcity in higher education institutions for conflict studies, whether at the level of Arab universities or civil society institutions and NGOs concerned with studying conflicts on scholarly grounds. Conflict has been present in human society since the beginning of social interaction, and there have been scholars throughout history who dedicated their lives to studying conflicts, including the renowned Ibn Khaldun. However, the study of conflict as an academic discipline with its various pillars took a distinct form in the twentieth century.

Today, it is observed that most contributors to the study of conflict as a discipline in the twentieth century came from Western universities and societies. Their educational and cultural training in the field of study, along with the dominance of Western cognitive production in the social sciences in general, led to monopolizing the formulation of theories, concepts, perspectives, and intervention mechanisms. The output has not necessarily taken into considerations not only the cultural specificities and social structures of non-Western societies but also contributed to shaping the foreign policies of Western countries in a way that exacerbated these conflicts in various regions of the world, including the Arab region. Hence, there is a need to produce genuine Arab knowledge that contributes to the accumulation of efforts to establish an Arab science of conflicts

built upon what Arab society provides in terms of tools to deal with conflicts, benefiting from both the local and global intellectual heritage in understanding, managing, and resolving conflicts. Although global cognitive production in this field is abundant and important, any Arab attempt cannot dissociate itself from it, knowledge is cumulative, deriving its inputs from human intellectual production rather than from an independent group by itself. However, the need for a genuine Arab perspective has become imperative to enrich the field based on the requirements of local and regional understanding, developing new and innovative research approaches that contribute to deepening the critical vision of conflicts and finding sustainable solutions to them. ASCS is one of these scholarly forums working towards this direction.