Arabs make up approximately 20 percent of the population within Israel's borders. Until the 1970s, Arab citizens of Israel were a mostly acquiescent group, but in recent decades political activism ...has increased dramatically among members of this minority. Certain activists within this population claim that they are a national and indigenous minority dispossessed by more recent settlers from Europe. Ethnically based political organizations inside Israel are making nationalist demands and challenging the Jewish foundations of the state.Palestinian Ethnonationalism in Israelinvestigates the rise of this new movement, which has important implications for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a whole. Political scientist Oded Haklai has written the first book to examine this manifestation of Palestinian nationalism in Israel. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with key figures, Haklai investigates how the debate over Arab minority rights within the Jewish state has given way to questioning the foundational principles of that state. This ground-breaking book not only explains the transitions in Palestinian Arab political activism in Israel but also presents new theoretical arguments about the relationship between states and societies. Haklai traces the source of Arab ethnonationalist mobilization to broader changes in the Israeli state, such as the decentralization of authority, an increase in political competition, intra-Jewish fragmentation, and a more liberalized economy.Palestinian Ethnonationalism in Israelavoids oversimplified explanations of ethnic conflict. Haklai's carefully researched and insightful analysis covers a neglected aspect of Israeli politics and Arab life outside the West Bank and Gaza. Scholars and policy makers interested in the future of Israel and peace in the Middle East will find it especially valuable.
Side Effects Aspinwall, Mark
2013, 2013-01-09
eBook
This is a story about governance in Mexico after the labor and environmental accords—called "side agreements"—that accompanied the NAFTA treaty went into effect. These side agreements required member ...states to uphold and enforce their labor and environmental laws; though never codified, it was widely accepted that Mexico, in particular, had a problem with law enforcement. Side Effects explores how differences in institutional design (of the side agreements) and domestic capacity (between the labor and environment sectors) influenced norm socialization in Mexico. It argues that the acceptance of rule-of-law norms in environmental governance can be attributed to participating institutions' independence from national control, their willingness to give citizens access, and the professionalization and technical capacity of domestic bureaucrats and civil society actors. Changes in labor governance have been hampered by union confederations, longstanding corruption, and a closed opportunity structure. Going beyond a simple accounting exercise of resources devoted to enforcing the law, this book comes to grips with how best to strengthen local capacity and promote pro-norm behavior—advances essential to the task of development and democratization.
This book describes the process of the Czech economic transformation from the beginning of the 1990s to the country’s entry into the European Union in 2004. This transformation is divided into four ...periods: an initial recession caused by the transformation; economic growth in the mid-1990s; a recession connected to the currency crisis of 1997; and recovery and growth from 1999 until 2004, when the analysis ends. The examination covers the main aspects of the transformation – an overall view of the process, political transition, economic policy, economic results (GDP development, inflation, unemployment), changes in outside indicators (balance of payments), privatization, transformation of the financial sector, and changes in the business sector and institutional development. The book also compares Czech development in this transformative era to those of Poland and Hungary. As in Hungary and Poland, the Czech Republic underwent an exceptional qualitative shift from a system centrally planned to one that was market-based. The book concludes that despite mistakes and hardships, the overall transformation process in Central Europe has been successful.
The Israeli-Palestinian struggle is considered to be one of the most entrenched conflicts in the world. Presenting and evaluating interactive models of peacemaking and the phenomenon of intractable ...conflict, the book takes an in-depth look into specific models for peacemaking and applies them to the situation in Israel/Palestine.
The argument centers around the idea that a multifaceted approach to peacemaking has the greatest potential to transform an intractable conflict into a mutually beneficial social order. Encompassing theoretical background, comparative studies of conflict resolution processes in similar circumstances around the world and policy recommendations, the author presents four interactive models of peacemaking to suggest a comprehensive approach to peacemaking that attacks the conflict from various angles, directions and dimensions.
Introducing general conditions that have the potential to transform a situation of destructive conflict into a more peaceful social order, Conflict and Peacemaking in Israel-Palestine adds a fresh perspective to the study of destructive social conflicts and should provoke critical discussion among students and scholars of peace and conflict studies, Middle Eastern politics, conflict resolution and management.
Introduction Part 1: General Background 1. Intractable Conflict as a Complex Phenomenon 2. The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict 3. Between Conflict-Resolution and Conflict-Management Part 2: Interactive Models of Peacemaking 4. The Strong-Leader Model 5. The Social-Reformer Model 6. The Political-Elite Model 7. The Public-Assembly Model. Summary and Conclusion
Sapir Handelman is a visiting professor at the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University, an associate at Harvard University and the Lentz Fellow in Peace and Conflict Resolution Research. His research focuses on the study of destructive social conflicts and their resolution, political theory, and applied ethics. He also leads the "Minds of Peace Experiment" at various Centers for Peace Studies around the U.S. and the Middle East, a project which offers simulations of a potential Palestinian-Israeli public-assembly, a public negotiating congress, and is the recipient of the 2010 Peter Becker Award for Peace and Conflict Studies.
Many observers have portrayed the Oslo Process as a milestone in the peacemaking process between Palestinians and Israelis. In this controversial and groundbreaking new work, McMahon challenges the ...interpretation of the Oslo Process as a breakthrough or new beginning in Palestinian-Israeli relations. He argues that the Oslo Process affected no discursive or non-discursive change and that the Oslo Process in fact institutionalized the analytics practices involved in Israeli and Palestinian relations. It should, McMahon concludes, be no surprise that the process ended with direct Palestinian-Israeli violence. This book will be crucial reading for scholars of Israeli and Palestinian relations as well as anyone who is interested in understanding what discursive change must occur for peace between Israel and Palestinians to be established and sustained.
Introduction 1. Excavating the Oslo Process 2. Reading the Oslo Process 3. Pre-1993 Systematic Silences 4. Pre-1993 Rules of Formation 5. Post-1993 Systematic Silences 6. Post-1993 Rules of Formation 7. Persistent Israeli Practices 8. Conclusion
Sean F. McMahon is a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at the American University in Cairo. His research focuses on Palestinian-Israeli politics generally, and the Oslo Process and its effects more specifically. He has published his research in Canadian Foreign Policy and the British Journal of Middle East Studies .
During the past forty years, thousands of studies have been carried out on the subject of happiness. Some have explored the levels of happiness or dissatisfaction associated with typical daily ...activities, such as working, seeing friends, or doing household chores. Others have tried to determine the extent to which income, family, religion, and other factors are associated with the satisfaction people feel about their lives. The Gallup organization has begun conducting global surveys of happiness, and several countries are considering publishing periodic reports on the growth or decline of happiness among their people. One nation, tiny Bhutan, has actually made "Gross National Happiness" the central aim of its domestic policy. How might happiness research affect government policy in the United States--and beyond? In The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard president Derek Bok examines how governments could use the rapidly growing research data on what makes people happy--in a variety of policy areas to increase well-being and improve the quality of life for all their citizens.
Here, Conor O'Dwyer introduces the phenomenon of runaway state-building as a consequence of patronage politics in underdeveloped, noncompetitive party systems. Analyzing the cases of three newly ...democratized nations in Eastern Europe—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—O’Dwyer argues that competition among political parties constrains patronage-led state expansion.
O’Dwyer uses democratization as a starting point, examining its effects on other aspects of political development. Focusing on the link between electoral competition and state-building, he is able to draw parallels between the problems faced by these three nations and broader historical and contemporary problems of patronage politics—such as urban machines in nineteenth-century America and the Philippines after Marcos.
This timely study provides political scientists and political reformers with insights into points in the democratization process where appropriate intervention can minimize runaway state-building and cultivate efficient bureaucracy within a robust and competitive democratic system.
InConscientious Objectors in Israel, Erica Weiss examines the lives of Israelis who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. Based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnography ...chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish conscientious objectors as they grapple with the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society-often suffering severe social and legal consequences, including imprisonment.While most scholarly work has considered the causes of animosity and violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,Conscientious Objectors in Israelexamines how and under what circumstances one is able to refuse to commit acts of violence in the midst of that conflict. By exploring the social life of conscientious dissent, Weiss exposes the tension within liberal citizenship between the protection of individual rights and obligations of self-sacrifice. While conscience is a strong cultural claim, military refusal directly challenges Israeli state sovereignty. Weiss explores conscience as a political entity that sits precariously outside the jurisdictional bounds of state power. Through the lens of Israeli conscientious objection, Weiss looks at the nature of contemporary citizenship, examining how the expectations of sacrifice shape the politics of both consent and dissent. In doing so, she exposes the sacrificial logic of the modern nation-state and demonstrates how personal crises of conscience can play out on the geopolitical stage.
The Peace Puzzle Kurtzer, Daniel C; Lasensky, Scott B; Quandt, William B ...
12/2012
eBook
"Having observed earlier periods of determined, persistent, creative and wise American diplomacy on the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are left to ponder whether that kind of American leadership and ...diplomatic wisdom can be recaptured. We also are left to wonder whether the supportive domestic environment in which previous administrations operated will recur, or whether Congressional and public support for Israel has limited administration options and thus changed the very nature of the American role in the peace process. Our overall conclusions in this volume represent a mix of process, politics, and substantive lessons learned, offered in the hope that a better understanding of the past can inform future policy."-fromThe Peace Puzzle
Each phase of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has been inordinately difficult in its own right, and every critical juncture and decision point in the long process has been shaped by U.S. politics and the U.S. leaders of the moment.The Peace Puzzletracks the American determination to articulate policy, develop strategy and tactics, and see through negotiations to agreements on an issue that has been of singular importance to U.S. interests for more than forty years.
In 2006, the authors ofThe Peace Puzzleformed the Study Group on Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, a project supported by the United States Institute of Peace, to develop a set of "best practices" for American diplomacy. The Study Group conducted in-depth interviews with more than 120 policymakers, diplomats, academics, and civil society figures and developed performance assessments of the various U.S. administrations of the post-Cold War period. This book, an objective account of the role of the United States in attempting to achieve a lasting Arab-Israeli peace, is informed by the authors' access to key individuals and official archives.
The tragedies of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are never far from the pages of the mainstream press. Yet it is rare to hear about the reality of life on the ground -- and it is rarer ...still when these voices belong to women. This book records the journey of a Jewish American physician travelling and working within Israel and the Occupied Territories. Alice Rothchild grew up in a family grounded by the traumas of the Holocaust and passionately devoted to Israel. This book recounts her experiences as she grapples with the reality of life in Israel and the hardships of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. The new edition includes a new preface, two chapters on Israeli dissent and a chapter which explores the impact of a Palestinian home demolition and the work of Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters who have joined together to form Combatants for Peace. Ultimately, the book raises troubling questions regarding US policy and the mainstream Jewish community's insistence on giving unquestioning support to all Israeli policy.
