Search

Begin New Search Topic Conflict Resolution Political Geography Middle East

591. Middle East—Peace Process Unfrozen

Author:
Oxford Analytica
Publication Date:
09-1999
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxford Analytica
Abstract:
Last week's signing of an Israeli–Palestinian agreement at Sharm al-Sheikh represents an important development in the search for a lasting settlement in the Middle East. The deal illustrates that it is possible to reach an agreement from which all parties will gain, while also exposing enduring problems. The progress made at Sharm al-Sheikh represents, as Nabil Shaath of the Palestinian authority described, an 'unfreezing' of the peace process. Whether the whole process can be infused with greater warmth depends firstly on US efforts to impel the Syrian–Israeli peace negotiations; secondly, it relies on the ability of the regional leaders to make the compromises necessary to reach a peace that all can present as a victory to their domestic constituencies.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Development, and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Syria

592. New Government, New Agenda For Israel

Author:
Joel Peters and Becky Kook
Publication Date:
08-1999
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Chatham House
Abstract:
On 17 May 1999 Ehud Barak secured a stunning victory in the Israeli elections, defeating incumbent Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with a majority of almost 400,000 and gaining slightly over 56 per cent of all the votes cast. While polls in the days immediately prior to the election had signalled Netanyahu\'s defeat, no one had anticipated such a landslide victory. After three turbulent years of Likud government, Barak\'s election slogan \'Israel wants a change\' clearly captured Israeli public disillusion with Netanyahu, who lost the trust and support of voters throughout the country.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Government, Peace Studies, and Politics
Political Geography:
Middle East and Israel

593. Ideas, Culture and Political Analysis Workshop

Author:
Thomas Risse, Sarah Mendelson, Neil Fligstein, Jan Kubik, Jeffrey T. Checkel, Consuelo Cruz, Kathleen McNamara, Sheri Berman, Frank Dobbin, Mark Blyth, Ken Pollack, George Steinmetz, Daniel Philpott, Gideon Rose, Martha Finnemore, Kathryn Skikkink, Marie Gottschalk, John Kurt Jacobsen, and Anna Seleny
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Social Science Research Council
Abstract:
The last decade or so has witnessed a resurgence in scholarship employing ideational and cultural factors in the analysis of political life. This scholarship has addressed political phenomena across a variety of national and international settings, with studies of European politics being particularly well represented. For example, the work of scholars like Peter Hall (1993), Peter Katzenstein (1996), Ronald Inglehart (1997), Robert Putnam (1994) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1995) has improved our understandings of European polities, societies and economies. Yet despite a recent rise in interest, ideational and cultural explanations still meet with skepticism in many quarters of the discipline. Some scholars doubt whether non-material factors like ideas or culture have independent causal effects, and others, who accept that such factors might matter, despair of devising viable ways of analyzing their impact on political life.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Security, Democratization, Economics, Government, Human Rights, International Cooperation, Nationalism, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, France, and Latin America

594. After Hebron: Prospects for the Peace Process

Author:
Zalman Shoval
Publication Date:
03-1997
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Abstract:
The Hebron agreement is now finally in place. During the months that it took to reach that point, some must have been reminded of what the nineteenth century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerstone once said about the Schleswig-Holstein question: there were only three people who understood it - one of whom was dead, one was in an asylum, and he himself had forgotten it.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, and Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Middle East

595. Demarcating an Israeli-Palestinian Border: Geographic Considerations

Author:
David Newman
Publication Date:
07-1997
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Abstract:
Maps are a very important part of the political process of conflict resolution known as the peace process. Maps are important parts of all territorial conflicts. We often walk around with the idea of a map in our head and think we know what we are talking about, but often we do not.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, Peace Studies, and Sovereignty
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, and Palestine

596. Palestinian Refugees and the Peace Process

Author:
Elia Zureik
Publication Date:
05-1996
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
As a discipline, refugee studies is of a recent vintage and very much influenced by the more established tradition of migration studies. Analysis of (voluntary) migration tends to focus on individuals rather than groups. To the extent that groups are considered, they are treated as aggregates of individuals rather than as cohesive social units in the sociological sense of constituting communities with shared common historical experiences (Shami 1993). In contrast with immigrant status, refugee status is the outcome of involuntary forms of migration, in which displacement is often caused by events beyond the control of refugees, such as internal and external wars, state policies of expulsion and exclusion, development projects, and natural disasters.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Migration, and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
Middle East

597. Peace Among States Is Also Peace Among Domestic Interests: Israel's Turn To De-escalation

Author:
Yagil Levy
Publication Date:
06-1995
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Studies of Social Change
Abstract:
Demilitarization and de-escalation of violent conflicts have seemed to prevail during the last decade. The most significant event -- the collapse of the Soviet Union with the end of the Cold War--has stimulated scholars of international relations (IR) to retest the power of major theories to both explain and forecast the shift in the Soviet Union' 5 foreign policy from competition to cooperation with the U.S. (similar to shifts undergone by other states). Scholars generally agree that the economic crisis in the Soviet Union in a world system dominated by the U.S. played a key role in the former superpower's failure to extract the domestic resources needed to maintain its position of rivalry vis-à-vis the U.S., thus propelling it to embark on a new road. Still, scholars have debated with respect to the shift's timing and the origins of the trajectory opted for by the Soviet Union toward cooperation relative to other options, such as further competition as a means of ongoing internal-state extraction and control. This debate also highlights the analytical weaknesses of the realism/neorealism school of thought when taken against the background of the collapse of the bipolar, competitive world system on which this school has staked so much.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Defense Policy, Diplomacy, and Ethnic Conflict
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, Israel, and Soviet Union