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36151. The Multilaterals: Status And Prospects

Author:
Nicole Brackman
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
On February 1, the multilateral track of the Middle East peace process is scheduled to resume in Moscow with the first meeting of the Steering Committee since May 1995. In the wake of Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's election last summer, there was widespread expectation that the multilateral talks would restart, but Egypt insisted no meeting be held until negotiations reopened between Damascus and Jerusalem. The restart of those talks last month paved the way for a revival of the multilateral talks.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Jerusalem, Moscow, Arab Countries, Egypt, and Damascus

36152. Syria's Critique Of The U.S. Draft Treaty: A Textual Analysis

Author:
Robert Satloff
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
Syria-Israel negotiations are on hold, but Israelis and Syrians have found a way to negotiate through third parties—the media. Two weeks ago, Israel leaked the U.S. draft text of a proposed peace treaty, complete with a timeline for implementation, in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. Over the last ten days, a surprised and embarrassed Syria has responded with its own leaks through the Lebanese media. Beirut's al-Safir newspaper is the favored recipient of these leaks, the most authoritative of which were a set of interviews by Syrian foreign minister Faruq al-Shara and a document detailing article-by-article amendments to the proposed U.S. text. The Shara interviews highlight Syria's (professed) obsession with dignity as an essential ingredient in negotiations as well as Damascus's demand that the United States procure a clear Israeli commitment to withdraw to the June 4, 1967 borders prior to the renewal of talks. More important, though, is the al-Safir critique of the original U.S. draft treaty. A close reading of that chilly document suggests that Syria is keen to project the image of offering Israel only an arctic-cold peace, correcting the impression advanced by some press reports that al-Shara had offered numerous concessions to Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak during the Shepherdstown talks.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, Israel, Arab Countries, and Syria

36153. The U.S. Draft Treaty For Syria-Israel Peace: A Textual Analysis

Author:
Patrick Clawson and Robert Satloff
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
After more than a week of negotiations in Shepherdstown, W.Va., the "working draft" of the Syria-Israel peace treaty reported in yesterday's Ha'aretz notes only one area of seemingly irreconcilable difference between the two parties—over the scope of the demilitarized zone separating the two sides. As currently worded, the text neither rules in nor rules out an Israeli withdrawal to the "June 4, 1967, lines." The draft reflects a document much more detailed than a Camp David-style framework accord or an Oslo-type Declaration of Principles but still far short of a full-blown peace treaty. In tone and wording, it is a throwback to the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, with few improvements and even several drawbacks from that two-decade-old document.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, Israel, Arab Countries, Syria, and Egypt

36154. Special Policy Forum Report: A Syria-Israel Summit -- Prospects For Peace

Author:
Raghida Dergham and Joel Singer
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
On January 4, 2000, Raghida Dergham, the senior diplomatic correspondent for Al-Hayat newspaper, and Joel Singer, a principal architect of the Oslo Accords and an Israeli participant in the 1996 Wye Plantation negotiations with Syria, addressed the Washington Institute's Policy Forum to discuss the prospects of Syrian-Israeli peace talks in Shepherdstown. The following is a rapporteur's summary of their remarks.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Arab Countries, and Syria

36155. The South Lebanon Army And Syria-Israel Talks

Author:
Gal Luft
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
While Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara are talking peace at Shepherdstown, the fighting in south Lebanon still goes on. Last time the two leaders met in Washington in December, the party was almost spoiled after a stray shell fired by South Lebanese Army (SLA) gunners hit an elementary school in the Lebanese village of Arab Salim, wounding twenty-four children. Residents of Israel's northern settlements anticipating Hizballah's wrath had to spend the night in their bomb shelters. Only after Israel's prompt apology, describing the incident as "an unfortunate mistake," did Hizballah, breaking with its usual pattern, agree not to retaliate by firing katyusha rockets at Israel's north.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
Washington, Middle East, Israel, Arab Countries, Lebanon, and Syria

36156. Removing Syria From The List Of State Sponsors Of Terrorism: Between Peace And Counterterrorism

Author:
David Schenker
Publication Date:
01-2000
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Abstract:
With Syrian-Israeli peace talks underway in Shepherdstown, W.Va., media attention has focused on the shape of a possible peace agreement and the potential for U.S. financial assistance to the parties. Virtually no attention, however, has been paid to the principal legal obstacle in the way of U.S. aid to one of the two putative peacemakers: Syria's place on the State Department's list of countries recognized as "state sponsors of terrorism." It is generally assumed that Syria will "do what it takes" within the context of making peace with Israel to earn its removal from the State Department's list, or that Washington will, in the framework of peace, find enough in Syrian efforts to merit Damascus's decertification as a terrorist-supporting state. In this environment, the potential rises that U.S. antiterrorism efforts will be blurred to fit an emerging Syria-Israel political reality.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, Security, and Diplomacy
Political Geography:
Middle East, Israel, Arab Countries, and Syria

36157. The Globalization of Property Rights: An Anglo and American Frontier Land Paradigm, 1700-1900

Author:
John Weaver
Publication Date:
02-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Old-world ideas accompanied European migrants, and a few changed the globe. An English obsession with landed property was implanted in settlement colonies, so that, between the late 1600s and late 1800s, private initiatives and official planning on British colonial and American frontiers interacted to frame property rights to extensive regions. This paper dwells on that interaction and the tensions between private goals and state sovereignty. The state was essential for framing property rights when these were associated with land and in situ resources. In very recent times, property rights have fostered entirely new industries, for example in software and genetically modified biota. Property rights have changed traditional activities such as art and entertainment. Do new forms of property - "less constrained by physical location" - leave the state with a reduced role in the realm of property rights? Does the paradigm of evolving property rights seen in previous centuries suggest any parallels with struggles over more recent property rights? These are questions for members of the institute to consider. We will offer several concluding thoughts.
Topic:
Globalization, Government, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
America and Europe

36158. Identity, Empathy and International Relations

Author:
Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
The insertion of identity politics into international relations undermines the capacity for cosmopolitan empathy, a capacity that might be useful in ameliorating some of the world's social problems. Empathy is the capacity to put oneself into another's shoes and recognize a stranger's humanity. The useful post-modern stress on the mutability of identity has hardened in identity politics into the creation of exclusive social categories of Oppressed and Oppressor. The social creation of such categories through such devices as the politics of amnesia paves the way for isolationist indifference. Yet data drawn both from the sociology of genocide and from the author's own research shows that humanitarian empathy across lines of identity is possible.
Topic:
International Relations, Civil Society, and Imperialism

36159. Globalization as the End and the Beginning of History: The Contradictory Implications of a New Paradigm

Author:
Arif Dirlik
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
This paper seeks to understand globalization as a new paradigm. It recognizes that there is much about the discourse of globalization that is ideological, that seeks to cover up the detrimental consequences of globalization for the majority of the world's population. It suggests nevertheless that there may be much to be gained from viewing it as a new paradigm, albeit a contradictory one, that has replaced an earlier paradigm of modernization. It makes an analytical distinction between globalization as historical process, which is at least as old as the history of capitalism, if not older, and globalization as a new way of looking at the world and its past, which is quite novel. To illustrate its argument, the paper contrasts present-day political and intellectual consequences of globalization with the late nineteenth-century, where several observers have identified a level of economic globalization greater than that of the present. It argues that whereas earlier globalization produced nationalism, colonialism and epistemological universalism, globalization presently is postcolonial, challenges the nation-state, and is marked by a break-down of universalism. It follows that globalization needs to be understood not just as global integration, as suggested by its ideologues and in economistic interpretations, but equally importantly as a new mode of fragmentation. An analytical distinction between globalization as process and paradigm is necessary to grasping globalization as a new mode of comprehending the world, but it is nevertheless necessary from a critical perspective to keep in mind the historical relationship between the two; globalization may be viewed as a new beginning in breaking down old hegemonies, but globalization may be viewed also as the ultimate victory of capitalist modernity. The contradictoriness may be perceived in the epistemologies of postmodernism and postcolonialism. The paper suggests that these epistemologies are best grasped as symptoms of globalization, that seek to break with modern and colonial ways of knowing, and yet are stamped by those very legacies. The discussion turns, by way of conclusion, to the relationship between globalization and history. While globalization is best understood historically, it also has produced new ways of looking at history. Three modes are selected here as products of globalization: world history writing, which is consciously motivated at the present by the idea of globalization, and seeks to understand the past in nonEurocentric ways, but may be understood also as a mode of containing the break-down of universalism; and two different perspectives on the "end of history" as we have known it. First, a EuroAmerican perspective that sees in the end of universalism(and the crowding of the past with incompatible and incommensurate cultural claims) also the end of history. Second, a conscious challenge to history as a modern way of knowing in the name of "alternatives to history." The paper concludes that these conflicts over history, too, point to the present as both an end, and a possible new beginning-but only as a possibility.
Topic:
Globalization, Political Theory, and History

36160. Racial and Ethnic Disparities: Key Findings from the National Survey of America's Families

Author:
Sarah Staveteig and Alyssa Wigton
Publication Date:
02-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Urban Institute
Abstract:
More than 30 years after the passage of civil rights legislation, significant economic and social inequalities persist amongst racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Analysis of well-being by race and ethnicity using data from the 1997 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) confirms that disparities exist both within and across all racial and ethnic groups. Even at higher incomes, whites and Asians repeatedly fare better than blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans.
Topic:
Human Welfare, Migration, and Poverty
Political Geography:
United States