Jung offers a normatively informed and empirically grounded critique of approaches that justify minority rights on the basis of the need to protect culture.
Bohman notes the extensive interdependence that characterizes the new circumstances of global politics, and argues that states have reacted either by strengthening state boundaries and increasing centralized authority or by delegating political authority.
Barry and Reddy challenge us to envision a world where workers everywhere can make a living wage in safe conditions and globalization does not drive us to compete in a desperate "race to the bottom."
According to Grewal, we need to understand globalization as a process in which we participate by choice but not necessarily voluntarily—one in which common standards allow more effective coordination, yet also entrap us in their pull for convergence.
This edited collection takes stock of the state of the Western alliance, seeking both to improve our theoretical understanding of conflict and crisis and to examine the relevance of theories of politics and international relations.
Iraq and Israel/Palestine may on the surface appear to be very different societies with little in common. Iraq has its Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiites, and its modern history has been a struggle over monarchy, republicanism, and the one-party state. Israel and Palestine are Jewish, Sunni Arab, and Christian Arab, and their central struggle has been over the shape of the Zionist state and the question of Palestinian statelessness. Iraq is a hydrocarbon state, while Israel and Palestine have diverse economies. The two can fruitfully be viewed through the same prism in two ways, however. On a comparative level, they share much in common, being multi-ethnic states with a background in Ottoman and British colonial administrative practices. Their fragility and ethnic instability have driven both internal civil wars and wars with neighbors. They have also had an important impact upon one another. The rise of Zionism in the Middle East and the Arab rejection of it robbed Iraq of its vibrant and influential Jewish community, with fateful results. It also displaced thousands of Palestinians to Iraq and hundreds of thousands to neighboring Kuwait. Iraqi troops fought Israel, with Iraq supporting its Palestinian foes. The Palestinians of Kuwait were further displaced by the Gulf War, and those of Iraq had to flee to Jordan and Palestine after 2003. The Israel lobby in the United States was one important mover in fomenting the 2003 U.S. overthrow of the Iraqi government, which propelled Iraq into chaos.
Political Geography:
United States, Iraq, Middle East, Israel, Kuwait, Palestine, and Jordan
The conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors is overlain with history and religion, but it is best understood as a product of two 20thcentury nationalist movements that sought self-determination and statehood in the same small piece of land. The British, who held the League of Nations' mandate over Palestine, never found a mutually acceptable plan for self-government by Jewish Zionists and Palestinian Arabs during their moment of preeminence (1920–1947). It fell to the newly formed United Nations to recommend partition into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Palestinians, backed by their Arab brethren, did not accept the partition, decided to wage war against the new state when the British withdrew, and were badly defeated, but not vanquished, on the battlefield.
The 8 August 2008 death of Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine's greatest modern poet, did not go unnoticed by the global community of scholars of Palestine as obituaries of Mahmoud Darwish continue to appear in the media around the world. The poet from Birweh, one of the 400 destroyed villages within present-day Israel, was honored in Ramallah with three days of official mourning in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as well as a state funeral (usually reserved for the highest political officials). The past forty years (1967–2007) are an appropriate time period for reflection on the process of colonization in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While many Israelis may consider the past forty years a time of rejoicing and jubilation, Palestinians worldwide see it as a time of quiet mourning and reflection. The events following the June 1967 Six-Day War began the Israeli process of colonial occupation of the West Bank through the use of former British Mandate emergency laws, the establishment of illegal colonies (called settlements), and an array of rules and restrictions on movement within the territories. Limitations were imposed on imports and exports of manufactured goods and produce. Restrictions were placed on access to religious sites, aquifers and wells, and home and factory building permits. There was the establishment of arbitrary invasions and the closure of schools and universities. It is the latter colonial restrictions and prohibitions that are the subject of this essay, which serves as a litmus test of the extent of the colonial social and cultural transformation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories over the past four decades. It is in the schools, colleges, and universities of a society where much of the growth and future hope of a nation may be observed and which manifest the deeper social and cultural values and aspirations of the nation. Yet these institutions are vulnerable to military and police actions.
The Oslo Accords seemed to represent the new post-Cold War/ post-Gulf War era, which ostensibly heralded the beginning of a “new world order” under American hegemony. The weakened Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Arab radical actors, such as Syria and Iraq; the belief that the American-led capitalist, market-oriented ideology had scored its final victory—best expressed by Francis Fukuyama's “End of History” thesis; Israel's vulnerability to Iraq's mediumrange missiles and to American financial pressures; and the perceived loss of Israel's status as a reliable U.S. ally in a tumultuous Middle East all seemed to have created ripe conditions for a historical breakthrough in the long-stalemated Arab-Israeli peace process.
Political Geography:
United States, Iraq, America, Israel, Arabia, Syria, and Oslo