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4631. Saudi Arabia in the 1990s: Stability and Foreign Policy

Author:
Mordechai Abir
Publication Date:
09-1997
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Abstract:
The stability of Saudi Arabia (and the Persian Gulf as a whole) is crucially important to the world's industrial countries. According to the Gulf Center of Strategic Studies, "oil is expected to account for 38 percent of all the world consumption of energy until 2015, compared to 39 percent in 1993. Increasing world-wide demand for oil, now about 74 million barrels per day, is projected to rise by 2015 to about 110 million" (Gulf Report, London, July 1997). Over 60 percent of the world's proven oil reserves are located in the Persian Gulf, and Saudi Arabia alone controls 25 percent of the total.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, Foreign Policy, Economics, Energy Policy, Politics, and Religion
Political Geography:
Middle East and Saudi Arabia

4632. 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

4633. Turkey Between Secularism and Islamism

Author:
Jacob M. Landau
Publication Date:
02-1997
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Abstract:
When Mustafa Kamal (Ataturk) founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 (he was its president until his death fifteen years later), he set as his main objective the modernization of the new republic. His preferred means was speedy, intensive secularization and, indeed, every one of his reforms was tied up with disestablishing other Islamic institutions from their hold on Turkey's politics, economics, society, and cultural life.
Topic:
Government, Islam, Politics, and Religion
Political Geography:
Turkey and Middle East

4634. Soviet and Russian Relations with the Two Koreas

Author:
Jane Shapiro Zacek
Publication Date:
01-1997
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
International Journal of Korean Studies
Institution:
International Council on Korean Studies
Abstract:
This essay considers Soviet and then Russian relations with North and South Korea since 1988, which was a watershed year for Soviet policy toward northeast Asia. By that time, the Soviet leadership had reassessed basic ideological and security interests as well as the country's growing domestic economic needs. While the Communist Party was still in power and Mikhail Gorbachev was still General Secretary of the Central Committee (a position he had assumed upon the death of Konstantin Chernenko in March 1985), Marxist-Leninist ideology was playing an everdecreasing role in Party politics and policymaking. By 1987, Gorbachev began to stress the critical need to shift primary political power and the policymaking process from the Party to state institutions. He also emphasized the necessity of revamping the Soviet economy, which would be costly and would need foreign assistance. By 1988, the international communist movement, with the Soviet Union at its head, no longer was of interest to the Soviet leader. Rather, he was looking to reconfirm his country's role as a great power in the international arena, a power that could not be ignored in any regional political turmoil and subsequent settlement, whether in Africa, the Middle East, or Northeast Asia.
Political Geography:
Russia, Middle East, South Korea, Korea, and Northeast Asia

4635. Khomeini's Incorporation of Iranian Military

Author:
Mark Roberts
Publication Date:
01-1996
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
In her book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), revolutionary authority and sociologist Theda Skocpol states: The repressive state organizations of the prerevolutionary regime have to be weakened before mass revolutionary action can succeed, or even emerge. Indeed, historically, mass rebellious action has not been able, in itself, to overcome state repression. Instead, military pressures from abroad … have been necessary to undermine repression.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and Religion
Political Geography:
Russia, China, Middle East, and France

4636. The New Great Game in Muslim Central Asia

Author:
M.E. Ahrari and James Beal
Publication Date:
01-1996
Content Type:
Working Paper
Abstract:
The dismantlement of the Soviet Union also brought about the liberation of six Central Asian Muslim republics—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan (figure 1). Although Azerbaijan is part of the Caucasus region, it is included in this study because: The independence of that country, like that of the Central Asian states, was brought about as a result of the dismantlement of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan, like its Central Asian counterparts, is a Muslim state, and faces similar politico-economic problems. Azerbaijan's conflict with Armenia involving Nagorno-Karabkh reminds one of a number of conflicts in the Central Asian region. These include a seething ethnic conflict in Kazakhstan (involving the Khazaks and the Slavs), the ongoing civil war in Tajikistan "along ethnic, national, and religious lines (since the Russian forces are "also involved in this civil war), and the ethnic conflict in the Fargana valley that cuts across the borders of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Like the economies of its Central Asian neighbors, the Azeri economy was largely dependent on the economy of the former Soviet Union. Consequently, like its other neighbors, Azerbaijan is also busy establishing economic self-sufficiency, along with strengthening its religious political, linguistic, and ethnic identities.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and Religion
Political Geography:
Central Asia, Middle East, and Soviet Union

4637. 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

4638. Military Doctrine and Political Participation: Toward a Sociology of Strategy

Author:
Yagil Levy
Publication Date:
01-1996
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Studies of Social Change
Abstract:
Wars produce contrasting effects on the state's status in the domestic arena: they bolster its internal control but, at the same time, create opportunities for collective action of which domestic groups can take advantage and weaken state autonomy. As the case of Israel suggests, within the confines of geo-political constraints, states modify their military doctrine to balance the two contradictory impacts. The main purpose of the paper is to lay the foundation for a Sociology of Strategy by drawing on the case of Israel.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Government, and Politics
Political Geography:
Middle East and Israel

4639. 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

4640. How Militarization Drives Political Control of the Military: The Case of Israel

Author:
Yagil Levy
Publication Date:
12-1995
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Studies of Social Change
Abstract:
Observation of state-military relations in Israel reveals an apparent paradox: Within a period of about seventy years, the more the militarization of Israeli society and politics gradually increased, the more politicians were successful in institutionalizing effective control over the Israel Defence Forces (IDF, and the pre-state organizations). Militarization passed through three main stages: (1) accepting the use of force as a legitimate political instrument during the pre-state period (1920-1948), subsequent to confrontation between pacifism and activism; (2) giving this instrument priority over political-diplomatic means in the state's first years up to the point in which (3) military discursive patterns gradually dominated political discourse after the 1967 War. At the same time, political control over the IDF was tightened, going from the inculcation of the principle of the armed forces' subordination to the political level during the pre-state period to the construction of arrangements working to restrain the military leverage for autonomous action.
Topic:
Security, Defense Policy, and Government
Political Geography:
Middle East and Israel