Political Science

A prime focus for social scientists, and in particular political scientists, is on institutions. Institutions are stabilized sets of expectations that establish frameworks for social action that affect behavior because they affect calculations and inspire attachments. Institutions do change, but they change slower than life changes. This creates a paradoxical reality. On the one hand, the relative stability of institutions-the rules and procedures they establish for interaction and decision-compared to the fluctuations of circumstances and preferences is what makes it possible for human groups to take effective action. On the other hand, their very stability means that the decisions they enable are almost inevitably suboptimal.

Book review essay re three volumes: 
Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, eds., Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 244 pp. Hardback, $90.00. Paperback, $35.00.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 368 pp. Hardback, $39.95.
Gershon Shafir, A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World’s Most Intractable Conflict (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 296 pp. Hardback, $26.95.

How Ariel Sharon manipulated administrative categories and imposed radical interpretations of Jordanian and Ottoman Land Law in order to circumvent Israeli High Court decisions that limited land expropriation for Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

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Some of the editors of Contemporary Jewry were disturbed by the constructivist treatment of the Holocaust offered in my article which was accepted and published via a normal peer-review process.  Several comments on the article were solicited for publication along side it.  When those editors discovered that these comments were positive, they wrote and published their own lengthy critique.  This is my brief response.

Institutional frameworks powerfully determine the goals, violence, and trajectories of identitarian movements—including secessionist movements. However, both small-Nand large-Nresearchers disagree on the question of whether “power-sharing” arrangements, instead of repression, are more or less likely to mitigate threats of secessionist mobilizations by disaffected, regionally concentrated minority groups. The PS-I modeling platform was used to create a virtual country “Beita,” containing within it a disaffected, partially controlled, regionally concentrated minority. Drawing on constructivist identity theory to determine behaviors by individual agents in Beita, the most popular theoretical positions on this issue were tested. Data were drawn from batches of hundreds of Beita histories produced under rigorous experimental conditions. The results lend support to sophisticated interpretations of the effects of repression vs. responsive or representative types of power-sharing. Although ...

Ending Protracted Conflicts: The Oslo Peace Process Between Political Partnership and Legality Ian S. Lustick* Introduction If the Oslo peace process is considered within the category of other extended processes of negotiation and attempted reconciliation, such as those underway ...

336 Minnesota Journal of Int'l Law [Vol. 16:2 they gave 36 percent more speeches about terrorism than about Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's signature theme (transformation of the military), 22 times more speeches about terrorism than about nuclear weapons, 43 times more ...

Traditional Approaches and Problems in the Study of Emigration Jewish emigration from Israel has always been sensitive and susceptible to sensationalism. This can hardly be surprising in a country accustomed to defending its very right to exist against charges of illegitimacy and which, in that context, treats every immigrant and emigrant as a kind of participant in a perpetual referendum on the country's chances for survival. Discussion of Jewish emigration from Israel (or from Palestine before 1948), known within the Zionist ideological lexicon as "yeridah" ("going down") has seldom been systematic. In sharp contrast to the cornucopia of statistical information provided by Zionist and Israeli institutions over the years regarding almost every detail Jewish immigration into Israel, official Israeli sources contain almost no consistent, annual information about rates of emigration from the country or profiles of those leaving.

Irredentism conflicts are ravaging human lives across the globe. These co@icts arise not only from the aggressive abrogation of settled boundaries, but from real pressures to accommodate population growth, migration, changes in solidarity patterns, and increased political mobilization. Any intellectually interesting criterion for evaluating claims to territories must be formulated without ascribing decisive significance to the scriptures or beliefs of any particular people or group of peoples. Two problems arise, however, that complicate any effort to substitute a moral rule for the logically contradictory, empirically incorrect, and ethically bankrupt principle of "might makes right". Unless there is a practical meaning to the criterion, neither movements, nor governments, nor the peoples they represent will be inclined to pay any attention to it. On the other hand, any spect$c operational, criterion, such as current habitation, land to population ratio, prior habitation, or productivity of use, will encourage "'ethnic cleansing" or demands for impossibly constant adjustments in allocation of territory. This impossibility will drain the criterion of meaning or plunge the world into an endless and dangerous process of territorial re-demarcation. A partial solution to this problem is offered by conceiving of legitimate boundaries as hegemonically institutionalized beliefsd@icult to establish, tenacious once established, and linked via politics and economics to the real capacities of peoples, to their aspirations, and to prevailing international conceptions of right and wrong.

Propelled by the oil boom of the mid-1970s the Middle East emerged as the world's fastest growing region. Hopes and expectations were high for Arab political consolidation, economic advancement, and cultural efflorescence. With falling oil prices and a devastating war between Iran and Iraq, these hopes had dimmed somewhat by the early 1980s. In 1985, however, the spectacular image of an Arab great power was still tantalizing. A Pan-Arab state, wrote two experts on the region, would include a total area of 13.7 million square kilometers,second only to the Soviet Union and considerably larger than Europe, Canada, China, or the United States. … By 2000 it would have more people than either of the two superpowers. This state would contain almost two-thirds of the world's proven oil reserves. It would also have enough capital to finance its own economic and social development. Conceivably, it could feed itself.… Access to a huge market could stimulate rapid industrial growth. Pre...