《日内瓦倡议》——巴以和平进程中的新动力

2003年12月1日,巴以民间和平协议--<日内瓦倡议>正式启动.该倡议首次对巴以冲突的几个主要焦点问题提出了完整而具体的解决方案,让人们初步看到了未来的巴以两国的大致轮廓,并受到巴以双方及在中东问题上有重要影响力的国家的普遍关注.     

The Contribution of Law and Social Work to Interdisciplinary Community Development and Peace Building in the Middle East

SUMMARY

Reducing inequity and strengthening civil society are both intrinsically related to peace building. This article outlines how social work and legal theory, coupled with an interdisciplinary practice framework, advance the development of community networks for the promotion of social rights as a medium for peace building in the Middle East. The combined effect of human rights advocacy, civic engagement, and the structuring and building of community, work to reduce inequality and promote civil society. Examples of interdisciplinary practice as implemented through the initiative of the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building are presented. Finally, implications for interdisciplinary training for schools of social work are discussed.     

Troubled Engagement in Ethnicized Conflict

Feminist cross-community initiatives, which emerged in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine in the 1980s, are frequently lauded in the gender and conflict literature as evidence of the ways in which women can work across ethnonational boundaries. In particular, the theory of ‘transversal dialogue’, developed by Nira Yuval-Davis and adopted by other feminist scholars and activists, suggests that participants have developed a mode of dialogue that enables them to acknowledge differences while developing common goals. In ethicized conflict, transversal politics is understood as an alternative to the essentializing of ‘identity politics’ as well as their undemocratic character. The empirical research, however, suggests that identity politics remains relevant for participants, particularly when cross-community dialogue is limited by external political realities and internal community divisions. In my view, understanding the ways in which identity politics contributes to the development of feminist goals related to women's inclusion in peace processes and post-conflict peace-building is not at odds with transversal politics; rather, women use both modes of politics to build feminist networks and tackle women's marginalization in hyper-masculinized and militarized zones of ethnicized conflict.     

Articulation,national unity and the aesthetics of living against occupation in Elia Suleiman’s Palestine Trilogy

This article interrogates questions of political subjectivity and representation in the context of late modern colonialism, by reading Elia Suleiman’s Palestine trilogy against a wider history of Palestinian political articulation. It suggests that Suleiman’s films detach the Palestinians’ struggle from the national paradigm, and create a political aesthetics that does not reduce the Palestinians to passive victims, nor depends upon their ability to reconstruct national unity and a coherent struggle for liberation. The political importance of this post-nationalism cannot, however, be understood unless it is tied to the specific historical and discursive conjuncture in which the Palestinians exist today. Undoing discourses of Palestinian nationalism, I argue, has become particularly important since the break up of the Oslo accords, not despite, but because of the exigencies of the colonial occupation and the imperative of finding efficient ways of resisting it.     

Necronationalism: managing race,death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.     

从犹太“岛民文化”透析巴以冲突

犹太人在近2000年饱受磨难的流散生涯中形成的“岛民心态”和“岛民文化”,长久以来影响着犹太人的安全观与生存观,导致以色列政府在阿以冲突问题上过于敏感和偏执,始终坚持强硬立场,使其一次次错失和平良机,并在中东乃至国际社会陷入孤立境地.“岛民心态”和“岛民文化”决定了中东和平进程的长期性、曲折性和复杂性.     

论艾德礼政府的巴勒斯坦政策及对英美关系的影响

本文主要讨论第二次世界大战后上台的艾德礼工党政府在巴勒斯坦问题上的政策变化,分析在巴勒斯坦问题上英美关系的发展及对第二次世界大战后两国关系的影响,考察第二次世界大战后英国政府对美国外交的走向对英国发展的影响及得失.     

Young people,emotional suspicion and the emergence of paediatric selfhood in Palestine

This paper explores young people's relationships to emotions and mental health care in Ramallah, Palestine. Palestinian young people—via public anger, sadness, or even joy—are often marked as emotionally other in familial, institutional and other public spaces as part of NGO-driven constructions of emerging paediatric selfhood. In response, they reproduce and/or reframe notions of emotional suspicion that underwrite these marginalizing processes. Thinking along such axes as possibility and impossibility; mobility and immobility; and the local and international, they simultaneously integrate and resist representational subjection, which is an important part of understanding broader post-Oslo Palestinian identity and community formation.     

Inclusion or transformation? An early assessment of an empowerment project for disabled people in occupied Palestine

Can disabled people become advocates in occupied Palestine? This article presents findings from a current three-year project. It examines the environmental, attitudinal and institutional barriers faced by disabled people and the activities being undertaken to challenge social discrimination. The article considers the project in relation to liberation theory and the struggle by young disabled Palestinians to achieve social inclusion – and eventually social transformation.     

Radical Ground: Israeli and Palestinian Activists and Joint Protest Against the Wall

We present a comparison of two cases of ‘parading protest’ that share roots in a long Anglo-European tradition but unfolded in very different political and social contexts. Both Orangemen in Northern Ireland and Washingtonian temperance activists in the United States made strategic and contentious use of the power of socially-approved meanings attached to parading. These different cases of parading turned to protest as elements of the ceremonial parade were appropriated by working-class groups to challenge authorities and rally others to the cause. We argue that the centrality of symbols and ritual in social movement, their polysemous character, the authority associated with them, and the social psychological processes through which they operate help explain how parades may be appropriated for both orthodox and insurgent purposes.