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Blair Peterson

9 questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict you were too embarrassed to ask - Vox - 1 views

  • On the surface at least, it's very simple: the conflict is over who gets what land and how it is controlled. In execution, though, that gets into a lot of really thorny issues, like: Where are the borders? Can Palestinian refugees return to their former homes in present-day Israel?
  • Israeli forces have occupied and controlled the West Bank ever since. It withdrew its occupying troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005, but maintains a full blockade of the territory, which has turned Gaza into what human rights organizations sometimes call an "open-air prison" and has pushed the unemployment rate up to 40 percent.
  • Settlers are Israelis who move into the West Bank.
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  • Others move deep into the West Bank to claim land for Jews, out of religious fervor and/or a desire to see more or all of the West Bank absorbed into Israel. While Israel officially forbids this and often evicts these settlers, many are still able to take root.
  • The simple version is that violence has become the status quo and that trying for peace is risky, so leaders on both ends seem to believe that managing the violence is preferable, while the Israeli and Palestinian publics show less and less interest in pressuring their leaders to take risks for peace.
  • That sense of Palestinian hopelessness and distrust in Israel and the peace process has been a major contributor to violence in recent years.
  • "We don't have a partner for peace."
  • 9 questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict you were too embarrassed to ask
Blair Peterson

Club Med for Terrorists - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It says a great deal that Hamas’s former Arab backers, which historically have included Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, long ago abandoned the terrorist group. Only a few nations still stand by Hamas. Among the most prominent is the tiny Persian Gulf emirate Qatar.
  • In recent years, the sheikhs of Doha, Qatar’s capital, have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza. Every one of Hamas’s tunnels and rockets might as well have had a sign that read “Made possible through a kind donation from the emir of Qatar.”
  • Qatar’s proxies of choice have been radical regimes and extremist groups.
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  • This hasn’t stopped the Persian Gulf monarchy from serving as a Club Med for terrorists. It harbors leading Islamist radicals like the spiritual leader of the global Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who issued a religious fatwa endorsing suicide attacks, and the Doha-based history professor Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi, whom the United States Department of Treasury has named as a “terrorist financier” for Al Qaeda. Qatar also funds a life of luxury for Khaled Meshal, the fugitive leader of Hamas.
Blair Peterson

One World, Rival Theories - 2 views

  • He sketched out three dominant approaches: realism, liberalism, and an updated form of idealism called "constructivism."
  • Realism focuses on the shifting distribution of power among states.
  • Liberalism highlights the rising number of democracies and the turbulence of democratic transitions.
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  • Idealism illuminates the changing norms of sovereignty, human rights, and international justice, as well as the increased potency of religious ideas in politics.
  • President George W. Bush promises to fight terror by spreading liberal democracy to the Middle East and claims that skeptics "who call themselves 'realists'…. have lost contact with a fundamental reality" that "America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."
  • National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a former Stanford University political science professor, explains that the new Bush doctrine is an amalgam of pragmatic realism and Wilsonian liberal theory.
  • Sen. John Kerry sounded remarkably similar: "Our foreign policy has achieved greatness," he said, "only when it has combined realism and idealism."
  • Krauthammer argued for an assertive amalgam of liberalism and realism, which he called "democratic realism."
  • Fukuyama claimed that Krauthammer's faith in the use of force and the feasibility of democratic change in Iraq blinds him to the war's lack of legitimacy, a failing that "hurts both the realist part of our agenda, by diminishing our actual power, and the idealist portion of it, by undercutting our appeal as the embodiment of certain ideas and values."
  • At realism's core is the belief that international affairs is a struggle for power among self-interested states.
  • hicago political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau, are deeply pessimistic about human nature, it is not a theory of despair.
  • In liberal democracies, realism is the theory that everyone loves to hate. Developed largely by European émigrés at the end of World War II, realism claimed to be an antidote to the naive belief that international institutions and law alone can preserve peace, a misconception that this new generation of scholars believed had paved the way to war.
  • China's current foreign policy is grounded in realist ideas that date back millennia.
  • Realism gets some things right about the post-9/11 world. The continued centrality of military strength and the persistence of conflict, even in this age of global economic interdependence, does not surprise realists.
  • Realists point out that the central battles in the "war on terror" have been fought against two states (Afghanistan and Iraq), and that states, not the United Nations or Human Rights Watch, have led the fight against terrorism.
  • The realist scholar Robert A. Pape, for example, has argued that suicide terrorism can be a rational, realistic strategy for the leadership of national liberation movements seeking to expel democratic powers that occupy their homelands.
  • nsights from political realism -- a profound and wide-ranging intellectual tradition rooted in the enduring philosophy of Thucydides, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes -- are hardly rendered obsolete because some nonstate groups are now able to resort to violence.
  • Standard realist doctrine predicts that weaker states will ally to protect themselves from stronger ones and thereby form and reform a balance of power.
  • Despite changing configurations of power, realists remain steadfast in stressing that policy must be based on positions of real strength, not on either empty bravado or hopeful illusions about a world without conflict.
  • The liberal school of international relations theory, whose most famous proponents were German philosopher Immanuel Kant and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, contends that realism has a stunted vision that cannot account for progress in relations between nations.
Blair Peterson

A Brief Introduction to Theories on International Relations and Foreign Policy - 4 views

  • System level analysis examines state behavior by looking at the international system. 
  • State level analysis examines the foreign policy behavior of states in terms of state characteristics.
  • Organizational level analysis examines the way in which organizations within a state function to influence foreign policy behavior. 
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  • Individual level analysis focuses on people.  People make decisions within nation states and therefore people make foreign policy. 
  • Classical realism is a state level theory that argues that all states seek power.
  • However, it sees the cause of all the power struggles and rivalries not as a function of the nature of states, but as a function of the nature of the international system.
  • States don’t just seek power and they don’t just fear other powerful states, there are reasons that states seek power and there are reasons that states fear other states.
  • Liberalism adds values into the equation.  It is often called idealism. It is a state level theory which argues that there is a lot of cooperation in the world, not just rivalry. 
  • Neo-liberals might focus on the role of the United Nations or World Trade Organization in shaping the foreign policy behavior of states.  Neo-liberals might look at the cold war and suggest ways to fix the UN to make it more effective.
  • Constructivism is a theory that examines state behavior in the context of state characteristics.  All states are unique and have a set of defining political, cultural, economic, social, or religious characteristics that influence its foreign policy. 
  • Each author is developing a theory to explain the behavior of all states, not just one state.
  • Can you find universal patterns of activity, universal rules that can used to explain how any state behaves?
  • So you use historical data to test your theories. That’s what you’re examining in your papers.  An author has developed a theory or tested two theories.  How well does the author’s argument hold up when tested against the historical data?
  • The US has always had an idealist streak in its foreign policy (some disagree with this) and sees “bad guys” out there in the international system. 
  • How did these organizations create US foreign policy would be the key question at this level of analysis.
  • People are greedy, insecure, and aggressive, so the states they govern will have those same characteristics.
  • The world is anarchy and states do what they can get away with to gain power and they do what they must to protect themselves.
  • States try to build a more just world order.
  • It is a system level version of liberalism and focuses on the way in which institutions can influence the behavior of states by spreading values or creating rule-based behavior.
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