The Occupied Territories, Gaza, and Israel’s Recent Slide to Authoritarianism

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-292
Author(s):  
Menachem Mautner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Fascist Regime ◽  
The Government ◽  
Israel Defense Forces

AbstractIn recent years there have been numerous warnings in the press and in the social networks that Israel is about to convert its liberal democracy into a fascist regime. This Article argues that the occupation of the West Bank stands at the root of the most important processes that have been taking place in Israel in the past five decades. One of those processes is the erosion of Israel’s liberalism. I claim that the prolongation of the occupation is the central, lasting threat to Israel’s liberalism. In essence, the occupation breeds denunciations of and protests against the government and the Israel Defense Forces, and these, in turn, bring about measures on the part of the government and right-wing civil society organizations that undermine or threaten Israel’s liberalism. In addition, the full-scale wars between Israel and Gaza, and the continuation of violence between the parties in the periods between the wars, undermine or threaten Israel’s liberalism.

Military (Non-)Policing in the Occupied Territories

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Nir Gazit
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
Reciprocal Relations ◽  
Palestinian Territories ◽  
Situational Variables ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Israel Defense Forces ◽  
The Military ◽  
Israeli Soldiers

Since 1967, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been engaged in various military missions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including occasional high-intensity fighting and counter-insurgency, as well as civilian duties, such as administration and policing. While existing literature emphasizes the organizational and professional burden this combination of duties places on the military, the actual forces that shape soldiers’ policing practices in the field remain largely unexamined. The present article offers a micro-sociological examination of the patterns of military policing implemented by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. It explores the social and political forces that shape soldiers’ ‘logics of action’ and demonstrates the reciprocal relations between the IDF’s disparate modes of policing of Jewish settlers and Palestinians. Three clusters of factors shape these interrelations: the relationships between soldiers and settlers, the blurring between ‘security’ and ‘civilian’ missions, and situational variables. The research for this article was conducted between 2004 and 2018.

Grasping the Syrian War, a view from Albanians in the Balkans

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 540-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Behar Sadriu
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Social Networking Site ◽  
First Century ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
The West ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Government

Reactions to the brutal Syrian War from European governments and Europe's Muslims have been diverse and subject to many shifts over the past few years. This paper focuses on how Albanian political and Islamic religious figures living in the Balkans have come to interpret the war. I focus on discourse, the ways in which these different agents communicate with their audience, and the wider contexts they evoke. Government sources and religiously themed lectures delivered by prominent imams on the social networking site YouTube are used to assess these trends. The most obvious aspect of these debates is the ways in which these agents use the war to press their own agendas, the government to affirm their commitment to the “West” and an ethnicized view of Islam, while Islamic religious leaders use it to reconnect their audiences to a more cosmopolitan vision of their past. War thus becomes a catalyst for a resurgent contestation between different groups vying for control over what it means to be “Albanian” and “Muslim” in the twenty-first century.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich
Keyword(s):  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover

Israel’s Ground Forces in the Occupied Territories

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-57
Author(s):  
Eyal Ben-Ari ◽  
Uzi Ben-Shalom
Keyword(s):  
High Intensity ◽  
Force Generation ◽  
Institutional Autonomy ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
The West ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Media Monitoring ◽  
Israel Defense Forces ◽  
And Control ◽  
Over Time

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) routinely rotate ground forces in and out of the Occupied Territories in the West Bank. While these troops are trained for soldiering in high-intensity wars, in the Territories they have long had to carry out a variety of policing activities. These activities often exist in tension with their soldierly training and ethos, both of which center on violent encounters. IDF ground forces have adapted to this situation by maintaining a hierarchy of ‘logics of action’, in which handling potentially hostile encounters takes precedence over other forms of policing. Over time, this hierarchy has been adapted to the changed nature of contemporary conflict, in which soldiering is increasingly exposed to multiple forms of media, monitoring, and juridification. To maintain its public legitimacy and institutional autonomy, the IDF has had to adapt to the changes imposed on it by creating multiple mechanisms of force generation and control of soldierly action.

The Golf Boom in South Korea: Serving Hegemonic Interests

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 372-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minseok An ◽  
George H. Sage
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Golf Courses ◽  
Farm Land ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Incentives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Industrial Productivity ◽  
The Government

In the past decade, to help maintain political stability and promote economic growth, South Korea has committed substantial resources to commercialized sports, including golf. A major source of support for building golf courses has come from government leaders and economic and social incentives as well. In the past 4 years the government has given permission to build 135 new golf courses. The official government discourse about the new golf courses is that they are being built in the interest of “sport for all.” But the golf courses overwhelmingly require membership, which is extremely expensive. Despite the enormous power and resources of the dominant groups in Korea, there are elements of opposition. The golf boom has been severely criticized because it removes large amounts of land from agricultural and industrial productivity, contaminates farm land, and pollutes water. It also represents the worst aspects of the social imbalance of wealth.

For Science and Country: History Writing, Nation Building, and National Embeddedness in Third Republic France, 1870–1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Guillaume Lancereau
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The West ◽  
Academic Competition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Territorial Claims

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

The Perils of Vanguardism

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua C Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Unemployment Benefit ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Asylum Policy ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Right ◽  
Unexpected Outcome

AbstractOver the past 25 years, Sweden has gone from having one of the most generous unemployment benefit systems among the rich democracies to one of the least. This article advances a multi-causal explanation for this unexpected outcome. It shows how the benefit system became a target of successive right-wing governments due to its role in fostering social democratic hegemony. Employer groups, radicalized by the turbulent 1970s more profoundly than elsewhere, sought to undermine the system, and their abandonment of corporatism in the early 1990s limited unions’ capacity to restrain right-wing governments in retrenchment initiatives. Two further developments help to explain the surprising political resilience of the cuts: the emergence of a private (supplementary) insurance regime and a realignment of working-class voters from the Social Democrats to parties of the right, especially the nativist Sweden Democrats, in the context of a liberal refugee/asylum policy.

scholarly journals Welfare State Policy Model as A Poverty Reduction Strategy in the West Sumatra Districts and Cities

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 227
Author(s):  
Azwar Azwar Azwar ◽  
Emeraldy Chatra ◽  
Zuldesni Zuldesni
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
State Model ◽  
The West ◽  
Policy Model ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
West Sumatra ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Welfare State

Poverty is one of the social problems that the government can never completely solve. As a result, other, more significant social issues arise and cause social vulnerability, such as conflict and crime. As a province that is experiencing rapid growth in the last ten years, the West Sumatra find difficulty to overcome the number of poor people in several districts and cities.  The research outcomes are the models and forms of social policy made by West Sumatra regencies and cities governments in improving the welfare of poor communities. It is also covering the constraints or obstacles to the implementation of social policy and the selection of welfare state models for the poor in some districts and municipalities of West Sumatra. This research is conducted qualitatively with a sociological approach that uses social perspective on searching and explaining social facts that happened to needy groups. Based on research conducted that the social policy model adopted by the government in responding to social problems in the districts and cities of West Sumatra reflects the welfare state model given to the poor. There is a strong relationship between the welfare state model and the form of social policy made by the government.

scholarly journals DAKAR SUMMER SCHOOL AND STRATEGIES FOR SUPPORTING PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES IN THE LIBYAN SOCIETY (AN EXP. IN THE SOCIAL INTEGRATION OF CHILDREN)

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (03) ◽  
pp. 299-303
Author(s):  
Hassan Mohammed ABUOKATYYIF
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Summer School ◽  
Community Integration ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
Education And Health ◽  
The Social ◽  
War And Conflict ◽  
The Government

Many are strategies to ensure disability in areas of education and health and access to place and information, but in this experience, we are in the role of civil society organizations in providing possible services in the community integration of an important chip, especially the time of crises and wars (The subject of this experience). We aimed to prepare a model for an inclusive and supportive summer club for children with disabilities with ordinary children from 7 to 14 years old, taking into account the awareness and understanding of ordinary students or children and accept them for their counterparts, unity, mobility and others. We have divided the club into many programs, paragraphs and science and put them through video, participation and entertainment as well as many supporting psychosocial and participation and entertainment as well as many supporting mental and social programs and contracted a specialized organization that took it upon itself to study the behaviors and submit reports with the club's specialists. the topics of the club have covered an interactive and entertainment study as well as the science of Quran and development and life skills such as drawing and coloring – young media, theater and crochet – computer principles as well as weekly and monthly encouraging competitions which made us believe that we have been in the theme of cleaving and integration, and this is evident in the clear harmony through competitions, dances, songs, and the fear and tightness and intensity we have noticed at the beginning of the club, which made us seek to mainstream and develop the idea and recommend to the government, private sector and civil society and urged them to conduct efforts for effective participation and ensure persons with disabilities, especially children to remove them from the situation of war and conflict and support their psychological and social balance..

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