The Partition Solution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Robson
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
State System ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Palestinian Arab ◽  
Imperial State

This chapter looks at the emergence of proposals to partition Palestine into a separate Arab and Jewish states. It argues that partition, far from representing a last-ditch effort to solve the problems of Arab-Zionist conflict in Palestine, actually reflected central principles of the imperial state system the mandate governments and the League had long been building across the Middle East. In particular, this chapter examines how the League and the British began to present partition as a mode of protecting minority rights and the principle of national self-determination – the same rationales used to promote the idea of transfer – and traces Zionist, Palestinian Arab, and regional Arab responses to proposals of partition.

The Government of War

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-793
Author(s):  
Dina Rizk Khoury
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
State System ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Security Services ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
The Government

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.

I. The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement, Minority Rights and Self-Determination

1998 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 943-950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Warbrick ◽  
Dominic McGoldrick ◽  
Geoff Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Right

The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement1 was concluded following multi-party negotiations on Good Friday, 10 April 1998. It received 71 per cent approval in Northern Ireland and 95 per cent approval in the Republic of Ireland in the subsequent referenda held on Friday 22 May, the day after Ascension. To some, it must have seemed that the timing was singularly appropriate following 30 years of “The Troubles”, which were perceived as being between a “Catholic minority” and a “Protestant majority”. While there are some minority groups identified by their religious affiliation that do require rights relating only to their religion, such as the right to worship in community,2 to practise and profess their religion,3 to legal recognition as a church,4 to hold property5 and to determine its own membership,6 some minority groups identified by their religious affiliation are properly national or ethnic minorities–religion is merely one factor which distinguishes them from the other groups, including the majority, in the population. One example of the latter situation is to be seen in (Northern) Ireland where there is, in fact, untypically, a double minority: the Catholic-nationalist community is a minority in Northern Ireland, but the Protestant-unionist population is a minority in the island of Ireland as a whole.7 The territory of Northern Ireland is geographically separate from the rest of the United Kingdom. The recent peace agreement addresses a whole range of issues for Northern Ireland, but included are, on the one hand, rights for the populations based on their religious affiliation, their culture and their language and, on the other, rights with respect to their political participation up to the point of external self-determination. It is a holistic approach. Like any good minority rights agreement,8 it deals with both standards and their implementation and, like any good minority rights agreement, it is not a minority rights agreement but, rather, a peace settlement.

Territorial Dimensions of Self-Determination

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-468
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
International Court Of Justice ◽  
The Third ◽  
Court Of Justice ◽  
Middle East Conflict ◽  
International Court ◽  
Generous Support

Professor Yaël Ronen introduced the workshop as the fourth in a series of events on legal aspects of the Middle East conflict. The first two events concerned the Palestine Mandate of 1922. The third focused on the 1948 refugee issue. All these events have and are being held with the generous support of the Knapp Family Foundation and under the auspices of the International Law Forum of the Faculty of Law. Also, as part of the Shabtai Rosenne International Law Center Initiative, the first session was dedicated to the commemoration of the work of the late Shabtai Rosenne, whose scholarship spanned a host of international law issues but who is most renowned for his work on the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Trusteeship Council

2008 ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Ralph Wilde
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
The Caribbean

This article examines the Trusteeship Council, a principal organ whose work was essential to the settlement arising from World War II. It involved establishing procedures for the independence of the defeated powers' colonies. This article details the pioneering efforts of the UN at facilitating the decolonization of trust territories. This is part of the world organization's contribution to the processes of self-determination for peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. It also reveals that the work of the Trusteeship Council was linked to what may have been the most important political change of the twentieth century.

Political Culture in the Islamic World: The Socioeconomic Roots of the Islamic Leviathan

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 612-640
Author(s):  
Amir Abdul Reda
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
State System ◽  
Socioeconomic Class ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Public Opinions ◽  
Independent Variables

Abstract In this paper, the author explores how development affects public opinions on an Islamic Leviathan as an appropriate political system in the Middle East. He asks the following: In the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), what influences political attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan? To answer this question, he looks at the influence of seven independent variables on attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan as a state system. The seven variables are (1) society’s overall development, (2) the socioeconomic class of respondents, (3) society’s corruption, (4) religiosity, (5) education, (6) gender, and (7) age. The author finds the observations needed to assess his theory in the Carnegie Middle East Governance and Islam Dataset 1988-2014 (CMEGID), which includes 15,194 relevant observations throughout the MENA region. His findings show that societies’ overall development has the most influence over Arab attitudes toward the Islamic Leviathan as an appropriate state system.

The Uncomfortable Balance between a Minority and a People: The Global/Local Disconnect

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Parvathi Menon
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Personal Characteristic ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Minority Protection ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Minority Identity ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

The legitimacy of secessionist movements has emerged as an important debate, while the protection of minorities within a democracy has become merely of peripheral interest to international law. My project suggests that the advent of universalized (minority) rights re-conceptualized the majority-minority relationship and its balance, reducing the possibilities of political processes to balance the relationship. What was construed as a redress for dichotomous relationships between the oppressor and the oppressed through (the right to) self-determination, became a discourse between minority (identity) rights and a democratic entitlement, post-colonially. These norms universalized a demand to rethink minority protection, no longer from the perspective of advantaged and disadvantaged; rather, to introduce perspectives of individuals polarized around a personal characteristic in their identity thus establishing/reinforcing the inferiority of their identity within the hierarchy.

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