West Bank Barrier: Origins, Implementation, and Consequences

The Israelis call it a “security fence,” but the Palestinians call it the “apartheid wall.” From the original idea to its construction, the West Bank barrier, which separates Israel from the West Bank, is hugely controversial. This article begins by unpacking Israel’s motivations to build such an edifice, arguing that, despite its purported security purposes, evidence suggests that the barrier may also have been intended to prevent an influx of Palestinians living inside Israeli territory that would have threatened Israel’s claim to be a Jewish State. This research investigates the political, social, and economic consequences of the barrier for Palestinians, concluding with a discussion of the barrier’s implications for the Israeli-Palestinian relationship overall.

Lebanon and Iraq: Two Distinct Demonstrations of Confessionalism’s Failure as a Means to Manage Ethnic and Religious Pluralism

The Iraqi and Lebanese political systems stemmed from each country’s distinctive mosaic of sub-national identities but have been deemed corrupt and incompetent, prompting ongoing protests and calls for unity in both contexts. However, this dissatisfaction is unsurprising given the challenging task of translating the ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity that characterizes each population into an overarching national identity. The Lebanese and Iraqi political systems have attempted to manage ethnic and religious pluralism through confessionalism, or a “consociational government which distributes political and institutional power proportionally among religious sub-communities.” This paper argues that Lebanon and Iraq are two specific examples of confessionalism, demonstrating its failure to manage ethnic and religious pluralism, which seems to inevitably beget sectarianism—a discriminatory structure in which each group advances its privileges at the expense of others. Nevertheless, confessional systems are challenging to transform, namely because they institutionalize different ethnic or religious groups’ identities instead of promoting a unified, national identity.

Double Trouble: Analyzing the Impact of Statelessness on the Status of Kurdish Women

The struggle of Kurdish women at large has been, as many media outlets suggested, an extraordinary and unique example of women’s status in the Middle East. In contrast to the widespread, surface-level narrative of Kurdish women’s empowerment, a complex political, socio-historical background of Kurdish statelessness has intensified women’s empowerment or oppression. This essay will demonstrate how nationalist ideology, autonomous spaces, and violent conflict may provide the conditions for a 'double revolution' and/or 'double oppression' of stateless Kurdish women through the lens of statelessness. These three features of statelessness intersect with unique features of the stateless Kurdish populations across the Middle East to determine a woman’s status. More specifically, the case of Syrian Kurdistan exemplifies a 'double revolution' while Iraqi Kurdistan exemplifies a case of 'double oppression' for Kurdish women.

The Climate Conflict Trap: Examining the Impact of Climate Change on Violent Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

As recently as 2019, international security officials reported that international state sponsors of terrorism, such as ISIL, were moving into Sub-Saharan Africa. The causal links between climate change and conflict, especially in an understudied and misunderstood region such as Sub-Saharan Africa, are often complicated and ill-defined. In reality, climate change does not unilaterally or unconditionally strengthen terrorist organizations and, by extension, civil conflict. The circumstances of climate change impact the trajectory of violent non-state armed groups in Sub-Saharan Africa through three primary mechanisms that intersect and interact with one another: natural resource instability, colonialism, and the intensity of intra-state tensions throughout a particular region. Through these three primary lenses, it is evident that, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the effects of climate change exacerbate conditions that, in turn, provide a unique, fertile environment for violent non-state armed groups to develop and thrive.

The ICC-African Relationship: More Complex Than a Simplistic Dichotomy

The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) legitimacy, as an independent and unbiased international criminal court, has been brought into question, for all 30 official cases opened to this date are against African nationals. The ICC-African relationship is often framed in this excessively simplistic dichotomy: either the ICC is regarded as a Western neo-imperial colonial tool, or as a legal institutional champion of global human rights, rid of the political. Nevertheless, each obfuscates the complexity of this relationship by purporting either extreme. Rather, it is the legal framework of the ICC that necessitates selectivity bias against nationals from developing countries, in particular, African states. The principle of complementarity and the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) referral power embedded in the ICC’s legal framework, allows for African nations to be disproportionately preliminarily examined, investigated, and then tried, while enabling warranted cases against nationals from developed states to circumvent such targeting. Therefore, the primary issue lies not in cases the ICC has opened, but in the cases it has not.

Impact of Trumpian Trade on Canadian Agriculture: Evidence from Commodity Analyses

It is generally understood that Canada’s close trading relationship with the United States helps power its export-dependent economy. This understanding was challenged in the wake of the US-China trade war that began in 2018. The trade war, which created opportunities for countries to fill the void left by American products in the Chinese market, was a chance for Canada to sink its teeth into China’s need for agricultural commodities. By examining Canada’s trading relationship with China during the trade war at a commodity level across five different products, this paper ascertains the factors that determined why Canadian lobster fishers jumped for joy while canola farmers floundered. This examination exposes how Canada-China tensions arose because Canada’s extradition with the US severely depressed its ability to sell certain agricultural goods to China.

Two Birds, One Policy: The Establishment of the National Supervisory Commission as a Factional and Centralizing Tool

Xi Jinping has made “anti-corruption” campaigns a hallmark of his leadership. The campaigns promise to target both “tigers” - senior party, government, and military leaders - and “flies” - local party and government officials. This practice has included a drastic restructuring of China’s anti-corruption and judicial agencies, culminating in their centralization under the National Supervisory Commission (NSC) in 2018. Many scholars have debated whether Xi’s campaigns and the NSC are genuinely intended to combat corruption or are instead a tool to eliminate political opponents and consolidate power. The NSC’s establishment is considered in relation to the two predominant models of anti-corruption drives conducted in China, the “Chongqing” model, and the “Guangzhou” model. By deliberately reproducing the Chongqing model’s accountability defects, eliminating political opponents appears to be a core objective of the NSC’s establishment. However, owing to its centralized nature, the NSC also strengthens the central party’s power over local authorities. Local party branches are far less trusted by the population than their national counterparts. Thus, strengthening the party’s credibility - including a genuine attempt to decrease corruption - and strengthening local government oversight appears to be another objective of the NSC’s establishment.

Political Discourse in the Maghreb: An Analysis of Amazigh Identity in Algeria and Morocco

The Imazighen (plural of Amazigh) are an indigenous group primarily located in Northern and Western Africa. While Amazigh communities are present across the Maghreb, the role of Amazigh identity in Morocco and Algeria is of particular interest given each country's distinct treatment of ethnic and linguistic minorities. In Algeria, Amazigh identity is not as overtly politicized as in Morocco, wherein Amazigh communities are often at the forefront of public discourses and are often scapegoated as a source of political instability. Compared to Morocco, Algerian Imazighen generally experience higher acceptance levels due to numerous social, political, historical, and geographic factors that underpin the treatment and perceptions of Amazighté in Morocco and Algeria today. This article analyzes Algeria and Morocco's respective independence movements, political systems, language laws, and geographic topography to link the contemporary role of Amazigh identity to each national setting's unique history, politics, and geography.

Capital and Control: Neocolonialism Through the Militarization of African Wildlife Conservation

Biodiversity loss is occurring at catastrophic rates worldwide. In sub-Saharan Africa, wildlife conservation efforts have centred around creating and managing protected areas. However, contemporary African states and their environmental policies are inseparable from the legacies of their former colonial powers, who sponsored the creation and continued management of protected areas to best serve their interests. By reviewing existing literature and a case study on the colonial history of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this paper examines how African wildlife has been accumulated as capital belonging to the nation-state, legitimizing the use of military force against perceived threats. Through this framing, former colonial powers have funded and sponsored militarized conservation in Africa, effectively retaining control over the narratives and management of the continent’s natural resources in the postcolonial period.

Rice Bunnies vs. the River Crab: China’s Feminists, #MeToo, and Networked Authoritarianism

As censorship algorithms for digital communications evolve in China, so do netizens’ evasion techniques. In the last two decades, strategic users have employed the language of satire to slip sensitive content past censors in the form of euphemisms or analogies, with messages ranging from lighthearted frustration to wide scale resistance against repressive government policies. In recent years activists have used spoofs to discuss controversial subjects, including the president, violent arrests by the Domestic Security Department, and even the #MeToo movement. In addition to providing an outlet for criticism and free speech, spoofs can also be a powerful organizational tool for activists in authoritarian societies through their ability to facilitate decentralized, personalized, and flexible connective action. This paper investigates how feminists used spoofs for social mobilization throughout China’s #MeToo movement while evaluating potential frameworks for measuring activists’ success against the media censorship and political repression of a networked authoritarian regime.