|
Middle East Review on Publications:
Recently released books and new publications
[MIDDLE
EAST REVIEW IN HEBREW]
Bridging a Gulf:
Peacebuilding in West Asia
Majid Tehranian, editor
London: I. B. Tauris, 2003
This volume is the result of a
“triple track” diplomatic initiative launched by the Honolulu, Hawaii,
branch of the Tokyo-based Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy
Research. The goal of the project is to build a bridge between civil
societies and governments and mobilize a social movement for peace in the
Persian Gulf area. The essays in the book are written by the scholars
and diplomats who took part in the project. They provide a range of
perspectives on Gulf security and offer detailed suggestions for future
visions of cooperative security regimes in the region.
The book’s strength lies in its
authentic regional voices, many of which are rarely heard in analyses
published in the West. A professor from King Saud University in Riyadh
writes on Saudi-Iranian relations. Iraq’s ambassador to the Vatican
writes on “The Curse of Oil.” Kuwaiti, Iranian, and Egyptian scholars
all provide insights from universities in their home countries.
In diagnosing current opportunities in
the region, several authors predict and support a thaw in relations between
Iran and its Arab neighbors. In reviewing current challenges, they
note unresolved border disputes and the economic problems facing the Gulf
Cooperation Council. In addition, almost without exception, the
authors point to U.S. interference as the primary cause of problems in the
region. Whether through its support of proxy regimes in the 1970s, its
maintenance of military bases after Operation Desert Storm, or its rhetoric
about the “axis of evil,” the U.S. is viewed as the root of conflict.
Some of the authors take this accusation beyond reasoned analysis and into
overheated rhetoric, giving their chapters a haranguing quality and a sense
that the Gulf states should be absolved of responsibility for problems
within their borders.
While most of the book’s chapters were
written before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and all of them
were written well before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, they have
sufficient historical and conceptual depth to make them worth reading.
In particular, the visions of future regional security regimes and possible
confidence-building measures provide an optimistic blueprint for building a
more peaceful Persian Gulf.
-By Gayle Meyers
Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East:
Gender, Economy, and Society
Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Marsha Pripstein Posusney,
editors
Lynne Rienner Publications, 2003
297 Pages
The contributing authors and editors
of this volume provide a gender analysis of the economic impact of
globalization in the Middle East - North Africa region (MENA). The
book’s chapters attempt to illustrate a contradictory relationship between
new patterns of women’s access to jobs and their capacity to organize, with
the evolution of gender ideologies in the MENA region.
The authors argue that economic liberalization, specifically structural
adjustment programs, constrains women’s access to public sector employment,
a conduit for social change. As a result, women’s activism has pursued
a more conservative agenda, often creating more traditional gender
ideologies in policy-making. In this sense, globalization has not
necessarily fueled a process of linear social change. In the MENA
region, globalization affects change in women’s lives. Their response to
these changing socio-economic, socio-cultural and socio-political conditions
becomes a variable determining both the shape of the globalization process
in the MENA countries as well as the ways in which women participate in this
process.
This book is divided into two sections.
The first section, chapters one through three, takes a broad view of
economic development and liberalization in the MENA region, and is intended
to provide the reader with a useful framework for the country-specific case
studies that follow in the second section of the book. In the second
section, starting with chapter four, six country-specific case studies are
presented from different authors. Chapters four and five examine how
structural adjustment programs affect women’s access to public sector
employment in Egypt. Chapters six and seven address globalization’s
effect on the nature of women’s activism and ability to organize in Jordan
and Tunisia. Chapters seven and eight investigate the revision of
gender ideologies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
The authors’ research makes several
important contributions. Primarily, it seeks to explain why disparities, in
education, income and labor force participation, are greater in the MENA
region out of the larger developing world. Noting the importance of
this endeavor, it sheds light on the complex and often contradictory
relationship between globalization and social change.
While the authors do identify common
regional dynamics, they do not address any regional strategies that women in
the MENA countries have undertaken or the benefit of such cooperation on
these issues. Furthermore, the reader ought to consider that this
research was conducted prior to September 11, 2001. While the editors
include an additional post-September 11th chapter on women’s
education in Saudi Arabia and an epilogue at the book’s conclusion, they
fall short of offering any substantive commentary on how this event will
undoubtedly affect regional economic development and its gender impact.
- By Anne Figge
Healing the Holy Land:
Inter-religious Peacemaking in Israel/Palestine
By Yehezkl Landau
United States Institute for Peace, September 2003.
Peaceworks N° 51
Since 2000, through its Religion and
Peacemaking Initiative, USIP has worked at strengthening the capacity of
religious communities to help resolve conflicts. “Healing the Holy Land” is
part of a larger series on dialogue between religious leaders in Macedonia,
Nigeria, between Jews and Christian from the United States and Muslims from
both the United States and other countries.
“Healing the Holy Land: Inter-religious
Peacemaking in Israel/Palestine” is an interesting exploration of religious
peacemaking in Israel and Palestine. The author focuses on efforts to build
bridges between religious communities, especially Jewish and Muslim
communities, as well as interfaith efforts to promote peace.
The author advocates that even though
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is primarily a political dispute between
two nations over a common homeland, it has religious aspects that need to be
addressed in any effective peacemaking strategy. Therefore, the peace agenda
cannot be the monopoly of secular nationalist leaders, for such an approach
guarantees that fervent religious believers on all sides will feel excluded
and threatened by the diplomatic process. Religious militants need to be
addressed in their own symbolic language; otherwise, they will continue to
sabotage any peacebuilding efforts.
The book goes through important
inter-religious initiatives, the most famous among them being the January
2002 Alexandria Summit and its aftermath, where a group of Jewish, Christian
and Muslim religious leaders from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and
Egypt met in an attempt to open a dialogue between high religious
authorities of the three Abrahamic traditions and explore ways of ending the
violence in the holy land. The book also highlights other types of
spiritually engaged organizations in the search for peace in the Middle
East, like the peacemaker community, a multi-faith association that includes
Druze, Buddhists, traditional Jews, Christians and Muslims. The book also
highlights activities of other Muslim organizations like Muslim voices for
Inter-religious Peacebuilding or other Jewish organizations that stand out
like Rabbis for Human Rights.
One of the strengths of “Healing the
Holy Land” is that it also highlights a variety of grassroots
inter-religious dialogues throughout the holy land, therefore challenging
the secular, commonly held view that religions are forces that cannot
contribute positively to peace.
Aware of the potentially devastating
impact of the mixture of religion and nationalism in conflicts, this book
argues that religious elements must be incorporated into the theory and
praxis of healing international disputes, taping into, in this case, the
resources of both Judaism and Islam (since Jews and Muslims are the two
majorities) while also examining the contributions that Christians can make.
International religious bodies like the World Conference on Religion and
Peace (WCRP), the International Association for Religious Freedom,
Initiatives of Change, and the Catholic Community of Sant’Egidio can play
their part in contributing to healing and reconciliation in the holy land as
issues such as Jerusalem’s Temple Mount/ Haram Al-Shariff are international
in character. Therefore transnational bodies like the Organization of the
Islamic Conference should have a role in addressing them.
The book concludes with a set of
important recommendations drawn from testimonies and model programs
presented it the report.
-By Geoffrey Weichselbaum
Palestinian Refugees:
Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace
By Robert Bowker
Lynne Rienner Publications, 2003
267 Pages
In Palestinian Refugees,
Robert Bowker analyses the complex interplay between identity, history, and
memory in the psyche of Palestinian refugees and how these elements are
mutually constituted by political changes in the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. His aim explicitly is to avoid passing judgment on these competing
versions of “collective memory” as he calls it, but to provide insight into
how such conceptions of the refugee self impact prospects for reconciliation
between Palestinians and Israelis in the long term.
The role of myth and memory in this
conflict is particularly important, notes Bowker, because it is intimately
linked to imposing, literally and figuratively, one people’s reality upon
another. Acknowledging the competing and contradictory “founding myths”
about the roots of the conflict, Bowker focuses specifically on the
multifaceted Palestinian refugee consciousness and its interaction with the
general Palestinian society and the institutions of Israeli occupation since
1967.
Figuring largely in this analysis for
Bowker is the phenomenon of “imagined community”: how refugees construct
their identities not on the basis of any shared geography but rather by a
common experience of social and political disenfranchisement. Bowker
emphasizes two key elements that arise from the “potency of refugee identity
as imagined community”: one, that such an identity was inevitable given that
refugees were and still are isolated from non-refugee Palestinians by their
lack of land and home, and two, that sharing the common experience of being
refugees afforded a strong resistance to compromise without redress for
prior injustice.
The book also examines some of the
central themes of the collective refugee memory, with a lengthy discussion
about the right of return for Palestinians to Israel proper, which continues
to be the most essential to refugees and the most contentious for any peace
accord.
Bowker dedicates a chapter to analyzing
the peace process in “Mythologies and the Palestinian Leadership in the Oslo
Period”, looking at the more obvious manifestations of the interplay between
mythology and political history and how the two dynamics continually define
one another. Oslo’s failure within Palestinian refugee society, Bowker
argues, stemmed from the external demand for change with concessions and
compromises that stood wholly outside the acceptable realm of collective
memory.
The closing chapter, “Mythology,
Identity, and Future” seeks to synthesize his previous discussion of the
dynamics between memory, identity, and its role in the peace process by
raising two major questions: are political mythologies ever receptive to
external changes, and are they able to coexist with political approaches
that contradict them? A successful resolution of the conflict will only be
possible with a comprehensive redress for refugees including reconciling
mythology with an unfriendly political reality. The author argues that this
will require real participation by the PLO, Israel and the international
community.
-By Fatima Ayub
From Cold War to Democratic Peace:
Third Parties, Peaceful Change, and the OSCE
By Janie Leatherman
Syracuse University Press, December 2003
This book thoroughly describes the
history of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE),
which, in 1995 became the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE). The book claims that the CSCE/OSCE played a key role in ensuring
that the shift from the Cold War to a democratic peace took place without
large-scale violence between East and West. It did this by helping to
institutionalize cooperation between the two opposing blocs, especially by
creating methods for resolving disputes. The author is mainly interested in
developing a normative account of the role third parties, such as the OSCE,
play in bringing about peaceful change.
Many of the concepts discussed in this
work also seem applicable to the Middle East. For example, Leatherman
describes the OSCE as an emergent, or ascendant, security community.
Although the nations of the Middle East are far from such a level of
regional security, it is conceivable to imagine such a community forming
sometime in the future. An arms control and regional security working group
emerged from Madrid in 1991, which, although ultimately unsuccessful, opened
up the discussion on such issues. The Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (SIPRI) also tried to explicitly develop a regional security
regime, though was also unsuccessful. Possible features of such a security
community have been discussed recently, especially in the context of WMD.
For example, if the nations of the Middle East were to move toward a
biological- or chemical-weapons-free zone, including mechanisms for
verification, it could conceivably be the first step in such a direction.
Another concept that the author
discusses is the important role of outside powers in pushing the opposing
parties to develop cooperative mechanisms. In the case of the CSCE/OSCE,
Finland played a crucial role as a facilitative mediator. However, a crucial
part of playing this role successfully required Finland to assume a neutral
role in the East-West conflict. As many now believe, as evidenced by
criticism of the US’s pro-Israeli policies, perhaps a neutral stance is what
is needed, but missing, in mediation attempts in the Middle East.
Ultimately, what made the CSCE/OSCE
successful in helping to transform the Cold War into a democratic peace in a
largely non-violent manner was the acceptance of the principle of “the
indivisibility of security.” In essence, this meant, “security cooperation
in the CSCE had to be based on enhancing all participating states’
security,” which was a very different starting point from previous
superpower arms-control talks.
Although the Middle East still has a
long way to go before it can reach the level of cooperation currently
enjoyed by OSCE members, this book makes the important point that the
gradual development of the CSCE/OSCE was one of the factors that made the
transition from Cold War to peace as smooth as it was.
-By Elyte Baykun
hagalil.com
22-02-2004 |
