Selective Engagement with Islamist Terrorists: Exploring the Prospects

Despite claims to the contrary, governments have frequently talked to groups branded as terrorists in their efforts to find peaceful solutions to longstanding armed conflicts. The rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror has tended to portray an uncompromising and extreme, monolithic Islamist enemy with whom such accommodation is unthinkable. Therefore, it is not surprising that the potential for dialogue and negotiation with Islamist terrorist groups has been relatively neglected. This article examines the character of the contemporary Islamist threat and explores the prospects for selective engagement with terrorist groups that may not share Al Qaeda's global jihadist agenda.     

Shining Some Light Back on the Dark Ages: New York State's Early Environmental Law and Its Implications for Today's Environmental Insurance Coverage Disputes

While many environmental practitioners consider the passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in the 1970s and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in the 1980s as the dawn of modern environmental law, New York State has a robust body of antipollution law that predates those federal statutes by decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York State statutes, embracing well-established common law principles, contained limitations on the disposal of harmful industrial waste into the waters of the state. The New York State Public Health Law required permits for certain discharges of industrial waste, and the common law provided injunctions and monetary damages for those injured by environmental pollution. This body of law should not be overlooked during coverage disputes over historical environmental contamination because it documents an awareness by the state legislature of the impact of pollution on both surface and groundwaters of the state, and because it demonstrates that harmful unpermitted discharges were prohibited by law since the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Are Latin American peasant movements still a force for change? Some new paradigms revisited

This article is a critique of structuralist and postmodern approaches to the study of agrarian reform and the viability, nature and significance of peasant and landless movements in Latin America. Contrary to the dominant structuralist view, we argue that peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are not anachronistic but dynamic modern classes, which in many contexts play a major role in opposing the dominant neoliberal agenda. Against postmodern interpretations of such grassroots agrarian movements, we also argue that in terms of action and programme, peasant and landless workers’ movements have raised fundamental class issues, in some instances combining them with ethnic demands. Deploying a reconstituted class analysis, we examine four cases of peasant/landless workers movements currently challenging state power: the Rural Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia, the National Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities in Ecuador, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. Our conclusion is that in the current context, peasant and landless workers’ movements in Latin America are engaged in a modern form of struggle, combining traditional forms of solidarity not only with the acceptance/adaptation of modern goals and techniques, but also with a strategic understanding of the levers of power in the national and international system.     

Reviews

G.R. Batho: Thomas Harriot and the Northumberland Household; W.A. Wallace: John White, Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh in Ireland; M.P. Earles: The London Pharmacopoeia Perfected (The Durham Thomas Harriot Seminar, Occasional Papers, Nos. 1, 2 and 3, 1983–5; £8.10).

Michael Mendle: Dangerous Positions, Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the ‘Answer to the XIX Propositions’ (University of Alabama Press, 1985; pp. 256; £28.50. Distributed in the U.K. by Eurospan, 3 Henrietta Street, London).     

Project Abstract: an Anglo-American intelligence operation in 1947 to recover guided weapon technical documentation buried in Germany

In early 1947, American intelligence organisations learned that there were hidden collections of technical documentation that pertained to World War II German guided weapon development that were not recovered by Allied investigators in 1945. A joint Anglo-American intelligence operation was initiated in February of that year, dubbed ‘Project Abstract’ by the Americans, to recover the caches. Project Abstract was a concerted effort by British and American scientific and technical intelligence experts to round up the last material remains of the World War II guided weapon programmes at the renowned experimental and testing establishments at Peenemünde in northern Germany.