The Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism: Old Wine in New Bottlenecks

This article examines the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM) – the main institutional mechanism regulating the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip since the 2014 war. Proponents of the GRM hold that it is a crucial lifeline enabling the entry of humanitarian and reconstruction goods into Gaza while assuaging Israel’s security concerns. In contrast, this article argues that the GRM has introduced a bureaucratic and cumbersome mechanism that has created new bottlenecks that are impeding effective reconstruction and have institutionalized and depoliticized the siege of the Gaza Strip by passing the responsibility for its maintenance on to the international community.     

Setting the scene for Afghanistan's reconstruction: The challenges and critical dilemmas

The current round of fighting in Afghanistan is only the latest twist in a protracted conflict in which the focus of the international community has tended to fluctuate, depending on prevailing geopolitical agendas. Now in its third decade, the war has resulted in massive population displacement, both internal and external, casualty figures in excess of one million, and a serious deterioration in conditions for the civilian population. This paper takes as its starting point the events of 11 September 2001, which led to the recent dramatic changes in Afghanistan, including the Emergency Loya Jirga and other constitutional developments envisaged in the Bonn Agreement. By way of essential background, the paper then offers a brief introduction to the country; it describes the way in which conflict began and traces the various different phases of the war from the late 1970s to the present day. In so doing, it seeks to outline the global and historical context of the current crisis in Afghanistan. It considers the challenges that need to be addressed in order to achieve effective post-conflict reconstruction and development. Finally, it offers a brief overview of current UN plans for Afghanistan's reconstruction and outlines a number of critical dilemmas facing those involved in their implementation.     

Simultaneous Homicide–Suicide: A Case Report of Double Drowning

Homicide–suicide is a tragic phenomenon which typically does not result in a criminal charge or trial. However, correct diagnosis and classification of homicide–suicide cases are important to determine the perpetrators and dynamics of each category properly. The deaths in the homicide–suicide acts can be divided into two categories with respect to the number of involved individuals: dyadic deaths and triple or multiple deaths. These two categories can also be divided into two subgroups according to the chronology of the incidents: simultaneous deaths and consecutive deaths. Herein, a simultaneous homicide–suicide case of a father and daughter where both deaths occurred through drowning which was not found in the selected literature review and where the victim was a child is presented. The article aims to clarify the term discrepancies about multiple death cases in the literature and to discuss the pathological and psychosocial characteristics of the simultaneous dyadic death cases.     

A Century in Thirty Years: Sheikh Zayed and The United Arab Emirates

Following are excerpts from an April 20, 1999, conference convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The papers these presentations are drawn from will be published as a book, forthcoming in 1999.     

State Bureaucracy in Indonesia and its Reforms: An Overview

New Public Management (NPM) as a part of neoliberalism has increasingly become a global phenomenon and has transcended national boundaries, irrespective of whether they are English-speaking countries or non-English-speaking countries. This label of public management has not been interpreted and implemented in a single language, but has been adapted and implemented based on the contextual condition of given nations in terms of their socio-culture, history and formation, ideological inclination, and polity system. This article aimed at providing support to the above supposition, taking Indonesian public governance reforms as an example. The review of Indonesian reforms on public governance is expected to enrich the proliferation of international reforms on public governance in terms of how NPM has been travelling global and has been recontextualized in the existing values of Indonesian people.     

Religious parties and democracy: A comparative assessment of Israel and Turkey

Discussions of the role of religious parties in democracies can be highly misleading when they take the parties' ideologies at face value and assign them to the binary categories of moderate vs radical. Only by a careful review of how religious parties use religious and secular symbols in defining their political stances can we evaluate their roles vis-à-vis liberal democracy. The competing political ideologies of the Mafdal and Shas Parties in Israel and the National Action Party, the Prosperity Party and the Justice and Development Party in Turkey are foci of this analysis. Two controversial concepts, ‘redemption’ in Israel and ‘secularism’ in Turkey, are used to question how these parties appropriate religious symbols in their policies towards secular public and institutions. The arguments draw on a set of interviews with the religious party leaderships and a content analysis of party ideologues' views. The findings suggest that parties that adopt the strategy of sacralization (that is, assigning religious meanings to secular ideas thereby treating them as sacred) appear more moderate yet they are more likely to support authoritarian policies. However, the so-called radical religious parties tend to be more inclusive and are more likely to secularize their respective religious tradition internally by redefining secular terms. Despite their novel political agendas both groups fail to exhibit principled commitment to liberal values and fail to provide inclusive and coherent alternatives to their secularist counterparts.