Acting in a tight spot: Homi Bhabha's postcolonial politics

Homi Bhabha's writing on postcolonial agency foregrounds discursive subjection, yet retrieves subaltern subterfuge. It reconstructs a critical politics despite and because of hegemonic and orientalist representational systems. And it demonstrates the (im)possibility of a stable subject, but still manages to assert creative and performative agency. The article endeavours to analyse these feats and paradoxes, relying both on Bhabha's work and on some of the criticisms and controversies surrounding it.     

Do Health Interventions Support Peace Through “Disaster Diplomacy?”

Health problems and health interventions do not stop in conflict zones. Conversely, many health-related topics fail to be addressed adequately because conflict interferes with health systems, health personnel, and health-related actions. Based on these experiences, health diplomacy, medical diplomacy, and vaccine diplomacy have developed as fields of research, policy, and practice. From the Journal of Health Diplomacy, initiated in 2013 to the United Nations World Health Organization’s (WHO) “Health as a Bridge for Peace” program, academics, decision makers, and practitioners have been examining and trying to apply health work for diplomatic, peace-related, and conflict resolution endeavors.     

Towards prestige mobility? Diplomatic prestige and digital diplomacy

This article responds to previous efforts to calculate diplomatic prestige while adapting these methodologies to the exigencies of digital diplomacy. In particular, we are interested in how digital diplomacy provides opportunities for diplomatic actors lacking in material resources to overcome prestige deficits. We adapt approaches used in earlier studies to calculate the material and ideational components of diplomatic prestige to the online sphere—in terms of presence, centrality and perceptions. By analysing the twitter accounts of 67 foreign ministries and 33 United Nations missions, we find that the traditional markers of diplomatic prestige do not automatically translate online, and that significant effort is required to maintain prestige in online diplomatic networks. We also find that the flexibility and transience of online networks do allow diplomatic actors a degree of prestige mobility. Hence, this study is highly significant for understanding how prestige is managed and strategically influenced in digital diplomacy.     

From Munich to Boston,and from Theater to Social Media: The Evolutionary Landscape of World Sporting Terror

Modern terrorist attacks are usually characterized by intentionally extreme public displays of massive violence to get wide propagation, courtesy of the media. This article uses large-scale, world sporting events, from the 1972 Munich massacre to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing to document and analyze how terror acts grew and acclimatized into a reality in which the symbiotic, massive linkage between two gigantic entities—sports and the media—allows terrorism to prosper.     

Revisiting Putnam’s two-level game theory in the digital age: domestic digital diplomacy and the Iran nuclear deal

Few studies to date have investigated the impact of digitalization on Putnam’s two-level game theory. Such an investigation is warranted given that state and non-state actors can employ digital tools to influence decision-making processes at both national and international levels. This study advances a new theoretical concept, Domestic Digital Diplomacy, which refers to the use of social media by a government to build domestic support for its foreign policy. This model is introduced through the case study of the @TheIranDeal twitter channel, a social media account launched by the Obama White House to rally domestic support for the ratification of the Iran Nuclear Agreement. The study demonstrates that digitalization has complicated the two-level game by democratizing access to foreign policy decisions and increasing interactions between the national and international levels of diplomacy.     

Resource Priority,Fairness, and Equality-Efficiency Compromises

A central issue in theories of social justice is the potential conflict between equality and efficiency in the distribution of resources. We suggest here that resource priority is a key factor that moderates the perceived fairness of equality/efficiency compromises in resource allocation. Participants were presented with scenarios involving a policy change that pitted equality against economic efficiency in the allocation of a variety of resources that differed in their importance levels (basic versus non-basic). We found that participants gave more weight to efficiency considerations at the expense of equality in distributing non-basic (higher-level) resources than in distributing basic resources. We discuss the priority hypothesis in connection with norms of justice, human motives, the need hierarchy (deficiency versus growth needs), the consumption of basic versus non-basic resources, and the legitimacy of allocation policies. The paper is based on portions of doctoral research conducted by Eviathar Matania under the supervision of Ilan Yaniv.     

Balancing and the Bible: A Pre-Thucydidean View of Threat

This article uses the case of King Saul, David, and the Philistines, drawn from the Hebrew Bible (books 1 and 2 Samuel), to argue that leaders of states with contested or immature authority structures often elect to prioritize threats to their personal rule over external threats to the integrity and welfare of the states which they lead in a manner not predicted by neo-Realist international relations theory. In making this argument, this article not only makes a contribution to the Realist literature on threat prioritization but introduces a new, novel, and ancient data set which can be used both to generate new theories and to test existing theories within international relations.