Palestinian and Israeli Cooperation in Environmental Work During the “Peace Era”

This article presents a report summarizing a pilot study conducted by the Israeli-Palestinian research team of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). Sixteen Israeli and twelve Palestinian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were engaged in cooperative work were analyzed to measure the degree of their effectiveness in their societies, and obstacles encountered in their cooperative work. In addition, this report presents these NGOs' interpretation of the causes of environmental damage and its connection to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. NGOs data were collected from field interviews, their publications, and web sites. Results showed that while the Israeli and Palestinian NGOs agreed that joint work is needed to address ecological problems, they differed in their reasons for working together. This difference also appeared in their interpretation of the sources of environmental deterioration, relationship of the political conflict to the state of the environment, and the effect of the peace process on solving ecological problems. At the end, it was concluded that environmental narratives of both sides differ greatly, and that the establishment of a culture of peace is a protracted process.     

The impact of foreign direct investment on the growth of the tourism sector in Jordan (1980–2016)

The study aimed at measuring and analyzing the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the growth of the Jordanian tourism sector during the period 1980–2016. In order to test the stationarity of the variables of the study model, the augmented Dickey–Fuller and the Philips Perron tests were applied. The results showed that the variables were not stationary at their levels, but they become so when taking the first difference with the intercept. The study also found a positive long‐run relationship between the ratio of FDI to gross domestic product (GDP) and the ratio of tourism revenues to GDP according to the cointegration test used, which was the Granger causality test. The test showed a one‐way causal relationship between the ratio of FDI to GDP and the ratio of tourism revenue to GDP. According to the estimation results, the error correction model showed that there is a positive impact of FDI on the growth of the tourism sector. Based on the results reached, the study recommended the need to pay attention to the tourism sector, enhance its role in economic development, and work to provide an optimal investment environment by providing all necessary means for and assistance in establishing such investments. All obstacles that limit the flow of the FDI in the Jordanian tourism sector should be removed.     

The Algerian Works of Hélène Cixous: at the Triple Intersection of European,North African and Religious Nationalisms

The theme ‘Jewish conditions and theories of nationalism’, relating particularly to the twentieth century, can be connected to Hélène Cixous the thinker, through her childhood experiences in Algeria during the Second World War. Thereafter, she would spend 10 years in a country on the verge of what some have termed a ‘civil war’ between ‘European’ inhabitants, settled multiple generations previously, and an increasingly angry, marginalised, and dispossessed (Muslim) indigenous population. Importantly, Cixous has also called on her experiences in Algeria after Algerian independence, which is extremely rare given that the vast majority of non-Muslim departures took place up until 1962. In this way, her early life history and her intellectual trajectory, positioned as a writer of gendered and then ethnic difference (from Paris), and the relationships she garnered with Algerian women in the 1990s during the dark years of violence in Algeria, as well as her subsequent process of return to Algeria against a backdrop of a narrowly defined French national identity, are at a triple intersection with the evolutions of Algerian, French and Jewish nationalisms. This paper engages with the ambiguities and tensions of Hélène Cixous’ experience of and writing about Algeria combining close analysis of her literary production with our meetings in her Parisian home.     

The Extraordinary Politics of the Tunisian Revolution: The Process of Constitution Making

To understand the current stalemate in the drafting process of the Tunisian constitution, it is important to fathom the path Tunisia has chosen to walk since President Ben Ali fled the country. This article apprehends the post-Ben Ali era as a period of extraordinary politics, i.e. a moment of explicit self-institution of society in which popular participation, following Kalyvas' analysis, aims to transform the institutions of state as well as social imaginaries, cultural orientations and economic structures. It analyses the period following Ben Ali's departure as one in which the organization of free elections and the writing of a new constitution by an elected Constituent Assembly not as a technical process of institution-building aimed at creating a new political system, but as a re-constitutive phase of the political. This phase aims at the radical transformation of power relations within state and society and strives for the re-invention of society itself.     

Identifying Diagonal Cutter Marks on Thin Wires Using 3D Imaging

We present work on matching 2‐mm‐thick wires using optical 3D imaging methods. Marks on such small surfaces are difficult to match using a comparison microscope as this 2D imaging method does not provide height data about the sample surface. Moreover, these 2D microscopy images may be affected by illumination. Hence, the reference and investigated sample should be present at the same time. We employed scanning white light interferometry and confocal microscopy to provide quantitative 3D profiles for reliable comparison of samples that are unavailable for simultaneous analysis. We show that 3D profiling offers a solution by allowing illumination‐independent sample comparison. We correctly identified 74 of 80 profiles using consecutive matching striae (CMS) criteria, and we were able to match samples based on profiles measured using different 3D imaging devices. The results suggest that the used methods allow matching cutter marks on thin wires, which has been difficult previously.     

The ideological conditions for Khomeini's doctrine of government ∗

The Islamic movements and ideologies labelled ‘Fundamentalist’ share an oppositional stance to their respective governments rather than common doctrinal positions. The Islamisation of society and the state is planned on the model of the ‘original’ Islamic community of Muhammad and his immediate successors, but the interpretation of their principles in relation to modern socio-political contexts gives rise to political ideologies which represent marked departures from traditional Islamic doctrines and incorporate implicity or explicity modern political concepts. Khomeini's doctrine of government is an interesting example in that it is entirely based on traditional Shi'ite, premises and modes of reasoning and yet it reaches novel conclusions. It is argued that these conclusions presuppose the modern ideological notions of ‘the nation’ and the ‘nation-state’.     

The ‘Arab Spring’ in the historical perspectives of Middle East politics

Abstract

The events of the ‘Arab Spring’ appeared to be animated by slogans and objectives of universalist orientations to liberty, dignity and social justice, a departure from the ethno-religious nationalisms that dominated the politics of the region. They raised questions regarding the ‘exceptionalism’ of Arabs and Muslims, whom many observers and commentators considered to be tied to sentiments and solidarities of patrimonialism, tribe and religion. Yet, the forces that seemed to benefit from the transformations in Egypt and elsewhere were not those that made the ‘revolution’ but precisely religious and patriarchal parties which benefited from popular constituencies in elections. A consideration of the political history of the main countries concerned can throw some light on these transformations. The nationalist, often military, regimes which emerged from the independence struggles of mid-twentieth century headed ideological, populist, nationalist and ‘socialist’ movements and parties and authoritarian regimes which eliminated oppositional politics and social autonomies in favour of a corporatist welfare state. These regimes, facing economic and geo-political contingencies of the later decades were transformed into dynastic oligarchies and crony capitalism which broke the compact of welfare and subsidies leading to intensified impoverishment and repression of their populations. Popular strata were driven ever more into reliance on ‘survival units’ of kin and community, reinforcing communal and religious attachments at the expense of civic and associational life. These ties and sentiments come to the fore when the ruling dynasties are displaced, as in Iraq after the 2003 invasion or Egypt after the removal of Mubarak. The ideological and universalist politics of the revolutionaries appear to be swamped by those conservative affiliations.