About the Authors

Biography

About the Authors     

Evaluating the Communication between Groups in Dispute: Equality in Contact Interventions between Jews and Arabs in Israel

This article examines a new approach for evaluating the process of interactive conflict-resolution interventions by focusing on the quality of communication between the groups in dispute. This approach assesses the extent to which contact interventions, aimed at improving relations between sides in dispute, actually promote among their participants relationships, behaviors, and interactions that fulfill standards of social justice, equality, and fairness. Creating equality in communication models and reinforces values of mutual respect and tolerance. Thus, establishing symmetrical communication can be especially important for many interventions conducted to resolve conflicts marked by unequal distribution of power. One such asymmetrical conflict is the one between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority in Israel. This article describes a study that applies our process-evaluation approach to assess equality and social justice in planned contact interventions between Israeli Jews and Arabs by measuring the degree to which members of the two groups contributed equally to the communication between them. Finally, the article presents guidelines, derived from this and other similar studies, for establishing communication equality in other planned contact interventions.     

Al Qaeda as a Dune Organization: Toward a Typology of Islamic Terrorist Organizations

Al Qaeda and its affiliated groups offer the analyst a highly complex challenge. The current literature classifies Islamic terrorist organizations as either networked or hierarchical. Yet, this classification fails to account for the appearance on the international stage of a new type of global terrorism. Most notably, it does not capture the structure and mode of operation of Al Qaeda as it emerged after the 2001 U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan. This article therefore introduces a new conceptthe Dune organizationthat is distinct from other organizational modes of thinking. This conceptualization leads to a new typology of Islamic terrorist organizations. This typology concentrates on organizational behavior patterns and provides a framework for a comparative analysis of terrorist movements, which is applied to a study of Al Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.     

Evaluating Israel's Strategy of Low-Intensity Warfare, 1949–2006

This study examines the strategic and tactical logic of Israel's limited uses of force against Arab states and against substate actors. It evaluates the effectiveness of these policies, and their political and strategic ramifications. The study is based on a historical survey of these policies and on quantitative analysis of a dataset of the use of limited force by Israel over the 1949–2003 period. The findings suggest, first, that limited force strategies were occasionally used to foster escalation. In other cases, the mismanagement of limited engagements resulted in inadvertent escalation to full-blown wars. Second, domestic political and social considerations had important effects on the nature and intensity of Israeli uses of limited force. Third, Israeli reliance on offensive strategies has not only consistently failed, but produced adverse military and diplomatic side effects. Defensive and preventive measures have shown a much greater degree of success. The study concludes that a combination of military and diplomatic measures produces far more effective results than strictly military ones.     

Peace Building in Violent Conflict: Israeli-Palestinian Post-Oslo People-to-People Activities

This article deals with peace-building activities in the context of the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Scores of people-to-people projects were conducted after the September 1993 signing of the Oslo peace accords, but these projects did not seem to prevent the collapse of the peace process and the re-emergence of severe violence between the sides in late September 2000. However, evidence from the field indicates that peace-building activities are still continuing. This article will describe peace-building activities both before and after September 2000, discuss their effectiveness, and define their relevance in the ongoing violent conflict between the sides.     

Proportional representation: An empirical evaluation of single-stage,non-ranked voting procedures

Rapoport, Felsenthal and Maoz (1988) have proposed three alternative methods to discern the fair proportion of seats that a party in a representative assembly ought to receive as a function of voters' preference orderings. All three methods assume that the ratio between the number of voters preferring party i over j to the number of voters preferring party j over i can be tested for consistency, and, if sufficiently consistent, can be appropriately scaled to discover the proportion of seats each party ought to receive. Using these methods as standards, we use exit-poll data gathered during the 1985 elections to the general convention of the Israeli General Federation of Labor (Histadrut) to examine the extent to which plurality- and approval-voting procedures provide a fair allocation of seats. The findings indicate that: (a) all three methods yield sufficiently consistent matrices of preference ratios; (b) the plurality- and the approval-voting procedures yielded significantly different proportional representations; (c) the proposed proportion of seats according to the three aggregation methods fall midway between the proportion of seats that the plurality and the approval procedures allocate. We discuss practical implications of these findings. Requests for reprints should be sent to: Professor Amnon Rapoport, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Davie Hall 013A, Chapel Hill, NC 27514.     

The Effects of Strategic and Economic Interdependence on International Conflict Across Levels of Analysis

This study develops a Social Network Analytic approach to conceptualize and measure interdependence across levels of analysis. This framework contains several innovations. First, it integrates "sensitivity interdependence"—the effects of changes in one state on other states—with "vulnerability interdependence"—the opportunity costs of breaking a relationship. Second, it measures interdependence at different levels of analysis and across multiple relationships. Third, it integrates multiple dimensions of interdependence into a single measure. I derive hypotheses from the realist and liberal paradigms regarding the effects of strategic and economic interdependence on monadic, dyadic, and systemic conflict. These hypotheses are tested via data on alliances, military capability, and trade. The findings provide robust support to the expectations of the liberal paradigm regarding the effects of strategic and economic interdependence on conflict. On the other hand, the expectations of the realist paradigm are not supported. I discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of this approach.