‘Heart-Beguiling Araby’ on the Frontier of Empire: Early Anglo-Arab Relations in Transjordan

In 1920 the British government of Palestine sent six officers to establish a British presence in Transjordan. Lacking military and financial support, they could not possibly control a country populated by more than 200,000 tribespeople, many of them members of powerful tribal confederacies. The key to explaining why the British chose this unorthodox way to takeover a new territory lies in the special attitude towards Arabia entertained by the British following World War One. British policy derived from an alleged cultural affinity between the British and the ‘Bedouin’, coupled with a colonial tradition of attributing British administrators with a ‘natural’ ability to rule over natives. These two myths gave the British an inflated belief in their ability to rule local society. Drawing on official reports, private papers and local accounts, this article shows that the British grossly misunderstood local conditions and could not deal with the tribal communities that frustrated their attempt to assert British influence.     

Ideological Rigidity and Flexibility of Secular and Religious Terror Groups: The Case of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Hamas

This article explores the ideological rigidity of secular and religious terror groups. Analyzing leaflets disseminated by two Palestinian groups during the First Intifada, it examines if and how each shifted its identity and goals in response to repression, political shifts, or resource changes. The results suggest that while similar catalysts led to ideological reformation among the secular and the religious group, the extent of ideological change within the religious group was more limited. The article argues for the need to disaggregate ideological analysis further in order to identify more subtle shifts, alterations, and omissions, in the positions held by religious terror groups, moving past the exploration of if such changes exist in ideological templates and instead focusing on the extent and type of alterations the different groups allow.     

Lenin on the Jewish Question: the Theoretical Setting

Western scholars studying Lenin's writings on the Jewish question tend to view them as reflecting no more than the tactical needs of the struggles he conducted against the Jewish Bund. This article examines these writings in the context not of Lenin's political quarrels with the Bund but of his theoretical conception of the relationship between modernization and ethnic conflict. Underlying Lenin's views on the Jewish question and the positions he took vis-à-vis the Bund was a carefully considered theory of nationality grounded in a clearly defined Marxist outlook on history. That theory of nationality, however, happened to be erroneous in that it stipulated the gradual elimination of ethnic conflict as a by-product of modernization. In reality, as theorists of ethnicity have shown in the last 15 years, modernization may have the exactly opposite effect. For the benefits of modernity, whether economic or political, accrue in unequal measures to members of different ethnic groups, thus intensifying ethnic solidarity and the friction between ethnic communities. Lenin's over-optimistic view of the effect of economic development on inter-ethnic relations caused him to judge the Jewish problem in Russia in an unrealistic way, and gave his comments on that problem the appearance of ad hoc tactical pronouncements.     

Facts,Preferences, and Doctrine: An Empirical Analysis of Proportionality Judgment

Legal proportionality is one of the most important principles for adjudicating among conflicting values. However, rather little is known about the factors that play a role in the formation of proportionality judgments. This research presents the first empirical analysis in this regard, relying on a sample of 331 legal experts (lawyers and legal academics). The policy domain addressed by the experiment is the antiterrorist military practice of targeted killings, which has been the subject of a legal debate. Our experimental findings suggest that proportionality judgments are receptive to normatively relevant facts. We also find strong correlational evidence for the effect of ideological preferences on such judgments. These results are consistent for two proportionality doctrines. We suggest that proportionality judgment is anchored jointly in the experts’ policy preferences and the facts of the case. We outline the implications of the findings for the psychological and legal literature.     

Digitizing Peircean semiotics to analyze students’ peer-review comments: classroom use of an application in open-source R

ABSTRACT

Statistical software applications are increasingly used to measure student engagement in the classroom. However, more work remains to be done to clarify how meaning is created and measured in classroom settings. With the growing use of technology in the classroom, students’ peer review has become a standard practice to improve students’ writing skills. This article examines the use of an open-source R software application based on Peirce’s sign theory to analyze students’ peer-review comments. Peer review is the assessment of student or professional work by others. The importance of open-source R as a platform lies in the fact that users can extend its code without having to ask permission. The results suggest a new approach, based on computational and social semiotics, to the assessment of students’ peer-review comments in higher education.     

The seventh withdrawal: has the US forces' journey back home from Korea begun?

This article analyzes the reasons that led to the six UnitedStates forces withdrawals from South Korea between 1947 and2008 and the Republic of Korea's responses to these policies.The article discusses the local and global aspects of theseforces' functions and tasks and attempts to understand why Koreahas not prepared itself for the withdrawal of the US forcesthroughout the years. The article will argue that there mightbe a seventh withdrawal of US forces from Korea in the nearfuture, which South Korea and the USA should begin preparingfor. Received for publication December 20, 2007. Accepted for publication March 28, 2008.     

Bureaucratic politics and the translation of movement agendas

Research on social movement outcomes focuses on the publicly visible stages of government policymaking. It rarely opens the black box of government's translation of movement demands beyond the agenda‐setting stage and before their materialization into legislative bills. Using a bureaucratic politics perspective, we suggest that bureaucrats play a central role in translating movement agendas into concrete problems and policy solutions, which they tend to link with their bureaus' missions and existing programs. We further suggest that relative consensus among bureaucrats when coupled with politicians' disinclination to intervene in the translation process tends to advantage conservative interpretations of movement agendas. Conversely, interbureau confrontation and political intervention are associated with more radical policy responses. Empirically, we examine the responses of the Israeli government to the large‐scale mobilization, in 2011, surrounding the rising costs of housing and living. We build on archival research and interviews with senior bureaucrats located in 11 central‐government ministries.     

Criminal law and behavioral law and economics: observations on the neglected role of uncertainty in deterring crime

Criminal sanctions are usually public, stable and predictable.In contrast, the practices governing the determination of theprobability of detection and conviction reinforce uncertainty.We invoke psychological insights to illustrate that criminalsprefer a scheme in which the size of the sentence is uncertainwhile the probability of detection and conviction is certain.Consequently, the choice to increase certainty with respectto the size of the sentence and to decrease certainty with respectto the probability of detection and conviction can be justifiedon the grounds that such a scheme is disfavored by criminalsand consequently has better deterrent effects.     

Constructions of girls’ bodies in Israeli academic literature: a critical scoping review

This scoping review offers an opportunity to examine the spread and reclaiming of feminist theoretical tenets in a central domain of youth studies. We examined critically the development of the academic literature on Israeli girls and their bodies, based on a girlhood studies perspective. Data consisted of the 255 academic works (articles, book chapters and graduate theses) published on the topic since Israel’s inception. The analysed variables included: decade, language, discipline, topic, focus population, approach and genre. The findings outline a gradual increase overtime of works on the bodies of girls, dominated by health-related topics and quantitative methodologies, alongside a relatively small number of studies on sub-populations of girls and based on a critical approach. The discussion situates the trends found regarding study populations, topics and approaches in the global and local literature on girls, highlighting signs of an emerging girlhood studies perspective in the reviewed literature in the past two decades.