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This article presents the results of a 15-year longitudinal study of the major educational peacebuilding initiatives in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, during times of relative peace and of acute violence (1993–2008). Using longitudinal field research data and surveys, it examines how peace initiatives, that work across conflict lines, adapt to hostile and unfavorable environments. Additionally, it investigates the criteria that allows some peacebuilding initiatives to survive and persist, when the large majority do not. Building on the organizational and social movement studies literature, I contend that organizations need to successfully attend to a variety of challenges such as maintaining resources, maintaining legitimacy, managing internal conflict, and maintaining commitment to have a significant chance for survival. Moreover, I argue that for organizations committed to working across difference and inequality in unfavorable and hostile conflict environments, it is critical for organizational effectiveness and survival to pay heed to the quality of the cross-conflict relationships, as well as, to matters of equality.

Jeliazkov and Poirier (2008) analyze the daily incidence of violence during the Second Intifada in a statistical way using an analytical Bayesian implementation of a second-order discrete Markov process. We tackle the same data and modeling problem from our perspective as cognitive scientists. First, we propose a psychological model of violence, based on a latent psychological construct we call “build up” that controls the retaliatory and repetitive violent behavior by both sides in the conflict. Build up is based on a social memory of recent violence and generates the probability and intensity of current violence. Our psychological model is implemented as a generative probabilistic graphical model, which allows for fully Bayesian inference using computational methods. We show that our model is both descriptively adequate, based on posterior predictive checks, and has good predictive performance. We then present a series of results that show how inferences based on the model can provide insight into the nature of the conflict. These inferences consider the base rates of violence in different periods of the Second Intifada, the nature of the social memory for recent violence, and the way repetitive versus retaliatory violent behavior affects each side in the conflict. Finally, we discuss possible extensions of our model and draw conclusions about the potential theoretical and methodological advantages of treating societal conflict as a cognitive modeling problem.

How are social groups unmade? Current theories identify the symbolic power of the state as a primary factor in the creation of social groups. Drawing on Gramsci's The Southern Question, this chapter extends state-centered theories by exploring policies that are critical but under-theorized factors in group formation. These include the concession of material benefits as well as the use of coercive means. Further, while current theories focus on how social groups are made, a Gramscian perspective draws attention to how the state intervenes to prevent or neutralize group-making projects from below. This chapter explores a case of a decrease in national group solidarity. Specifically, this study explains how in the 1990s the Israeli state weakened national group formation among Palestinians by adopting two spatially distinct but coordinated strategies. First, the rearrangement of the military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank through the establishment of an authority of self-rule (the Palestinian Authority) demobilized and divided Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories, especially along class-cum-moral lines. Second, state practices and discourses centered on citizenship rights shifted the center of political activism among Palestinian citizens of Israel toward citizenship issues. I argue that these two routes, which I call the indirect rule route and the civil society route, were complementary components of a broader attempt to neutralize Palestinian collective mobilization around nationhood. Despite recent changes and contestations, these two strategies of rule continue to affect group formation and to create distinct experiences of politics among Palestinians under Israeli rule. Analysis of the Palestinian–Israeli case shows that the state can unmake groups through the distribution of interrelated policies that are specific to certain categories of people and places. Understanding the conditions under which certain policies of inclusion or exclusion affect group formation requires going beyond the analytic primacy currently given to the symbolic power of the state.

State leaders’ decision-making calculus is often attributed to external factors. The political arena, international community pressure and a country’s military stance all take centre stage in the analysis of national security decisions. Little weight is given to personal aspects of a leader’s psyche in explaining these decisions; this is true to the bulk of the research regarding this topic. This study theorizes and tests a positive link between Israeli leaders’ combat military experience and their propensity to enter into ‘peacemaking’ decisions namely, peace talks, cease fires and unilateral withdrawals. This research uses a new database comprising all peacemaking decision points in Israel’s history, looking at the pressure put on a leader from outside factors and his military experience to explain the decision taken. It finds a strong significant link between combat experience and the tendency to enter in a peacemaking decision with little regard to ideological affiliation, shedding a new light on Israeli politicians from both sides of the aisle.

Social movement scholarship convincingly highlights the importance of threats, political opportunities, prior social ties, ideological compatibility, and resources for coalition formation. Based on interviews with Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists involved in two transnational coalitions in Israel/Palestine, this chapter illustrates the emergence of transnational coalitions, particularly those that cross polarized ethno-national divides, depends not only on such facilitators, but also, and critically, on the belief that such diverse cooperation is strategic. I argue these unique coalitions intentionally formed with individuals and organizations situated in different national communities out of a strategic decision by the Palestinian initiators, given the closed political opportunity structure they faced domestically, to enlarge the scope of conflict by drawing in new people and communities who may have some leverage on the Israeli government. Consequently, this chapter also makes clear that partners in the Global South make intentional choices about who to partner with, and that the agency is not solely linked with their more privileged partners in the Global North (cf., Bob, 2001; Widener, 2007). Finally, it illustrates that coalition partners are recruited not only because of social ties, prior histories of interaction, ideological similarity, and shared organizational framing, but also due to key considerations including perceptions of what the ethno-national diversity, varying networks, and differing privileges make available.

This contribution analyses marketing strategies of transnational corporations operating in the field of consumer goods in contemporary Egypt. Using anthropological methodology, I explore the interrelations between rural marketing and consumer intifada, and note that in contrast to commonly held views about the homogenisation of local consumer cultures, in the sense of a Coca-Colaisation process, corporate communications strategies and product policies over the past decade have been increasingly taking cultural spheres of meaning into account in their effort to penetrate the Egyptian mass market. Various indicators show that the relevance of producing and marketing standardised goods has been diminishing as compared to the key importance of adapting global products to the local setting with its various cultural and political components.

Purpose: The majority of academic and policy studies on counterterrorism rely on what is termed “the terror stock model.” According to this model, terrorist activity can be viewed as a product of a stock of terror: a combination of human, physical, and monetary resources needed to launch terrorist attacks. Consequently, countering terrorism is a matter of reducing the capacity of terrorist organizations to operate via direct assaults on terrorists themselves. Defining terrorism as a form of collective action, this article examines how various Israeli initiatives influence Palestinian acts of terrorism.

Method: This paper investigates how the rate of suicide terror attempts is affected by violent, non-violent, and socioeconomic forms of initiatives by the Israeli government between 2000 and 2006 using a series of event-history analyses. While directly addressing the efficacy of what the Israeli government terms as its methods of counterterrorism – violent repression of insurgents and terror suspects – it also explores the applicability of various social movement theories to exact a more accurate awareness of what activities actually incite or inhibit terrorism.

Findings: The results indicate that while certain forms of repression that the Israeli government identifies as counter-terrorist measures (such as killing of insurgents and detentions) have the intended outcome – a lower rate of suicide bombings – other forms and measures of repression have mixed effects. The results suggest that suicide bombings can be explained at least partly by a mixture of increased hostility, limited capacity to mobilize, and socioeconomic distress.

How can we account for patterns of mobilization undertaken by ethnic movements? What leads ethnic collectives to shift between mobilization strategies? Addressing the general lack of attention in the ethnic conflict literature to the diverse political strategies employed by ethnic minorities – particularly those in democratic and semi-democratic contexts, this chapter accounts for mobilization as developing along an institutional spectrum of ethnic contention. I argue that the internal dynamics of ethnic movements shape patterns of mobilization. Utilizing literature from new institutionalism and employing the approach advanced by the study of contentious politics, ethnic movements are theorized as developing through the interplay of three causal mechanisms, which combine to form processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. The process of deinstitutionalization is explored through the case of the mobilization of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, tracing the development of the three causal mechanisms and their influence on the collective’s mobilization pattern. The chapter concludes by considering the range of movements that can be explored along the institutional spectrum.

Palestinian children have been described as targets of the Israel government’s melange of mechanisms used to control the Palestinian people and territories. In this role, Palestinian children are subjected to direct violence, bureaucratic constructs, interrogation, incarceration, and other various means of marginalisation and oppression. Simultaneously, Palestinian children have also been depicted as nationalised subjects and resources for the future of Palestine, upon which historical and ongoing national symbols are projected. Palestinian children, therefore, play a dual role within the conflict and in everyday life: both innocent and in need of protection while also embodying sites of resistance. Nowhere is this dual role more pronounced than within the Palestinian home. In order to explore the multiple roles that children represent within the physical structure of the home, this chapter draws upon the authors’ research experience using collaborative family interviews and testimony collections in home environments. The authors’ methodological engagement with children and families at the home-level has found children to be a present absence within the home, with adult family members dominating the data-gathering discourse. In other words, children are ubiquitous within Palestinian landscapes, but they are rarely heard from. However, in research, children’s voices may be acknowledged for brief moments when data-gathering methods such as drawing or neighbourhood walks are used. Children may also be cherished as a focus of family protection and future resistance against the occupation. While much research has considered children affected by political violence as both victims and actors, this chapter adds another layer by exploring the multiple roles and representations of children within the Palestinian home. The authors focus is not on how these representations are imposed upon children by adults, but rather how representations of children are enacted and negotiated within oftentimes protective home spaces.