PALESTINIAN ANTIQUITIES LOOTERS,THEIR SKILL DEVELOPMENT,METHODOLOGY AND SPECIALISED TERMINOLOGY: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY

Abstract

The state of Palestine’s archaeological heritage resources is one of serious risk, due to the on-going looting of antiquities. Vandalising archaeological resources is a widespread phenomenon throughout the Palestinian National Territories (PNT) and has resulted in either total or partial damage to thousands of these resources, and the extraction of at least hundreds of thousands of archaeological objects. The main aim of this study is to explore the measures that have been used by Palestinian antiquities looters to develop their knowledge, fieldwork skills and experience. To this end, I interviewed 96 antiquities looters residing in the West Bank. The Gaza Strip, which is totally relevant to the issues under discussion, was only excluded from this study due to the current travel restrictions between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.     

Global Change and Southern Africa

The developing nations of southern Africa have previously been identified as vulnerable to the vagaries of global change, particularly in terms of future climate change. This paper explores recent climate change scenarios for the region in terms of some representative sectors of the environment‐society interface, namely biodiversity, agriculture and related land uses, water resources and health issues. It is concluded that the impacts of predicted climate changes over the next century are likely to be very marked indeed. Biome distribution, agriculture, rangelands and water resources are highlighted as being negatively impacted in ways that will increase the vulnerability of the great majority of the region's population to natural hazards. The potential impact of these changes on the prolific biodiversity of southern Africa is clear. Holistic policy responses, incorporating both environmental and human development concerns, are required in the near future if a crisis is to be averted.     

Trends and triggers: Climate,climate change and civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

The conventional discourse relating climate change to conflict focuses on long term trends in temperature and precipitation that define ecosystems and their subsequent impact on access to renewable resources. Because these changes occur over long time periods they may not capture the proximate factors that trigger conflict. We estimate the impact of both long term trends in climate and short term climatic triggers on civil conflict onset in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that both operationalizations have a significant impact. Climates more suitable for Eurasian agriculture are associated with a decreased likelihood of conflict, while freshwater resources per capita are positively associated with the likelihood of conflict. Moreover, positive changes in rainfall are associated with a decreased likelihood of conflict in the following year. We also assess the outlook for the future by analyzing simulated changes in precipitation means and variability over the period 2000–2099. We find few statistically significant, positive trends in our measure of interannual variability, suggesting that it is unlikely to be affected dramatically by expected changes in climate.     

Climate security,risk assessment and military planning

Climate and environmental changes pose emerging and unique challenges to international security—as the global community experiences issues of food insecurity, severe droughts and floods—and have cascading impacts on energy supplies and infrastructure. Environmental hazards may shift abruptly, posing new risks to vulnerable systems and critical nodes in ways that diverge from historical experience. Effective risk assessments and planning will require understanding of how climate change will affect natural disasters and disaster response, and how hazards may be more extreme or unique from past experiences. This article discusses the role of climate change in affecting security planning from a military perspective, and how integration of scientific data and intelligence methods can foster assessment and effective response.     

Sidelining the Hardliners: A 2 + 1 Solution for Israel‐Palestine

This article presents a modified two‐state solution to the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. A “2 + 1 solution” would see the establishment of a State of Palestine in the West Bank whose constitution proscribes the participation in government of any party whose platform calls for the elimination of Israel; Gaza would accede upon the reform or demise of Hamas. Achieving a state in the West Bank should be the proximate, urgent goal of the Palestinian people. Ideologically motivated Israeli settlement of the West Bank continues apace and threatens the viability of a two‐state solution. Meanwhile, religiously motivated policies of colonization hide behind a security narrative conflating Hamas with Fatah and suggesting that the Palestinians pose an existential threat. The 2 + 1 solution, by excluding Hamas from a State of Palestine, directly addresses Israel's legitimate security concerns and thus carries the potential to lay bare the extent to which ideology informs Israeli policy. The approach also gives moderate Palestinians the opportunity to define the civic values and attributes of Palestinian national identity in a way that supports a lasting two‐state peace.     

Climate change,environmental degradation and armed conflict

Climate change is expected to bring about major change in freshwater availability, the productive capacity of soils, and in patterns of human settlement. However, considerable uncertainties exist with regard to the extent and geographical distribution of these changes. Predicting scenarios for how climate-related environmental change may influence human societies and political systems necessarily involves an even higher degree of uncertainty. The direst predictions about the impacts of global warming warn about greatly increased risks of violent conflict over increasingly scarce resources such as freshwater and arable land. We argue that our best guess about the future has to be based on our knowledge about the relationship between demography, environment and violent conflict in the past. Previous rigorous studies in the field have mostly focused on national-level aggregates. This article represents a new approach to assess the impact of environment on internal armed conflict by using georeferenced (GIS) data and small geographical, rather than political, units of analysis. It addresses some of the most important factors assumed to be strongly influenced by global warming: land degradation, freshwater availability, and population density and change. While population growth and density are associated with increased risks, the effects of land degradation and water scarcity are weak, negligible or insignificant. The results indicate that the effects of political and economic factors far outweigh those between local level demographic/environmental factors and conflict.     

Gendering Palestinian Dispossession: Evaluating Land Loss in the West Bank

Despite increasing attention to Palestinian territorial dispossession, there is inadequate attention paid to how this dispossession is gendered in its legitimising discourses and practices. Inattention to gender results in a failure to understand the power relations at play in the processes through which Palestinians are dispossessed of their land, the discourses that serve to support that dispossession and the impacts of that dispossession. This article examines the roles of Israeli hegemonic militarised masculinity as deployed in discourses and practices of “security” as well as idealised Zionist femininity and idealised Zionist masculinity as deployed in discourses and practices of “God‐given Righteousness”. It finds that both are effective means of dispossessing Palestinians of their land, and that in settlements in the West Bank, the hegemonic militarised masculinity is often subsumed under idealised Zionist femininity and masculinity when it comes to settlement expansion and the violent dispossession of Palestinian land.     

Drivers of Unsustainable Land Use in the Semi‐Arid Khabur River Basin,Syria

The semi‐arid zone of Southwest Asia, known as the Fertile Crescent, is under unprecedented stress because of agricultural development. Where rain‐fed agriculture and transhumant herding had prevailed over ten millennia, today intensive cultivation with irrigation threatens future sustainability. A number of interconnected, but uncoordinated drivers of change combine to shape the landscape and its future, and their changes make it hard to anticipate future requirements and opportunities, as well as to implement policies, whether by local stakeholders or at the national level. Among the factors that comprise the socio‐natural systems are (1) climate, (2) water and soil resources, (3) history of land use, (4) social, economic and political factors, (5) infrastructural developments (6) interstate impacts, and (7) legacies of the past. The example of the Khabur River drainage in northeastern Syria shows the dynamic interplay among these factors over the past 70 years, with implications for the way future policies and practices are developed.     

Electoral Pluralism,Social Division and the 2016 Parliamentary Elections in Jordan

Representing one of the most stable regimes in the Middle East, Jordan has been undergoing a process of political liberalization since 1989. Due to the so‐called East Bank‐West Bank cleavage that followed by the influx of Palestinian migrants to Jordan, the country has also come to epitomize a divided society. Within this context, this paper aims to analyze the ongoing prospects for democratization in Jordan through an examination of four persistent debates shaping its electoral pluralism: those over social/identity division, electoral law as a regime‐survival mechanism, the role of the Ikhwan and the IAF's electoral boycotts, and electoral apathy. Finally, the impact of the Arab upheavals/revolts on restructuring the process of political reform — as well as opposition in the kingdom in the post‐2011 era — will be explored with reference to the changing dynamics of Islamist opposition.     

The Political Economy of Israeli-Palestinian Interdependence

The Israeli and Palestinian economies are asymmetrically interdependent. Some scholars argue that the Palestinian economy cannot be viable alone. Others believe that economic links with Israel will promote peace. Supporters of separation argue that these links distort Palestinian development. I show that the current interdependence is associated with a cyclical Israeli-Palestinian violence and Palestinian economic decline. Assuming that an independent Palestinian state forms in most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, I argue that Israeli-Palestinian relations require economic separation to be stable. Economic separation will deteriorate Palestinian welfare in the short run. Policies to make it viable are considered.     

Climate change,human security and violent conflict

Climate change is increasingly been called a ‘security’ problem, and there has been speculation that climate change may increase the risk of violent conflict. This paper integrates three disparate but well-founded bodies of research – on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change, on livelihoods and violent conflict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking, to offer new insights into the relationships between climate change, human security, and violent conflict. It explains that climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future, by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to sustain livelihoods. Climate change is also likely to undermine the capacity of states to provide the opportunities and services that help people to sustain their livelihoods. We argue that in certain circumstances these direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human security may in turn increase the risk of violent conflict. The paper then outlines the broad contours of a research programme to guide empirical investigations into the risks climate change poses to human security and peace.     

Securing Landscape Resilience to Tropical Cyclones in Australia's Wet Tropics under a Changing Climate: Lessons from Cyclones Larry (and Yasi)

Tropical cyclones are part of the ecosystem dynamics of rainforests in the Wet Tropics of Australia, and intact forest areas show remarkable ability to recover from cyclonic disturbance. However, forest remnants, littoral rainforests, and riparian vegetation have been shown to be particularly susceptible to cyclonic winds and post‐disturbance weed invasion with consequences for their long‐term conservation values. I evaluate the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones impacting the Wet Tropics region since records began in 1858. The recent Category 4 cyclones featured in this study, Larry and Yasi, had return intervals of about one in 70 years. I then discuss the natural resource management (NRM) lessons from Cyclone Larry and put forward practical recommendations on how authorities should deal with natural resources in the clean‐up and recovery phases. I argue that natural resources must be treated as valuable commodities by including their protection and rehabilitation in the same way that human livelihoods, infrastructure and industry are covered in disaster management planning. This requires NRM issues to be included in disaster response policy and legislation, together with ensuring that structures are in place to mitigate the effects of cyclones on natural resources. There is a general consensus that tropical cyclone intensity will increase under climate change while frequency will decrease slightly. This has profound implications for the long‐term sustainability of ecosystems in the Wet Tropics. There is a real risk of a phase shift to vegetation types dominated by disturbance species, including weeds, at the expense of cyclone intolerant species. It is therefore important that we begin to build more cyclone resilient landscapes to reduce the vulnerability of our remaining rainforest habitats and primary production systems. Securing landscape resilience requires greater NRM investment in key areas, including landscape connectivity, river repair, protecting coastal assets and cyclone resilient farms. While climate change poses a long‐term threat to the rainforests of the region, we need to focus on more immediate pressures affecting our remaining biodiversity, notably clearing of native habitat, habitat fragmentation and degradation, and biosecurity issues.     

Screening Climatic and Non‐Climatic Risks to Australian Catchments

Emerging and future climatic change across the Australian continent has been identified as a significant threat to the successful sustainable management of the nation's water resources. However, the impacts of climate change must be viewed within the context of past, present and future climatic variability and human agency. A qualitative screening‐level risk assessment was undertaken for Australia's 325 surface water management areas by aggregating a suite of six relevant risk indicators. Four indicators addressed the antecedent conditions upon which future climate change will act. These included 50‐year trends in rainfall, the status of surface and groundwater development, and catchment condition. Two indicators addressed future drivers of supply and demand; specifically, projected changes in runoff and population. The results indicate that the management challenges currently experienced in Australia's population centres and key agricultural areas such as the Murray‐Darling Basin are likely to increase in future decades. Furthermore, the geographic distribution of net risk, inclusive of multiple biophysical and socioeconomic drivers, is more extensive than is suggested by consideration of surface water development and availability alone. Comparison of at‐risk catchments with the spatial distribution of various social and environmental assets identified a high degree of overlap among catchment risk and human populations, water storages, irrigated agricultural land, and wetlands of international significance. This suggests that the catchments of the greatest value are also those judged to be at greatest risk. Though considerable work remains in evaluating the security of Australia's water resources to climatic and other stressors, this study provides a first‐order scheme for prioritising the risks to which catchments are exposed and an assessment of how some key drivers are likely to interact to drive risk.     

Language of political socialization: language of resistance

This paper discusses the notion of language as resistance for Palestinian children living in the West Bank. Drawing from the global/local language discourse, children constructed meaning of language that echoed the Palestinian political environment. The study examines the Palestinian children's language usage and language meaning as a method of political resistance, resilience and reworking. Children's conceptualization of language meaning emerged from discussion of the diversity of naming and strategies of resistance. Data for the study was drawn from the interviews of 12 Palestinian children (six females and six males) 11–13 years of age from cities, villages, and refugee camps in the West Bank.     

Law,Culture and Access to Justice under the Palestinian National Authority

It has been widely claimed that the Palestinian National Authority has failed to provide adequate access to the law for many Palestinians. Whilst impediments to legal access are often treated as a technical questions of procedure, or as an issue of the cultural appropriateness of legal regimes, this article takes a third approach, which stresses political and historical factors. In order to understand obstacles to legal access it is necessary to discover the ways in which legal practices are understood, used and abandoned in particular contexts. Through an examination of labour disputes, the article argues that in the context of the West Bank, legal claims have no absolute moral value, but are attractive for the substantive claims that can be made through them, opening up legal avenues for political manipulation. In this context, legal entitlements are distributed according to political resources, rather than legal procedures. The article concludes by arguing that promotion of effective access to legal processes in the West Bank should not be seen as a short‐cut to a stable political regime, since accountable legal processes require a centralized, strong and stable coercive support, based in a measure of organizational cohesion and territorial sovereignty.     

Climate change as the ‘new’ security threat: implications for Africa

Once it was an environmental issue, then an energy problem, now climate change is being recast as a security threat. So far, the debate has focused on creating a security ‘hook’, illustrated by anecdote, to invest climate negotiations with a greater sense of urgency. Political momentum behind the idea of climate change as a security threat has progressed quickly, even reaching the United Nations Security Council. This article reviews the linkages between climate change and security in Africa and analyses the role of climate change adaptation policies in future conflict prevention. Africa, with its history of ethnic, resource and interstate conflict, is seen by many as particularly vulnerable to this new type of security threat, despite being the continent least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. Projected climatic changes for Africa suggest a future of increasingly scarce water, collapsing agricultural yields, encroaching desert and damaged coastal infrastructure. Such impacts, should they occur, would undermine the ‘carrying capacity’ of large parts of Africa, causing destabilizing population movements and raising tensions over dwindling strategic resources. In such cases, climate change could be a factor that tips fragile states into socio‐economic and political collapse. Climate change is only one of many security, environmental and developmental challenges facing Africa. Its impacts will be magnified or moderated by underlying conditions of governance, poverty and resource management, as well as the nature of climate change impacts at local and regional levels. Adaptation policies and programmes, if implemented quickly and at multiple scales, could help avert climate change and other environmental stresses becoming triggers for conflict. But, adaptation must take into account existing social, political and economic tensions and avoid exacerbating them.     

明清时期福州西湖水环境变迁及其治理研究

明清时期,福州西湖水环境总体趋劣。明代西湖水源较为充足,水质状况良好;万历以降,受民间占垦等社会因素影响,湖域面积缩减,水质日渐趋下;清代中后期,福州城内水道淤浅,江潮渐绝,西湖水源趋向单一。明清时期西湖水环境的变动,除了受区域气候干湿变化、山地森林水土保持以及湖泊含沙量的影响之外,还与人为的水地之争密切相关。由于人地关系紧张,加之水资源权属不清、新垦湖田税赋征收模糊等,获取湖利的必然性刺激了民间占湖为地的行为。地方官府也曾采取如修闸筑坝护堤、追返侵地还湖、清理粪秽淤泥等治理措施,并取得阶段性成效,但受区域人口、土地资源与生存环境等社会经济因素的影响,西湖历经多次治理仍积弊难除。     

Australian Coastal Management and Climate Change

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) raised public awareness of the need to consider climate change in coastal management and gained international recognition when it received a joint award of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. The raised awareness of climate change surrounding the work of the IPCC was in large part responsible for the focus of the recent Australian national inquiry into coastal management in the context of potential climate change impacts on the coast, conducted by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Climate Change, Water, Environment and the Arts. In the same year the then Minister of Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong, and the Department of Climate Change released a major government report Climate Change Risks to Australia's Coast and set up a national Coasts and Climate Change Council to provide advice to the government. This paper provides a review and analysis of the extent to which climate change issues, within the context of the broader global change debate, have influenced Australian coastal management through its legislation, policies and practice. In particular, the paper focuses on the impact of recent national reports and state government legislative and policy changes and draws conclusions on future directions for Australian coastal management.