(Ad)dressing belonging in a contested space: Embodied spatial practices of Palestinian and Israeli women in Jerusalem

The article explores women's clothing choices from a feminist geopolitical lens to comprehend mobility practices and power-relations across the contested city of Jerusalem. Building on 80 interviews with Palestinian and Israeli women, we explore the different ways in which women's clothing choices can be interpreted as a spatial practice that affects urban im/mobilities. First, we demonstrate the different ways through which cultural and religious norms and representations of the body are perceived as both excluding and restricting women from using certain areas in the city. Second, we suggest that clothing practices may enable movement and mobility that potentially undermine social-cultural norms. Thus, women's bodies and clothing can be a political site of difference and resistance that somewhat underscores the insurmountability of boundaries in the contested spaces of Jerusalem.     

Palestinian Rights: An Israeli Attorney Speaks

Israeli attorney Lynda Brayer of Jerusalem visited Milwaukee in November 1992 and spoke with various groups interested in human rights in the Middle East. Andrew Clarke of DOMES inteviewed her at that time. The composite below is abridged and reordered material derived from some of those exchanges.     

Sport tourism and peace: crossing the contested wall

Abstract

Peace through tourism focuses on the place of tourism in promoting peaceful relations in positive multidimensional terms. Sport events are associated to tourism in that such events provide tourists with the opportunity to engage in friendly competition and social proximity brings local sport people, teams and communities in contact with societies from around the world. The main study aim is to examine and analyze how, why, under what circumstances, and to what extent a cross border sport tourism event can contribute to the promotion of a message of peace between Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land. The case study examines the Bethlehem to Jerusalem Peace Run in which participants were Catholic Italian pilgrims, Israelis and Palestinians. The qualitative methodology includes several forms of mixed data collection: participant observation; content analysis of media documents, and in depth interviews based on a grounded theory approach. The in-depth interview questions to the organizers focused on understanding the challenges and implications of organizing the event, and the extent to which it was important and successful, in their estimation. Participants were asked about their feelings during the event and their estimation of its importance and success. In light of the study findings, a typological model was constructed of tourism-sport-peace relations against a background of conflicts and confrontations. The model illustrates that the elements are interrelated and encourage peace-promotion aspects in three dimensions: at the decision-making and governmental level in the organizational dimension; at the level of people’s feelings in the field in the social dimension; and in the positive media image that emerges in the media dimension, promoting positive coverage and a positive image. These insights and the proposed model should be considered for implementation in other areas of the world suffering from closed and hostile borders.     

From dialogue to polylogue: Exploring the Israeli and Palestinian past in the present

Resumen Este artículo trata sobre un proyecto centrado en el pasado contencioso en Israel y Palestina. Frente a un escenario de incesantes conflictos, los participantes árabes y los judíos descubrieron sus compromisos mutuos, con distintos puntos de vista, en las comunidades en las que trabajaron. Partiendo de esta base común los participantes exploraron las áreas en las que coinciden o discrepan. No obstante, el espíritu predominante del proyecto era el de la colaboración. Un ejemplo de ese espíritu fue el éxito del esfuerzo de los participantes del proyecto por proteger un antiguo asentamiento que iba a ser destruido por la construcción de un muro de seguridad, a través del West Bank, por Israel.

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Résumé Cet article traite d'un projet au sujet du passé de discorde entre l'lsra?l et la Palestine. Avec pour arrière-plan un conflit incessant, les participants arabes et juifs ont découvert qu'ils étaient mutuellement impliqués dans les communautés dans lesquelles ils travaillaient. Dans le context de ce point commun, les participants on exploré les zones d'accord et de désaccord. La mentalité prédominante dans ce projet a été une de coopération. Le symbole de cet esprit de coopération a été le succès de l'effort des participants du projet pour sauver un ancien établissement menacé de destruction certaine lors de la construction du mur de sécurité par l'lsra?l à travers la West Bank.

     

The construction of Israeli Citizenship Law: Intertwining political philosophies

Because of the significance attached to it, the Knesset passed the 1950 Law of Return in an unprecedentedly short time, but it took two more years to pass the Citizenship Law. The official protocols regarding the legislation of Israel’s Citizenship Law illuminate the main concerns of the drafters. The goal of the emerging national citizenship regime was not just to promote Jewish immigration but to establish a modern state that prohibited dual citizenship, accepted naturalizations, prevented statelessness, and granted equal citizenship to women. These policies are accumulations of countless opinions, values, interests, and ideas, each with different conceptions of citizenship and nationhood.     

The role of ex-paramilitaries and former prisoners in political tourism

Northern Ireland has a turbulent history, enduring 30 years of violence known as ‘The Troubles’. Streets in Belfast that were once ‘no-go’ areas are now popular tourist attractions. They are the sites of assassinations, attempted murders and memorials to the dead - both those killed and those who killed. This article reports back on interviews and focus groups with ex-prisoners and ethnographic walks, participating in guided tours of streets, memorial sites and cemeteries, led by former paramilitaries turned tour guides. These local, sometimes controversial, figures play a key role in Belfast's tourist industry, letting those at the very centre of the conflict present and represent the city's dark and contentious history. In this article, we argue that ‘Troubles tourism’ is not about glorifying or commodifying violence, as its critics have suggested (Northern Ireland Assembly, 2008; O'Doherty, 2016; Tinney, 2017), but rather, it enables the contested nature of the conflict to be understood by allowing competing discourses to co-exist and divergent positions to be tolerated, which is politically important for peace. As such, post-conflict tourism requires a different analytical approach than that currently offered in the ‘dark tourism’ literature, which often focuses on visitors' motivations and expectations, and the commodification of history. Instead, we suggest that increased attention be dedicated to the voices of those with previous experience of violence, and the potential of this to understand current ongoing struggle, as well as consider how tourism might contribute to community transition in a post-conflict context.     

Hope in Hebron: The Political Affects of Activism in a Strangled City

The negative affects of this violent occupation—fear, threat, humiliation—quell hope, setting limits on the potentials of political agency. This article documents the corporeality of the Occupation in Hebron, evoking the body as materially contingent to explore agential capacities within the delimiting affects of the violent sensorium. Drawing on fieldwork with Palestinian activists engaged in providing political tours of Hebron, I argue that by reappropriating the violent affects of occupation, this form of activism demonstrates agency that resists “political depression”. Theoretically, I argue further, at hand is an empirical account of the “autonomy of affect” giving rise to critical hope amid a sensorium of fear. The research presented, therefore, contributes to addressing a key question for resistance in Palestine (and beyond): how fear—a predominant affective register of contemporary politics—might be harnessed towards (renewed) political agency and resistance to oppression.     

The political economy of dive tourism: precarity at the periphery in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

Using a critical political economy approach and the concept of labour precarity, the international dive tourism industry in Sabah, Malaysia and its workers’ vulnerabilities are interrogated. Fieldwork data highlights dive tourism's socio-economic impacts and the precarity of labour within the international tourism sector and also critiques it as a development strategy for a peripheral region. The paper challenges the optimistic views of labour precarity found in the existing political economy literature. Rather than identifying labour empowerment, evidence demonstrates significant worker vulnerability, uncertainty, and contingency – especially among ethnic minorities – resulting from Malaysia's state-led rentier economy.     

Planning the post‐political city: exploring public participation in the contemporary Australian city

This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post‐political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio‐spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.     

Operationalizing a contested concept: indicators of territorial cohesion

European territorial policies increasingly refer to broad goals such as sustainability, well-being and cohesion. For their operationalization as political goals, there is a need to create indicators. But how can an indicator be meaningful in relation to a complex concept that is not well defined? If the creation of an indicator is primarily aimed at quantifying a concept and making it more operational, in the case of a contested concept (such as territorial cohesion), the process of building indicators also helps stabilize it, allowing a potential decontestation. A participatory constructivist approach – as used by the ESPON project Indicators for Territorial Cohesion (INTERCO) – is considered to be the most suitable for building indicators of contested concepts. While ensuring computability of the indicators, it allows more flexibility and reconciles the different meanings of the concept in order to stabilize it. Ultimately, the validity of indicators of contested concepts lies in pragmatic criteria: usability, usefulness and use.     

Questions of deception: contested understandings of the polls on WMD,political leaders and governments in Australia,Britain and the United States

The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Saddam Hussein was said to possess were central to the justification the Australian Prime Minister gave for Australia's decision to go to war in Iraq. When no WMD materialised, poll data suggested that the public felt misled. But the same data suggested that support for both the government and the Prime Minister was unaffected. Among critics of the war, this generated a moral panic about Australian democracy and the Australian public—its commitment to the end justifying the means, its failure to receive a lead from the Labor Party, its widespread apathy. It also led to an intense debate about why the charge of not telling the truth had weakened public support for Blair and Bush but not for Howard. This article explores the concerns expressed by critics of the war in the face of polling that suggested that Australians were prepared to support a government and its leader that had misled them—deliberately or otherwise. It raises questions about the contrasts drawn between polled opinion in Australia, Britain and the United States. And it argues that the differences in the pattern of opinion across the three countries were not marked and that what had cost governments support were views about how the war was going, not the failure to find WMD.     

The contested rescaling of economic governance in East Asia: a special issue

The special issue this article opens engages with an apparent conundrum that has often puzzled observers of East Asian politics—why, despite the region's considerable economic integration, multilateral economic governance institutions remain largely underdeveloped. The authors argue that this ‘regionalism problématique’ has led to the neglect of prior and more important questions pertaining to how patterns of economic governance, beyond the national scale, are emerging in East Asia and why. In this special issue, the contributors shift analytic focus onto social and political struggles over the scale and instruments of economic governance in East Asia. The contributions identify and explain the emergence of a wide variety of regional modes of economic governance often neglected by the scholarship or erroneously viewed as stepping stones towards ‘deeper’ multilateralism.     

Cultural effects of authenticity: contested heritage practices in China

In this study, I analyse how the Chinese Government imposes the concept of authenticity on local heritage practices in the process of heritage nomination, conservation and management. Rather than discussing authenticity as an objective criterion, I approach authentication as a social process in the heritage discourse that impacts on local cultural practice. Through illustrating two cases in China, I propose three cultural effects of authentication on local heritage practices, namely spatial separation, emotional banishment and value shifting. Moreover, the heritage practices in China have created space for dynamic negotiations between local and global value systems. When the concept of authenticity is imposed on local heritage practices by heritage agencies, local communities are not passive recipients; rather, they consume, contest and negotiate the concept of authenticity in various ways.