Clarity or ambiguity? The withdrawal clause of UN Security Council Resolution 242

Today the international community seems at a loss as to how to transact peace between Israel and Palestine (and Syria). UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 provides the principles for that peace. Yet there has always been a perceived ambiguity about its withdrawal clause. Diplomatic and UN records show clearly what the Security Council intended in Resolution 242. Nine of 15 members wanted total withdrawal, and the minority saw the virtue of small adjustments to the 1949 Armistice Line to accommodate Israel's demand for ‘secure and recognized’ borders. Every Security Council member upheld the overarching principle, ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.’ Those who drafted Resolution 242 seem not to have checked that its terms were consonant with the Fourth Geneva Convention, even though they recognized the Convention applied. The Convention renders it illegal for those under occupation to agree terms with the Occupying Power which infringe the rights and protections of the Convention. Since the Convention remains in force until the end of occupation, no peace agreement which includes the adjustment of borders or ceding territory may be concluded until after a full withdrawal has taken place—a requirement fully consonant with Resolution 242's ‘inadmissibility’ principle, and removing any doubt regarding the requirement for a full Israeli withdrawal. To comply with it themselves and to avoid misapprehension, Quartet members must tell Israel, Syria and Palestine that they cannot recognize a peace agreement which would violate the Convention's terms.     

Learning from the past: the relevance of international history

This article is based on an inaugural lecture for the Stevenson Chair in International History, given at the London School of Economics (LSE) in October 2012. It re‐examines the origins in Britain in the 1920s of the academic discipline of international history, focusing on the partnership between the LSE and Chatham House. It highlights the differences among the discipline's founders between broader and more tightly defined conceptions of its subject matter and scope, identified respectively with Arnold J. Toynbee on the one hand and with Harold Temperley and Charles Webster on the other. It also underlines the founders' agreement about international history's practical applicability, particularly for analysing and even for helping to prevent the outbreak of major wars. It explores the theme of ‘learning from the past’ by investigating the interconnection between the diplomatic crises of July–August 1914 and October 1962, reappraising John F. Kennedy's use of history to inform statesmanship. The article points to a recurrent pattern in the international conjunctures of 1914, 1939 and 1962 that may be replicating itself again today. It concludes that a knowledge and understanding of international history can indeed yield insights of practical value, though must be drawn on flexibly and with imagination.     

Unconventional Gas Development: Why a Regional Community Said No

Public concern resulting from unconventional coal seam gas (CSG) exploration and production has become a contentious planning issue in regional Australia, with public concern drawing attention to government planning obligations. To assist Lismore City Council (Northern New South Wales) in its deliberations on the topic, a referendum‐style poll on the issue of CSG industry development was held in conjunction with the local government elections of September 2012. The poll question, ‘Do you support CSG exploration and production in the Lismore City Council area?’, elicited a poll response rate of 97% of eligible voters, of which 87% voted ‘no’. This paper reports the results of an exit poll survey using the Theory of Planned Behaviour to frame motivations behind the poll result, and examines the role of the poll and exit poll survey in providing a process of deliberative democracy in the context of the CSG debate. Key details highlighted by the results were that non‐supporters of CSG exploration were primarily concerned about water quality, while supporters saw the primary benefit being regional employment. Emerging themes of this study are the need for more independent research on potential risks and benefits of CSG developments, increase in institutional transparency, and the development of renewable alternatives. The study concludes that the principles of deliberative democracy involved in the Lismore City Council poll and subsequent exit poll survey have provided an opportunity for a more open discussion and genuine discourse within the CSG debate.     

Southern Irish Protestants: an example of de‐ethnicisation?

ABSTRACT. The study of minorities is central to research in ethnicity and nationalism. But there are cases where the precise nature of the minority is not easy to determine. One view of Southern Irish Protestants is that in the decades after independence they transformed themselves (or were transformed) from British nationals to Irish nationals or, alternatively, from a British ethnic to an Irish religious minority. This paper argues that treating the (past) British dimension of Irish Protestant identity as ethnic or national misconceives it and overlooks the historically deep Irish context of Protestant identity. One consequence of this is the neglect of the specifically Irish roots of residual tensions in Catholic–Protestant relationships. The themes of the paper are exemplified with case material drawn from research on Protestants and Catholics in rural West Cork.     

Analysing international nuclear order

William Walker's article, ‘Nuclear enlightenment and counter‐enlightenment’, raises fundamental questions about the history of efforts to construct order in international politics in relation to nuclear arms and weapons‐related capabilities. However, Walker's ‘enlightenment’ and ‘counter‐enlightenment’ tropes are clumsy and unsatisfactory tools for analysing contemporary policies concerning nuclear deterrence, non‐proliferation and disarmament. Walker holds that in the 1960s and 1970s most of the governments of the world came together in pursuit of ‘a grand enlightenment project’. This thesis cannot withstand empirical scrutiny with regard to its three main themes—a supposed US‐Soviet consensus on doctrines of stabilizing nuclear deterrence through mutual vulnerability, a notion that the NPT derived from ‘concerted efforts to construct an international nuclear order meriting that title’, and the view that the NPT embodied a commitment to achieve nuclear disarmament. Walker's criticisms of US nuclear policies since the late 1990s are in several cases overstated or ill‐founded. Walker also exaggerates the potential influence of the United States over the policies of other countries. It is partly for this reason that the challenges at hand—both analytical and practical—are more complicated and dif cult than his article implies. His work nonetheless has the great merit of raising fundamental questions about international political order.     

4. A PRAGMATIC RESPONSE1

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 (Indian edition) and 2003 (U.S. edition), Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as well as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 (and thus in the centuries before the consolidation of colonial rule) possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or ?āstric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist (and Barthesian) language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized (and impoverished) view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule.     

On the Ambivalence of Orthodoxy in American Anthropology

The establishment of professional anthropology is contrasted with the flawed limits and freedom of early self-trained anthropologists working outside of the academy. The work of ethnographer and linguist Jaime de Angulo and photographer Edward S. Curtis are oppositional examples of early 20th century self-trained anthropologically informed field research. While Curtis's career illustrates how work outside of academic anthropological circles often failed to document Indian culture, de Angulo's work provides an example of a brilliant scholar producing innovative, high quality work that would have been difficult to produce under the strictures of early 20th century academic life.     

Culture and Power in the Anthropology of Japan

Though Japan anthropology since the 1970s has been characterized as outside mainstream anthropological currents, recent work reflects broader disciplinary debates about the relation between culture and power. The four books under review, spanning the archaeology, history, ethnography, and political science of Japan, illustrate different ways of synthesizing cultural and political perspectives. Yet, to varying degrees, they all move beyond an undifferentiated, ahistorical, and depoliticized view of culture to embrace complexity, variability, conflict, and change. In so doing, they raise important questions about knowledge construction across the subfields of anthropology and its uneasy relationship with nationalist and essentialist discourses.