The road to normalization: The importance of the United Arab Emirates' neoliberal foreign policy in the normalization with Israel: 2004–2020

The article discusses the question of why and how the normalization between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel took place and managed to evolve into a peace agreement. It offers an additional explanation to the neorealists' scholarly and commonly accepted argument: that it was only the behavior of the revisionist state of Iran that was the motive for signing the peace agreement between the two states. Furthermore, the article argues that the normalization of relations began in 2004 and could have materialized owing to the UAE's neoliberal foreign policy of focusing on soft power cooperation. It suggests the UAE's internal interests of status, stability, and empowerment, which were incorporated in the Vision 2021 plan, were translated into a foreign policy of international cooperation rather than one of military involvement and alliances. The UAE's long-term strategy reveals a dual neorealist and neoliberal foreign policy with a tendency toward the latter. The neoliberal foreign policy of soft power cooperation attracted the UAE to Israel and, through these shared interests, built trust and eventually led to normalization between the two states. The study covers three periods of the UAE's foreign policy strategy during the development of the normalization process. It begins with the tension between the neoliberal and neorealist strategies from 2004 to 2009, then looks at the increase in tensions between 2010 and 2018, and ends with the focus on the neoliberal foreign policy strategy in 2019–2020.     

‘That Gleaming Sword of Satire’1: Power,Passion and Parliament in the Mid-Victorian City

Political print satire, construed as an articulation of sedition and dissent, is most commonly associated in Britain with its 18th-century ‘Golden Age’. Beyond Victorian fiction, the go-to 19th-century source tends to be the hegemonic, London-centric Punch. It is not widely known that, as Punch mellowed and popularised in the 1860s and 1870s, England's booming urban centres gave rise to a distinct form of citizen journalism which used boisterous satire as an effective vehicle for sociopolitical comment, evidence-based analysis and civic activism. Not only did the provincial satirical periodical filter parliamentary affairs through a critical provincial lens but at a time when politics were largely local, it engaged with the extra-parliamentary power vested in civic and municipal governance. It aspired to much more than diversion through witty posturing. Morally and ideologically inspired, fuelled by righteous indignation, it successfully used the protest of the pen to agitate in the cause of social and political reform, demonstrating the ‘everyday’ resistance and common sense essential to liberal governmentality. Referencing some of the most enduring and respected examples of the genre – the Porcupine in Liverpool, the Town Crier in Birmingham and the Free Lance in Manchester – this article casts light upon this poorly understood journalism of conviction. A cause and effect of both emotional and intellectual release, it serves as an excellent example of citizenship as performed political passion, in an age of public conformity and restraint.