Deliberative democracy and the Tasmanian forest peace process

Decades of contention regarding Tasmania's forests have been accompanied by several attempts for peace. Most recently the ‘forest peace process’ culminated in the 2012 Tasmanian Forest Agreement (TFA). We evaluate the peace process that led to the TFA, and its subsequent dismantling, from the perspective of deliberative democracy, which promises to achieve democratically legitimate outcomes in the toughest conflicts. Using normative criteria to evaluate the deliberative democratic quality of the process, our analysis shows that trades-offs were needed, and not all normative criteria could be achieved equally and simultaneously. Despite its shortcomings, and short-lived life, the peace process illustrates the possibility of achieving meta-consensus in deep value conflicts, and the crucial role of this consensus for sustaining deliberation.     

‘Memory is the strength of our resistance’: an ‘other politics’ through embodied and material commemoration in the San José Peace Community,Colombia

Scholars have shown how memory is an embodied and spatial practice that potentially generates more just possible futures, and that peace is a politicized and contextually specific process, but how does place-based memory performance actually contribute to social movements’ construction of peace? This article explores massacre commemoration pilgrimages and stones painted with victims’ names in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, a group of small-scale farmers living in the war-torn region of Urabá, Colombia. Based on 15 months of ethnographic research in Colombia from 2011 to 2014, including participant observation and 49 interviews, I explore the relationship between these spatially embodied practices and the community’s resistance to forced displacement and peace-building project. I argue that these forms of memorialization cultivate key elements for an autonomist ‘other politics’, including solidarity with allies; mobilizing bodies across space to defend life and land; and ongoing reflection, education and strategic planning that strengthen community cohesion and organization. Integrating scholarship on memory performance, peace geographies, and social movements, I illustrate how the San José de Apartadó Peace Community’s massacre commemorations and stones reject vindictive violence and instead build an alternative, transformative and emancipatory politics through internal and external solidarity.     

Angels,Illusions, Hydras,and Chimeras: Violence and Humanity

Gibson, Kathleen R. and Tim Ingold, eds. Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xii + 483 pp. including index. $69.95 cloth.

Wallman, Joel. Aping Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xii + 191 pp. including notes, references, and indices. $44.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.     

The vigorous and doux soldier: David Hume’s military defence of commerce

ABSTRACT

If war is an inevitable condition of human nature, as David Hume suggests, then what type of societies can best protect us from defeat and conquest? For David Hume, commerce decreases the relative cost of war and promotes technological military advances as well as martial spirit. Commerce therefore makes a country militarily stronger and better equipped to protect itself against attacks than any other kind of society. Hume does not assume commerce would yield a peaceful world nor that commercial societies would be militarily weak, as many contemporary scholars have argued. On the contrary, for him, military might is a beneficial consequence of commerce.     

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Building the Future Palestine

A Palestinian geographer and urban planner discusses one of the territorial challenges that will likely emerge in the process of building a future Palestinian state. More specifically, he outlines how looming population pressures (high density in tandem with rapid natural increase and return of displaced refugees) will require that investments to support economic growth and new construction be organized within a national settlement system based on the existing urban hierarchy. In addition to describing the elements of such a system ("developed urban axis of Palestine"), the paper also covers the effects of public opinion and shifting political alignments within the territories on shaping the conceptualization of a future Palestinian state.     

和平队的历史文化渊源

和平队创建于20世纪60年代肯尼迪政府时期,它是作为一个对外志愿援助机构的面目出现的.之所以在美国出现这样一个援外志愿者组织,除了肯尼迪政府对美国对外政策的调整的现实考虑,更主要是美国具有和平队所提倡的历史文化传统,如美国社会广泛存在的志愿者精神、美国历史上形成的边疆传统和拓荒者精神以及往届政府的政策实践等.     

National narratives and the Oslo peace process: How peacebuilding paradigms address conflicts over history

National narratives are an essential part of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Little is said, however, on how the Oslo Peace Process sought to address these narratives. Conventional wisdom argues that the peace process initiated in the 1990s largely ignored the matter. This article challenges this view, arguing instead that the peace process was and continues to be actively engaged in solving the narrative wars that divide Israelis and Palestinians. To shed light on these solutions, this article looks beyond the agreements of the Oslo Peace Process and focuses on the peacebuilding paradigms that informed it, more specifically, the national partition and the liberal peace paradigms. These prescribe two solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict over history: narrative partition and evasion. In their implementation, the article concludes, these solutions imposed greater identity costs on the Palestinian narrative than on the Israeli one.     

Mission Impossible: UN Special Representative Gunnar Jarring and His Quest for Peace in the Middle East

On 23 November 1967, Gunnar Jarring, a Swedish diplomat, was appointed the United Nations Special Representative to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Security Council had decided to launch a peace effort in the Middle East following the Six-Day War in June 1967. Israel had won a sweeping victory, and the Arab states had suffered a devastating loss. After the war, Israel controlled a territory almost three and a half times the size of the country itself. But what should be done with these newly conquered territories? Should Israel be allowed to keep them? Over the course of some three and a quarter years, Jarring shuttled between the representatives from the three countries involved in the peace endeavour: Israel, Egypt, and Jordan. (Syria refused to participate.) Despite his arduous efforts, he failed miserably to produce viable progress in the Arab-Israeli conflict.     

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.     

‘Therefore They Shouldn’t Exist’: The Carter Administration,the ‘Israel Lobby’ and the Sinai Settlements

Abstract

The Israeli settlements in Sinai could have been a fatal obstacle to Egyptian–Israeli peace, but the Jimmy Carter administration overcame it. The established narrative of how Israel ceded the Sinai settlements focuses on the Camp David summit. However, the real battle over the fate of the settlements was fought previously. In February–April 1978, the Carter administration attempted to turn pro-Israeli supporters in the United States against the Israeli position, according to which the Sinai settlements should remain in place. The Menachem Begin government mobilized to counter that push but lost the battle. Contrary to his image as an awkward political operator, Carter won over supporters of Israel effectively. The case raises questions regarding the oft-mentioned role of the ‘Israel lobby’ in preventing peace.