This book examines political, social, and cultural changes in Palestine and Israel from the 1993 Oslo Accords through the second Palestinian uprising and the death of Yasser Arafat. It also explains the failures of the Oslo process and considers the prospects for a just and lasting peace in the region.
Unrecognized states are places that do not exist in international politics; they are state-like entities that have achieved de facto independence, but have failed to gain widespread international recognition. Since the Cold-War, unrecognized states have been involved in conflicts over sovereign statehood in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union, South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the South Pacific; some of which elicited major international crises and intervention, including the use of armed force. Yet they remain subject to many myths and simplifications. Drawing on a number of contemporary and historical cases, from Nagorno Karabakh and Somaliland to Taiwan, this timely new book provides a comprehensive analysis of unrecognized states. It examines their origins, the factors that enable them to survive and explores their likely future trajectories. But it is not just a book about unrecognized states; it is a book about sovereignty and statehood; one which does not shy way from addressing crucial issues such as how these anomalies survive in a system of sovereign states and how the context of non-recognition affects their attempts to build effective state-like entities. Ideal for students and scholars of global politics, peace and conflict studies, Unrecognized States offers a much needed and engaging account of the development of unrecognized states in the modern international system.
Broadens the scope and meaning of American Indian political activism by focusing on the movement's early--and largely neglected--struggles, revealing how early activists exploited Cold War tensions in ways that brought national attention to their issues.
Defying the Odds examines the history of theTule River Tribe, a constituency of 1,500 members descended from the Southern Valley Yokuts Indians of California's Great Central Valley. This innovative book presents the first-ever study of a California tribe's political survival and transformation under American rule - from California statehood through the current Indian gaming era. The Tule River Tribe's struggle for sovereignty withstood challenges from political and legal institutions. Tribal members both reasserted and recast their traditions to preserve unity while competing for resources on their commonly owned reservation land base. The authors bring their remarkably rich knowledge of the Tribe's families and of federal Indian law to show how traditional leadership reemerged in the 1930s, under the Indian New Deal, through direct descendants of former chiefs. Vibrant portraits of men and women of the Tule River Tribe create a compelling narrative history, highlighting twentieth-century victories in land claims, government-to-government battles over Indian gaming, and use of Yokuts' traditional consensus - based negotiations over water rights with the Tribe's downstream neighbors. On every page of this groundbreaking book, the Tule River Tribe remains in frame as the protagonist of this exemplary story of indigenous struggle and triumph.
Winner of the Norris and Carol Hundley Award Winner of the U.S.–Russia Relations Book Prize A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable—the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies. Was the division of Europe after World War II inevitable? In this powerful reassessment of the postwar order in Europe, Norman Naimark suggests that Joseph Stalin was far more open to a settlement on the continent than we have thought. Through revealing case studies from Poland and Yugoslavia to Denmark and Albania, Naimark recasts the early Cold War by focusing on Europeans’ fight to determine their future. As nations devastated by war began rebuilding, Soviet intentions loomed large. Stalin’s armies controlled most of the eastern half of the continent, and in France and Italy, communist parties were serious political forces. Yet Naimark reveals a surprisingly flexible Stalin, who initially had no intention of dividing Europe. During a window of opportunity from 1945 to 1948, leaders across the political spectrum, including Juho Kusti Paasikivi of Finland, Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland, and Karl Renner of Austria, pushed back against outside pressures. For some, this meant struggling against Soviet dominance. For others, it meant enlisting the Americans to support their aims. The first frost of Cold War could be felt in the tense patrolling of zones of occupation in Germany, but not until 1948, with the coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade, did the familiar polarization set in. The split did not become irreversible until the formal division of Germany and establishment of NATO in 1949. In illuminating how European leaders deftly managed national interests in the face of dominating powers, Stalin and the Fate of Europe reveals the real potential of an alternative trajectory for the continent.
Has the concept of sovereignty outlived its usefulness? Social order requires a sovereign: an actor with unlimited, undivided, and unaccountable authority. Or so the classic theory says. But without noticing, we’ve gutted the theory. Constitutionalism limits state authority. Federalism divides it. The rule of law holds it accountable. In vivid historical detail—with millions tortured and slaughtered in Europe, a king put on trial for his life, journalists groaning at idiotic complaints about the League of Nations, and much more—Don Herzog charts both the political struggles that forged sovereignty and the ones that undid it. He argues that it’s no longer a helpful guide to our legal and political problems, but a pernicious bit of confusion. It’s time, past time, to retire sovereignty.
In its current state, the global food system is socially and ecologically unsustainable: nearly two billion people are food insecure, and food systems are the number one contributor to climate change. While agro-industrial production is promoted as the solution to these problems, growing global "food sovereignty" movements are challenging this model by demanding local and democratic control over food systems. Translating Food Sovereignty accompanies activists based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States as they mobilize the claim of food sovereignty across local, regional, and global arenas of governance. In contrast to social movements that frame their claims through the language of human rights, food sovereignty activists are one of the first to have articulated themselves in relation to the neoliberal transnational order of networked governance. While this global regulatory framework emerged to deepen market logics, Matthew C. Canfield reveals how activists are leveraging this order to make more expansive social justice claims. This nuanced, deeply engaged ethnography illustrates how food sovereignty activists are cultivating new forms of transnational governance from the ground up.
This powerful narrative traces the social, cultural, and political history of the Cherokee Nation during the forty-year period after its members were forcibly removed from the southern Appalachians and resettled in what is now Oklahoma. In this master work, completed just before his death, William McLoughlin not only explains how the Cherokees rebuilt their lives and society, but also recounts their fight to govern themselves as a separate nation within the borders of the United States. Long regarded by whites as one of the 'civilized' tribes, the Cherokees had their own constitution (modeled after that of the United States), elected officials, and legal system. Once re-settled, they attempted to reestablish these institutions and continued their long struggle for self-government under their own laws--an idea that met with bitter opposition from frontier politicians, settlers, ranchers, and business leaders. After an extremely divisive fight within their own nation during the Civil War, Cherokees faced internal political conflicts as well as the destructive impact of an influx of new settlers and the expansion of the railroad. McLoughlin brings the story up to 1880, when the nation's fight for the right to govern itself ended in defeat at the hands of Congress.