‘The Death of the West’: Samuel Huntington,Oriana Fallaci and a New ‘Moral’ Geopolitics of Births and Bodies

This paper argues for the inclusion of biopolitical practices of mobility regulation into study of Israeli control of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). State investment in bifurcated infrastructure, checkpoints, identity documents and a permit system underlines the centrality of closure to occupation. Through closure, Israeli agents of government aim beyond sovereign control of the Israeli-Palestinian border or narrowly conceived security for Israeli subjects. Differentiating, quantifying, documenting and disciplining, closure constitutes biopolitical control of the occupied Palestinian population. Palestinian agents are tasked with minor administrative responsibilities, but only within a framework of Israeli biopolitical control. Our analysis draws on empirical material from fieldwork in the West Bank and three case studies of Palestinian life in East Jerusalem. Findings point towards an Israeli “governmentality” of Palestinian mobility informed by incomplete territorialisation of the West Bank and demographic anxiety.     

Uneven Borders,Coloured (Im)mobilities: ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

The Israeli state apparatus mandates differentiated IDs to Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian non-citizens in East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The bureaucracy of Palestinian ID cards since 1948 has rendered Palestinians more legible for the security interests of Israel while simultaneously discriminating Palestinians from Jews as unequal citizens and non-citizens. The ID card regime, and less so the permit regime, limits Palestinian geographic movement and economic mobility while simultaneously permitting freer Jewish-Israeli flows and mobilities. ID cards demonstrate the power of the Israeli regime to produce distinct people and bind them to specific territories (such as the Palestinians), while allowing others (Jewish-Israelis) to ‘trespass’ over those same boundaries. Through ID cards borders are erected between Jewish and Arab people, not Israeli and Palestinian territory. The ID card regime puts into question the nature and territorial boundaries of ‘Israel’, and the geopolitical existence of the ‘Palestinian Territories.’     

The West Bank Apartheid/Separation Wall: Space,Punishment and the Disruption of Social Continuity

Through the use of survey data from the West Bank, this paper explores the effects of the Apartheid/Separation Wall in the occupied territory of the West Bank on Palestinian society. How has the Wall separated a population from their loved ones, their orchards and crops, homes, and overall livelihood? How have these relationships transformed? Place and space have special meanings in Palestinian experience and consciousness, and yet Palestinians remain vulnerable to punishment through control of access to spaces and places.

The inability to reach one’s home or land has serious ramifications on the psyche of individuals and communities. Not only do physical barriers hinder social interactions, but they also impact society in numerous ways. The effects on Palestinian society are largely invisible and have long-term and far-reaching consequences. These consequences run deeper than the physical barriers that have created them.

Social continuity has repeatedly been disrupted due to the geopolitical transformation of land control and roads network, which favours one group (Israeli Jews) over another (Palestinian Arabs—Christian and Muslim). The policies of separation, through the wall, checkpoints, and the permit regime, have actually separated Palestinians from other Palestinians, and not Palestinians from Israelis.     

The Geopolitics of Neighbourhood: Jerusalem’s Colonial Space Revisited

This article will focus on an ongoing process of Jerusalem’s contested urban space during the last decade namely the immigration of Palestinians, mostly Israeli citizens, to “satellite neighbourhoods”, i.e. Jerusalem’s colonial neighbourhoods that were constructed after 1967. Theoretically, this paper attempts to discuss neighbourhood planning in contested cities within the framework of geopolitics. In more details, we will focus on the relevance of geopolitics to the study of neighbourhood planning, by which we mean not merely a discussion of international relations and conflict or of the roles of military acts and wars in producing space. Rather, geopolitics refers to the emergence of discourses and forces connected with the technologies of control, patterns of internal migrations by individuals and communities, and the flow of cultures and capital.     

With a Wink and a Nod: Settlement Growth Through Construction as Commemoration in the Occupied West Bank

Construction as commemoration refers to the construction of new settlement outposts and the expansion of existing settlements to commemorate the loss of Israeli life in the occupied West Bank. Popular discourse surrounding this commemorative construction maintains that these acts are aimed at “sending a message” to Palestinian terrorists, asserting that Israeli settlers will stand fast in the face of violence. Settlements, however, grow regardless of what Palestinians do or do not do. In this paper, I argue that when viewed through the lens of settler colonial theory, construction as commemoration is revealed to not be aimed at sending a message to Palestinians, but rather at appealing to the hearts and minds of the Israeli public, and at providing cover for the Israeli government to openly support settlement growth regardless of international pressure. In contrast to commemorative acts like monuments and memorials which are aimed at symbolically controlling space, construction as commemoration results in the material, physical control of contested territory. The discursive framing of construction as commemoration maintains the fiction of a conflictual relationship between settlers and the Israeli government, which allows for settlement growth to continue, in the words of one informant, “with a wink and a nod” – with the tacit support of the Israeli government at the same time that it claims to try to rein the settlers in.     

Defining national property rights to a common property resource: The case of the West Bank aquifers

This article introduces a methodology to define Israeli and Palestinian property rights to the three aquifers straddling the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, i.e. the Yarqon-Tanninim, Northern, and Nablus-Jenin aquifers. A set of procedures for determining a fair division of waters is described for the hypothetical planning year 2000. Following this, the calculated allocation of water rights is evaluated in terms of the projected over-all water consumption and supply balance for Israel and a Palestinian sovereign authority (PSA) for the year 2000. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on the relative merits of this methodology.     

Institutions,parental selection,and locus of control

Locus of control, that is, people’s perception of how much influence they have over their lives, is an important predictor for economic outcomes – earnings, health and education, to name a few. This article uses difference-in-differences analysis to investigate the importance of the institutional environment for the development of locus of control, using the fall of the Berlin Wall as exogenous shock to the educational system in East Germany. Using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), we find that women showed less external locus of control following the fall of the Berlin Wall but less clear results for men.     

Domestic Sources of Twenty-first-century Geopolitics: Domestic Politics and Sovereign Wealth Funds in GCC Economies

The present article brings domestic politics into an analysis on sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) that are relevant for the study of contemporary geopolitics. What are the domestic drivers behind SWF creation, and how does a country’s domestic political environment affect the creation of these funds? Using a comparative historical case study on sovereign funds in Gulf Cooperation Countries, this article investigates the effects of domestic state–society structures on decisions about SWF creation and their evolving structure. Thereby, this article adds to an emerging stream of literature that looks at the drivers and implications of SWFs. One of the key findings of this analysis is that there are systematic links between the sovereign fund types and domestic structures; these structures include and exclude socio-economic actors that influence policy-making decisions.     

外部供需冲击视角下的东亚货币合作可行性研究

区域货币合作在维护区域金融稳定、促进区域经济发展方面具有不可替代的作用。欧洲主权债务危机爆发后,人们对东亚能否继续进行货币合作产生了疑问,有必要结合欧债危机产生的新情况、新问题,从新的视角探讨东亚货币合作的可行性。文章从供给与需求两方面的经济结构冲击对称性视角,对东亚10个经济体之间的冲击相关系数、冲击规模与调整速度进行了实证分析,证实了东亚区域不同经济体之间存在着不同的对称性,具有双边和次区域货币合作的经济基础。同时文章提出东亚区域未来货币合作的形式、实现路径和风险防范措施。     

Tribal Identity in Times of Peril

ABSTRACT

Jordan is a country of contrasts. Few people can boast of being a hundred percent rooted within the boundaries of the actual Kingdom. Almost everyone has relatives across several borders. The aim of this article is to explore the extent to which tribalism in Jordan acts as an identity source or the extent to which it is politicized and instrumentalized to protect economic and social benefits. My literature framework is the instrumentalist theory of ethnicity and the border studies literature. The extent to which ethnicity guarantees a return to the people determines people’s adherence to it. Some scholars regard ethnicity as a tool of political mobilization because ethnic groups could be considered also as interest groups. This theory provides an explanation of tribal behavior regarding the role of identity. As an example, I describe how East Bankers have reacted to challenges from the Palestinian population since 1948. In particular, the present-day delicate equilibrium among East Bankers and Palestinians is deeply decisive in regard to the Jordanian response to the regional crisis.     

Sovereignty as a Resource: Performing Securitised Borders in Tajikistan’s Pamirs

This paper scrutinises the translation of sovereignty into daily actions at the border. The Soviet Union established a heavily securitised and sealed border, which was perpetuated in post-Soviet, civil war-stricken Tajikistan by assigning the task to the Russian Federation’s border forces. After having taken over the task of guarding the border, the slowly recovering post-conflict state tried hard to maintain its own border control. Drawing on interviews with borderland people, this article discusses the convergence of Tajikistan’s strong claim but weak support for sovereignty, with the daily life of the borderland people. It will show how – given the Pamirs’ special status as a border district – far-reaching sovereign authority of state agents, aiming to provide security at the border, has been translated into arbitrary actions ensuring individual benefits and has been hidden by intransparency. The article argues that the lack of adequate support from the central government encourages state representatives at the border to reinterpret the sovereign power assigned to them in order to serve their own individual benefits and purposes. Instead of being used to maintain the state territory, the sovereignty’s power is diverted to serve individual interests, in the end serving to destabilize the border, the opposite of the intended purpose.     

Grounds for Peace; Territoriality and Conflict Resolution

Changes toward the de-territorialising of sovereignty and the corresponding emergence of various global institutions, associated with globalisation, can offer new incentives and possibilities for the resolution of seemingly intractable ethno-national conflicts, by rethinking them in a transnational context. Peace processes in Northern Ireland and Israel shared a common vision, associating conflict resolution with global integration, but differed profoundly in their structures, dynamics and outcomes. The Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland was based on a complex power-sharing model between Protestants and Catholics, which would supposedly allow both to express their national identity. On the other hand, the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, despite the vision of the globalised ‘New Middle East’, was based on partition that would lead to the making of two separate states. The dynamics and outcomes of the peace processes in Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland provide for a comparative study of these approaches in the wider context of globalisation and their contribution to the transformation of the conflict and, consequently, its stability.     

Income comparisons and attitudes towards foreigners - Evidence from a natural experiment

We exploit a natural experiment related to the German re-unification to address whether disutility from income comparisons affects attitudes towards foreigners. Our empirical approach rests upon East German individuals with West German relatives and friends. We use the exogenous variation of wealth of West Germans shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall as an instrument to identify the effect of disutility from income comparisons on East Germans’ attitudes. We find robust evidence that East Germans express more negative attitudes towards foreigners, particularly from low-wage countries, if they worry about their economic status compared to better-off West Germans.     

Withstanding financial crises: would trade partners help or hurt?

This article provides new empirical evidence on the losses of real activity caused by various financial shocks. Spillover effects due to foreign trade linkages deserve special attention. To this end, we estimate a modify auto-regressive process and a Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations estimator is used to account for the dependency of one’s country growth on its trade-weighted partners growth. We run estimations on a set of currency collapses, banking crises and sovereign defaults in 49 advanced and developing countries from 1978 to 2011. The trade-weighted foreign demand effect mitigated the economic downturn following a banking or a sovereign debt crisis in all countries, while only the advanced ones benefited from it after a currency collapse. Trade-based spillover effects make banking crises more costly in the developing countries, in those that liberalize their financial account. It contrasts with what is observed during currency or sovereign debt crises.     

Openness and growth: The long shadow of the Berlin Wall

The question whether international openness causes higher domestic growth has been subject to intense discussions in the empirical growth literature. This paper addresses the issue in the context of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We analyze whether the slow convergence in per capita incomes between East and West Germany and the lower international openness of East Germany are linked. We address the endogeneity of openness by adapting the methodology proposed by Frankel and Romer (1999) to a panel framework. We instrument openness with time-invariant exogenous geographic variables and time-varying exogenous policy variables. We also distinguish the impact of different channels of integration. Our paper has three main findings. First, geographic variables have a significant impact on regional openness. Second, controlling for geography, East German states are less integrated into international markets along all dimensions of integration considered. Third, the degree of openness for trade has a positive impact on regional income per capita.     

Institutional changes and breakpoints in Israeli trade

This paper examines the structural changes in Israeli trade trends since the 1970s. Structural change tests do not reject the null of no breaks in Israeli trade trends after Israel signed FTA agreements with the EEC and the USA, or after Israel's 1991 new trade policy. The tests, however, show significant evidence for breakpoints in 1993 in Israel's trade shares with three countries who had adhered strongly to the Arab boycott. This result suggests that the Middle East peace process, which began in 1991, considerably weakened the boycott and brought about positive changes in Israeli long-term trade patterns.     

Do sovereign rating announcements affect emerging market exchange rate correlations? A multivariate DCC-GARCH approach

This article investigates the effects of sovereign credit rating announcements on time-varying exchange rate return correlations for a sample of 11 emerging market countries over the period 2002–2015. The data set covers daily exchange rates and long-term foreign currency sovereign ratings, outlooks and watch list. The pairwise time-varying correlations are derived by corrected Dynamic Conditional Correlation (cDCC) modelling which is a member of multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models family. Furthermore, to capture the global factor effect, a dynamic-weighted index is created by using dynamic principal component (DPC) analysis. Findings suggest that some of the emerging market exchange rate co-movements are affected by rating announcements. Upgrades of Moody’s and downgrades of Fitch lead to spillovers. Main source of these spillovers are sovereign credit rating changes of European countries, especially Czech Republic and Turkey. Countries with high amount of external debt, large current account deficit and speculative grade are more prone to be influenced by announcements on a foreign country’s long-term sovereign rating.     

COALITION GOVERNMENTS AND SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISES

This article examines the domestic politics of sovereign debt crises. I focus on two alternative mechanisms that aggregate the preferences of domestic actors over debt repayment: single-party versus multiparty coalition governments. I uncover a very strong empirical regularity using cross-national data from 48 developing countries between 1971 and 1997. Countries that are governed by a coalition of parties are less likely to reschedule their debts than those under single-party governments. The effect of multiparty coalitions on sovereign defaults is quantitatively large and roughly of the same order of magnitude as liquidity factors such as debt burden and debt service. These results are robust to numerous specifications and samples.     

Inflation targeting credibility and sovereign risk: evidence from Colombia

This article relates to the literature on sovereign risk in developing countries. In particular, we present empirical evidence to address the effect of inflation targeting credibility on sovereign risk based on the Colombian experience. The findings denote that credibility is an important improvement in the institutional framework to reduce the sovereign risk premium.     

Evaluating sovereign risk spillovers on domestic banks during the European debt crisis

Using a Markov-switching model with time-varying probabilities, spillovers from sovereign to domestic bank CDS spreads during the European debt crisis for a set of 14 European countries and 30 European banks are investigated. Our model is able to capture how the increased sovereign risk observed between 2010 and 2013 throughout Europe has impacted i) the probability that banks fall into a crisis regime and ii) the probability that banks stay in the crisis regime. The latter state is characterized by a high volatility and large positive returns of CDS spreads. Different regime-dependent indicators have been computed to assess heterogeneity within the region. The evidence indicates that the intensification of sovereign risk observed during the European debt crisis has positively and significantly driven the regime shifts in volatility of the bank CDS spreads due to increased risk aversion. The results show that the increase in sovereign credit risk seems to have generated second-round effects for some banks that have experienced a deterioration in their funding conditions due to a rise in the domestic sovereign default risk. Overall, our results suggest that sovereign CDS spreads can be considered good forewarning indicators for predicting the evolution of bank CDS spreads. We also find that the effects differ depending on the country and the financial institution. This result suggests that banks are heterogeneously exposed to sovereign credit risk within the same country. One argument relates to the size of these financial institutions and the domestic exposure to sovereign debt.