YEZID SAYIGH, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Pp. 96. £70.00 cloth.

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 194-196
Author(s):  
Ann M. Lesch

Yezid Sayigh's encylopedic history focuses on the role that the idea of armed struggle played in the Palestinian national movement as it evolved over the past half-century. His central thesis is that “armed struggle provided the political impulse and organisational dynamic in the evolution of Palestinian national identity and in the formation of parastatal institutions and a bureaucratic elite, the nucleus of government” (p. vii). The concept of armed struggle reforged Palestinian national identity, mobilized Palestinians, provided political legitimization to the Palestinian movement, made the Palestinians a distinct political actor in relation to the Arab states, helped to create institutions that could form the basis of a government, and established a well-defined political elite. Thus, even though Palestinian leaders never transformed the armed struggle into a people's war along the lines of Algeria or Vietnam, and never liberated any part of Palestine by force, armed struggle served other important, statist functions.

Theater ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Tom Sellar

In this article, Tom Sellar, the editor of Theater for sixteen years, reflects on the five-decade legacy of the magazine. Sellar’s personal retrospective looks both backward and forward, from Theater’s polemical beginnings in the late 1960s and his own encounters with the magazine as a student in the 1980s to the political exigencies of the present day and the demands this moment makes on the future of theater and criticism. As Sellar writes, Theater’s early radical spirit has not left the magazine’s mission: “Part muse, part archive, part mirror, Theater has held tightly to … its permanent stance that the theater can provide a vessel for transformation, bringing altered consciousness and maybe a better society.” Tracing this history, Sellar illuminates how Theater, as a journal and a reflection of its object of inquiry, has responded to the evolving idea of a public — a sphere that has narrowed and expanded, fractured and recombined over the past half century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvin J. Dubnick

For the past half-century, those defining the field of Public Administration in their role as its leading “theorists” have been preoccupied with defending the enterprise against the evils of value-neutral logical positivism. This polemical review of that period focuses on the Simon-Waldo debate that ultimately leads the field to adopt a “professional” identity rather than seek disciplinary status among the social sciences. A survey of recent works by the field’s intellectual leaders and “gatekeepers” demonstrates that the anti-positivist obsession continues, oblivious to significant developments in the social sciences. The paper ends with a call for Public Administrationists to engage in the political and paradigmatic upheavals required to shift the field toward a disciplinary stance.


2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-43
Author(s):  
Josh Sides

California—simultaneously celebrated and reviled for its fabled sexual tolerance for the past half-century—has pioneered the use of sexual propositions, ballot initiatives designed to either expand the scope of “obscenity” censorship or to suppress the rights and aspirations of homosexuals. Viewed through the prism of the sexual propositions, the political landscape of California looks quite different than we generally imagine. This article examines the history of these propositions, their financial backers, and the politicians involved with them, including E. Richard Barnes’s Proposition 16, John Briggs’s Proposition 6 (The Briggs Initiative), and William J. “Pete” Knight’s Proposition 22.


1993 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-167
Author(s):  
Myron Gochnauer

In the past half century most legal philosophy has been limited to a fairly narrow range of traditional topics such as adjudication, legal reasoning, interpretation, legal persons, obligation and authority, the possibility of legal knowledge, the relationship of law to power, morality, economics and class struggle, and positivism vs. natural law. For those of us comfortable in the tradition, the range of questions appeared to outline an intellectually and politically adequate domain. The basic problems fell neatly into the major philosophical departments of epistemology, logic, value theory and, in some cases, metaphysics, and allowed participation by everyone along the political spectrum from the radical Marxist left through the liberal center to the fascist right.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 760-775
Author(s):  
Robert Edgar

AbstractThe recent racial reckoning has challenged scholars to recover Black voices that have been erased from historical accounts. This essay is my reflections on the challenges I faced in conducting research on African voices in politically and racially charged settings in Lesotho and South Africa over the past half century. After the political atmosphere began changing in South Africa in 1990, I served the individuals and communities I write about by rectifying historical injustices such as returning a holy relic to a religious group, the Israelites, and facilitating the return of remains of Nontetha Nkwenkwe from a pauper’s grave in Pretoria to her home.


1927 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Deborah Ellis

Political science is at the parting of the ways. Its foundations have been undermined by the claims of law and jurisprudence, into whose hands it has been deliberately surrendering itself for the past half-century or more, and now its chief strongholds are under fire from the neighboring fields of sociology, economics, and ethics. So severe and so persistent have these attacks become that the time has arrived when the political scientist must decide whether he will allow his subject to be absorbed in any one or all of these various fields, or will attempt to reëstablish it as a distinctive discipline.The reasons for this state of things are not difficult to discover. They quite obviously lie in the fact that in the pursuit of their basic problem—the search, namely, for the nature and source of sovereignty—political philosophers have so generally followed two equally futile and fruitless paths: either the path of pure speculation leading to a supernatural or metaphysical theory, or the path of legal analysis, leading ultimately to the juristic theory of the state. Indeed, during these recent years political theory has been so increasingly “under bondage to the lawyers” that it is little wonder that a reaction has come, and that thinkers in their determination to find the reality behind the formal juristic conception, are now repudiating not only the legal, but even the political, character of the state.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Andrew Henry Jakubowicz

The author reflects on engaged sociology over the past half-century, exploring the political contradictions, and social and political change. The essay expresses thoughts on his retirement, and the importance of collaboration.


Author(s):  
Áine Sheil

Opera has a history of just over four hundred years and a markedly finite canon in comparison with spoken theatre. The repertory has expanded very little in the past half-century, and this means that renewal is largely achieved through direction and design. In continental European theatres, and in Germany in particular, operas constantly acquire new layers of meaning in production, and are often staged as political statements. In Ireland, this type of ‘director’s theatre’ is rare. Irish companies seldom see opera as a vehicle for clear ideological statements, and productions often shy away from the political potential of opera texts. Drawing on theatre, opera and performance theory by Keir Elam, David J. Levin and Jon McKenzie among others, this article takes four recent Irish opera productions as case studies and argues that even apparently apolitical opera is inevitably shaped by politics.


1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yezid Sayigh

Armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine has been a rallying cry of the Palestinian national movement since its emergence in the 1960s, but its results have never been more than marginal. Instead, military groups have served a primarily political function, offering Palestinians in the diaspora organizational structures for political expression and state building. However, the nature of the PLO as an exile entity attempting to unite a disparate diaspora has necessarily resulted in an authoritarian leadership wary of the administrative, civilian, and social organizations needed to form a state. Ultimately, the political patterns that developed during the armed struggle impede as much as aid the realization of an independent Palestinian state.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


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