Recent Publications
- Recent Publications
Afghanistan
This series of essays diligently fills in the gaps in understanding Afghanistan today and reshapes the incomplete image of the country that limited Western media and military efforts have displayed to the world. Globalizing Afghanistan provides a cultural, historical, and regional context for globalization-related issues such as the opium trade, womens' rights, and media. This book is academically oriented but strives to prove how academic study can improve the way the United States operates abroad. (DS)
Arab-Israeli Conflict
Based on his deep personal connection with the city, Amirav's book explores the deadlock over Jerusalem in historical and sociological terms. Exploring the failure of Israeli efforts to unify Jerusalem as the undisputed capital of the Jewish state, this work explores why the issue of the city's sovereignty has scuttled numerous attempts at negotiation and reconciliation. Seeking scholarly objectivity at the heart of a profoundly emotional issue, Amirav draws on his experiences as a political negotiator and advisor to search for realistic optimism despite the ongoing conflict. His final question — if Jerusalem can be transformed from a bitterly contested prize to a center of reconciliation — is radical in its rejection of ideology in the quest for peace. (SL)
In this 430-page tome, Eisenberg and Caplan examine the historical background and framework of the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli peace processes since the Camp David negotiations in the late 1970s. The authors propose the idea that "there exists a historical pattern for failed Arab-Israeli negotiations which contemporary diplomats must break if they are genuinely to advance the peace process." They treat successive rounds of Arab-Israeli negotiations since Camp David as case studies and apply their "useful and orderly way" to think about Arab-Israeli negotiations to each round. Intended to provide a framework for diplomats to apply and students to learn, the book is an ambitious effort to understand and codify "the still unfinished business of Arab-Israeli peacemaking." (WT)
These editors have compiled a book that seeks to showcase the Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict — the Goldstone Report — by reprinting its central findings along with a discussion of its ongoing impact. The Goldstone Report, released in September 2009, spawned debates, rebuttals, defenses, editorials, resolutions, and protests, both for and against. The editors publish the central findings of the report to focus on the story the Mission tells of the Gaza War — the historical context, the breakdown of the 2008 ceasefire, and the December 2008-January 2009 conflict itself. Peppered with oral testimonies the Mission collected while conducting its investigation, the report is followed by 11 essays which deal with the findings of the report and the controversy surrounding it. (WT)
Egypt
Mittermaier explores the dream landscape in contemporary Cairo. Examining the different ways in which Egyptians experience and interpret dreams, Mittermaier introduces the reader to Muslim dream interpreters who draw on Freud, reformists who dismiss dream interpretation as superstition, a Sufi devotional group that keeps a diary of dreams, and ordinary believers who experience encounters with the Prophet Muhammad, offering a fascinating perspective of the Islamic Revival and the teeming city itself. (EB)
Iran
The contested search for Iranian identity lies at the heart of this study of political actors, ideas, and developments. An examination of the dialectic amongst Iranian, Islamic, and Western cultures in Iranian political discourse...
