This paper examines China’s policy towards human rights internationally with the intent of discerning real support for human rights. It compares China’s responses to two cases of mass human rights violations (the Darfur and Israel-Palestine conflicts) in which it has a serious interest (energy in particular). It finds that China treats human rights self-interestedly, but also has some support for them when its interests are not at stake.

Peter Coleman's (2011) Attractor Landscape Model (ALM) is a promising new framework for analysing and tackling intractable conflicts: conflicts that are highly destructive and highly resistant to conflict resolution. However, this thesis suggests that Coleman's ALM may be based on unreliable assumptions about homogenous group psychology. The aim is to test the reliability of the ALM from this perspective, and to suggest ways to successfully operationalise the ALM. The reliability of the ALM is tested using the case study of professional negotiators in the Israel- Palestine Track-I peace process 2007-2011. 12 interviews are conducted with negotiators from four key actors: the EU, the US, Israel and the Negotiation Support Unit (NSU). The transcripts of these interviews are coded for patterns of 'behaving' and 'thinking', and tested against five hypotheses derived from negotiation theories and the Conceptual Integrative Complexity Scoring Manual (Baker- Brown et al., 1992). It is concluded that the case study of the Israel-Palestine Track-I peace process 2007-2011 generally provides support for the attractor landscape model. However, negotiators from the NSU stood out as a significant exception. This suggests that future studies using the ALM should investigate potentially significant differences in...

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Face2Face is a photographic project realized by JR, an undercover photographer and Marco, a technology consultant, in 2007 in the Middle East context. It consisted of taking the portraits of Israeli and Palestinian people who were doing the same job, printing them in huge formats and putting them on various unavoidable places in Israeli and Palestinian cities. The project was based on the idea that Israeli and Palestinian people were so much similar to each other, as if they were &lsquo / twin brothers raised in different families&rsquo / but that they were not aware of that. Therefore, the artists decided to provide them with images of the other side which would make people be surprised, laugh, stop for a while and think about the other side once again. The artists hoped that such a reworking of the ideas about the other side would hopefully motivate people to enter into dialogue with each other, which would eventually end up in peaceful co-existence. This thesis sets this photographic project as its starting point. It focuses upon its conceptualization of dialogue, which is based on the idea of seeing the other from a new perspective, and compares it with Mikhail Bakhtin&rsquo / s concept of dialogue and Emmanuel Levinas&rsquo / s concept of face-to-face, which are based on the idea of disrupting the self. It then criticizes the project for its neglect of various dimensions which shape Israeli and Palestinian identities, such as diaspora, nostalgia and home and of the heavy burden of the past on these two communities&rsquo / present. As a result, the thesis focuses upon the concept of collective memory at length and then discusses photography at the service of collective memory. Another section is devoted to the analysis of Israeli and Palestinian collective memories. The photographic project Face2Face is discussed all throughout the thesis in terms of its failure to spot the crucial dimensions in Israeli-Palestinian context, no matter how well intended it was.

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