The Gaza Strip may be the world’s most relentless conflict zone. After decades of destruction and resistance, it is hard to imagine a different reality. But before the Gaza Strip, there was Gaza—a gateway city within an eponymous region with a much-neglected history. Stripped is an exploration of the Gaza borderland that aims to salvage Gaza’s past from the conceptual and historiographic shackles imposed by the current reality of the Gaza Strip, as well as to render imaginable a horizon for Gaza beyond this reality. The work is the first to methodologically depart from the common understanding of the Gaza Strip as purely a consequence of the 1948 war. Instead, Stripped situates Gaza within a century-long history of the Eastern Mediterranean’s integration into the global market economy, the Ottoman-British quest for imperial sovereignty over the Sinai-Palestine-Hijaz desert corridor, and the Palestinian struggle to overcome the urban and environmental destruction of World War I in the face of British and Zionist colonialism. Relying on little-studied sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew, English, and French, the dissertation explores how the Gaza region adapted to Ottoman agrarian reforms and gravitated into British economic orbit in the Mediterranean. As a result of these processes, Gaza of the late nineteenth century reoriented its economy from land to sea and turned to fully rely on exporting its locally cultivated barley to the British beer-brewing industry overseas. While generating promising growth for some two decades, global demand for grains diversified widely in the early twentieth century, leading to an abrupt collapse of Gaza’s new financial base. Concurrently, the very trade Gaza relied upon sliced this historic borderland into separate zones of imperial domination, turning it into a frontier between the Ottomans and the British. Gaza thus became one of the Middle East’s most devastating battlefronts during the First World War. When Palestine was made a formal political unit under the British Mandate, Gaza was both financially and physically in ruins, forced into a slower, more convoluted historical trajectory than other parts of the country. Ruins and their meanings, therefore, are central to the dissertation’s inquiry, as they turned in the interwar period into a contested ground in the struggle for Gaza’s recovery. Dwelling among the physical debris of their former city, Gazans had to marshal waqf regulations and Ottoman land legislation to restore their urban and agricultural environments against British antiquities preservation and land development schemes. Navigating often contradictory reconstruction initiatives, the people of Gaza toiled to carve themselves a space within the emerging Palestinian national collective as well. However, after a century-long “stripping” of its previous economic, social, and political centrality, Gaza could only remain peripheral to the political upheavals of the Mandate period and finally even remote from the battlefields of the 1948 war. It thus almost naturally emerged as a safe temporary shelter for wartime Palestinian refugees, around which the Israeli and Egyptian armies demarcated the Gaza Strip.

Author analyses three protracted conflicts of the 20th century (Cold War, Israeli-Arab Conflict and Indo-Pakistani Rivalry) in both qualitative and quantitative manner in order to find out an answer for the following research question: "Does a deterrence failure caused by a lack of credibility increase the likelihood of general deterrence failure in the next crisis?"

This diploma thesis titled "Developments of the Foreign Policy of FRG in Relation to the Palestinian Question 1967-1974" aims to bring closer look at the dynamics of development of the foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany in the time when the Palestinian question began to resonate with international community. This empirical study, inspired in its' structure by the Two-Level Game concept by Robert D. Putnam, examines the effects that the Bonn Republic had to deal with in the context of today's unresolved and often polarizing issues and identify factors that were decisive for shaping of the policy. The thesis operates with hypothesis that the pro-Palestinian speech of the representative of West Germany at the United Nations in 1974 was the natural outcome of the transformation that foreign policy has undergone in the years leading to it. After the historical part, which describes the relationship between Germany and the South Levant region until 1945, the second and third chapters deal with the external and internal influences that influenced the FRG in the chosen period. Among the strongest international influences were the US, Israel, Arab states and multilateral actors such as the UN and the European Community. On the national level, in addition to political parties, public opinion,...

This study is a Comparative Foreign Policy (CFP) analysis of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) foreign policy behavior from 1964 through 1981. This study develops and tests a role modification model that accounts for evolutionary changes in foreign policy behavior. One of the major premises of this research is that what often appears as dramatic restructuring in foreign policy is actually the culmination of a series of modifications that transpired over an extended period of time. The model relies on a total of six independent variables as determinants of PLO foreign policy output representing multiple levels of analysis. There are a total of 12 dependent variables expressed as either foreign policy tactical roles or strategic goals. Relying on content analysis of relevant PLO documents, the role modification model demonstrates that the foreign policy output of the PLO experienced a gradual, over time change in both the means and ends of its foreign policy. The model also identifies the conditions under which any one of the independent variables is able to exclusively determine foreign policy output and which roles one can reasonably expect the PLO to exercise under a given circumstance.

This study is an analytical investigation of the usage of the concept “people” and its relation to “class” in the Swedish left-wing antizionist repertoire post-1967. Relying on a critical Marxist understanding of antisemitism and nationalism, the study attempts to understand how and explain how the political left reproduced the antisemitic conspiracist structure of the “powerful Jews” through anti-imperialist nationalism. The study utilizes Freeden’s morphology of ideologies as a method to identify the position of specific political concepts, and what they mean in relation to each other. Likewise, how certain cultural constraints connected to Marxism-Leninism direct a specific political language regarding the communists understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is the author’s assumption that “people” replaced “class” as the main word, by which the political left re-positioned itself from a Marxist understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to an approach characterized as a post-colonial nationalism with class nuances, which contributed to left-wing antisemitism post-1967.

Henry Kissinger is considered to be one of the most influential diplomats of U.S. history. During the decade he spent directing the U.S. foreign affairs from one of the top level positions, he achieved many important successes. His power extended far beyond the normal competence of the secretary of state. His personal skills, which were an important asset in obtaining such an influential position, combined with the complicated internal political situation in the United States. At the time Kissinger entered the Middle East conflict as an important actor, the Nixon Administration fought against charges connected with the Watergate affair and the president consequently had little time and energz to devote to the foreign policy. Henry Kissinger could thus became the creator of American diplomacy and its main representative. The documents about the Yom Kippur War and the U.S. engagement in the region, which were declassified much later and which this thesis make use of, show that the real power of Henry Kissinger was much broader than widely believed.

The main aim of this master thesis is analyze role of UNRWA in the Middle East in 1950- 2010 based on the collected data. The main focus is on the population growth tendencies which are often criticized as the result of the UNRWA politics and which might be prolonging the conflict in the area. Second part of this thesis focuses on the elementary and preparatory education at UNRWA schools. Based on the research done, it was concluded that UNRWA isn't responsible of Palestinian refugee growth as it is the result of population growth in region and the result of foreign events. In question of elementary and preparatory education, the decreasing percentage tendencies in attendance at UNRWA run schools have been observed despite multiplication of the refugee population. This might be a result of failing to accommodate to the needs of Palestinian refugees.

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