Conclusions of this case study on Ramallah imply that an effective water management strategy will have a dual intent: incorporate "trickle-up" municipal level water management strategies and integrate conflict reduction measures. This study finds that Ramallah's cooperation with the Palestinian Authority and environmental Non-governmental organizations has a strong influence on water management and water conflict alleviation. Palestinian municipal and regional water management processes, can potentially contribute to effective water management and water conflict reduction between Israelis and Palestinians. The study focuses on Ramallah, a centrally located, mid-sized town in the West Bank. This research uses interviews of Palestinian water managers and researchers, gathered in the West Bank throughout the summer of 1999, as well as secondary sources. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

This research focuses on the Israeli town of Sderot and the rocket attacks it experienced since 2001. Sderot is a unique case study because it represents a group of individuals in a democratic country that lived with terrorism for almost a decade before the state took major defensive action. The situation in Sderot is one which has lacked attention in the media and in Political Science research. By analyzing the level of attention by multiple actors to the crisis in Sderot, the reasons for the perpetual insecurity of its population are discussed. The crisis is analyzed on four main levels: the experience of individuals in Sderot, the response of the Israeli government, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and the role of the United Nations. The preliminary chapter examines the impact of living with rocket fire while exploring methods by which Sderot residents have engaged in activism to improve their quality of life. The following chapter discusses Israeli national defense policy and examines where Sderot has ranked on the State's list of priorities. The third chapter consists of two main sections: an analysis of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, an explanation of Barnas' rise to power in Gaza. The latter section consists of an exploration of the politics surrounding the United Nation's level of attention to the crisis in Sderot. As one transitions from the individual level of analysis to the state level, the voices of Sderot residents become much quieter, and the realities of a state that is constantly attacked from beyond its borders can be understood. By analyzing the past failings of peace negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, lessons for future attempts at negotiations are discussed, and the ever-present link between peace and security is emphasized. Overall, the realities of daily life in a state which pursues a policy of security over diplomacy are illuminated.

This thesis applies securitisation theory to the Israeli-Palestinian case with a particular focus on the potential for desecuritisation processes arising from Israeli-Palestinian cooperation/coexistence efforts in peace education and water management. It aims to apply securitisation theory in general and the under-employed concept of desecuritisation in particular, to explore the limits and prospects as a theoretical framework. Concepts, arguments and assumptions associated with the securitisation theory of the Copenhagen School are considered. In this regard, the thesis makes a contribution to Security Studies through its application of securitisation theory and sheds light on a complex conflict situation. Based on an analytical framework that integrates the concept of desecuritisation with the concepts of peace-building and peace-making, the thesis pays attention to desecuritisation moves involving Israeli and Palestinian civil societies through peace education and water management. The thesis contributes to debates over the problems and prospects of reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, so making a significant empirical and theoretical contribution in the development of the concept of desecuritisation as a framework for analysing conflict resolution. The thesis develops an analytical framework that combines political level peace-making with civil society actors' peace-building efforts. These are seen as potential processes of desecuritisation; indeed, for desecuritisation to occur. The thesis argues that a combination of moves at both the political and societal levels is required. By contrast to securitisation processes which are mainly initiated by political andlor military elites with the moral consent of society (or 'audience' in Copenhagen School terms), processes of desecuritisation, especially in cases of protracted conflicts, go beyond the level of elites to involve society in cultural and structural peace-building programmes. Israeli-Palestinian peace education and water management cases are employed to illustrate this argument.

Recognising water as a central relational location of the asymmetric Israel- Palestinian conflict, this study critically analyses the peacebuilding significance of Israeli, transboundary water and peace practitioner discourses. Anchored in a theoretically-constructed framework of hydropolitical peacebuilding, it discursively analyses the historical, officially-sanctioned, as well as academic and civil society water and peace relations of Israelis and Palestinians. It responds to the question: How are Israeli water and peace practitioners discursively practicing hydropolitical peacebuilding in the Middle East? In doing so, this study has drawn upon a methodology of interpretive practice, combining ethnography, foucauldian discourse analysis and narrative inquiry. This study discursively traces Israel's development into a hydrohegemonic state in the Jordan River Basin, from the late-19th century to 2011. Recognising conflict as a power-laden social system, it makes visible the construction, production and circulation of Israel's power in the basin. It examines key narrative elements invoked by Israel to justify its evolving asymmetric, hydrohegemonic relations. Leveraging the hydropolitical peacebuilding framework, itself constituted of equality, partnership, equity and shared ii sustainability, this study also examines the discursive practices of Israeli transboundary water and peace practitioners in relationship with Palestinians. In so doing, it makes visible their hydrohegemony, hydropolitical peacebuilding, and hydrohegemonic residues. This study's conclusions re-affirm earlier findings, notably that environmental and hydropolitical cooperation neither inherently nor necessarily constitute peacebuilding practice. This work also suggests that hydropolitical peacebuilding may discursively be recognised in water and peace practices that engage, critique, resist, desist from, and practice alternative relational formations to hydrohegemony in asymmetric conflicts.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the longest and most violent conflicts in modern history. The language used to represent this important conflict in the media is frequently commented on by scholars and political commentators (e.g., Ackerman, 2001; Fisk, 2001; Mearsheimer & Walt, 2007). To date, however, few studies in the field of applied linguistics have attempted a thorough investigation of the language used to represent the conflict in influential media outlets using systematic methods of linguistic analysis. The current study aims to partially bridge this gap by combining methods and analytical frameworks from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics (CL) to analyze the discursive representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in American, Arab, and British media, represented by CNN, Al-Jazeera Arabic, and BBC respectively. CDA, which is primarily interested in studying how power and ideology are enacted and resisted in the use of language in social and political contexts, has been frequently criticized mainly for the arbitrary selection of a small number of texts or text fragments to be analyzed. In order to strengthen CDA analysis, Stubbs (1997) suggested that CDA analysts should utilize techniques from CL, which employs computational approaches to perform quantitative and qualitative analysis of actual patterns of use occurring in a large and principled collection of natural texts. In this study, the corpus-based keyword technique is initially used to identify the topics that tend to be emphasized, downplayed, and/or left out in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in three corpora complied from the news websites of Al-Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC. Topics –such as terrorism, occupation, settlements, and the recent Israeli disengagement plan—which were found to be key in the coverage of the conflict—are further studied in context using several other corpus tools, especially the concordancer and the collocation finder. The analysis reveals some of the strategies employed by each news website to control for the positive or negative representations of the different actors involved in the conflict. The corpus findings are interpreted using some informative CDA frameworks, especially Van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square framework.

This thesis analyzes the development of the settlement policies of Israel in the West Bank territory by focusing on the incentives of them with factors of change and continuity before and after the peace process. The Six-Day War of 1967 which initiated a new phase in the region with the Israeli occupation of territories in Jordan, Syria and Egypt became an important milestone in Middle East history. Although some of these territories were returned through bilateral talks, the main territory of the Palestinian people remained under occupation, being subjected to Jewish settlement activities. The settlement activities on the West Bank were expanded by all Israeli governments with different incentives until the peace process. The peace process which began in 1993 aimed to form an independent Palestinian state. Among the vital issues related to the final status talks the moratorium on future building of settlements and the Israeli withdrawal from the settlements were delayed. The Camp David Summit in 2000 was overshadowed by the ongoing activities of settlement. In addition to settlement activities, increasing security arrangements following the emergence of Al-Aqsa Intifada brought about the fragmentation of West Bank territories. This study aims to analyze the results of the settlement activities in the West Bank before and after the peace process in terms of an eroding factor for the mutual confidence between the Israelis and Palestinians. The settlement activities will be examined from the pre-state period of Israel within the framework of its unilateral policies until the end of 2005.

The mobility of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem is usually understood in terms of exclusion, reflecting their lack of access to urban services more broadly as well as the restrictive mobility regime at work across the Palestinian territories. Yet after fifty years of Israeli occupation, a more complex and contradictory situation has emerged in the city. This dissertation uses mobility as a vehicle to arrive at a more integrated understanding of the paradoxical manner in which Palestinian Jerusalemites are simultaneously excluded from and incorporated into the city and to analyse how they negotiate their interstitial and often contradictory position. The thesis approaches the question of Palestinian quotidian movement by engaging with theoretical work on mobility and embodied movement as well as from empirical study including eight months of on-site research. In its three core sections, the work examines in detail several manifestations of the restriction, facilitation, and contested nature of mobility. In the first section, a discussion of Palestinian exclaves and enclaves of the city shows the continuities of mobility’s exclusionary effects on both sides of the Separation Wall. This limitation of movement leads to a restriction of spatio-political possibilities – but at the same time, Palestinians expand the horizon of what is possible through everyday and leisure practices. The second section employs two case studies of recent public transport developments in East Jerusalem to examine how incorporation is operationalised through everyday movements across urban space. The third section analyses the paradoxical role of mobility as the result of a tension between the settler colonial and the neoliberal logics concurrently at work in the city. On the one hand, the restriction of movement gradually renders the Palestinians as external to their city. On the other, the facilitation and regulation of mobility in East Jerusalem also serves to normalise Israeli rule and constitute Palestinians as incorporated urban residents, thereby undermining long-term aspirations for autonomy in the east of the city. The examination of the manner in which mobilities are contested in Jerusalem shows that movement, although often associated with freedom and independence, is essential for negotiating the terms of interdependence in the city.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role of cultural and historical perceptions of parties to a conflict by prism of the protracted conflict model (PC). The theoretical part initially focuses on explication of the protracted conflict concept theory and argues for its presence in the IR theory. Subsequently, the clarification of the national narratives theory as a form of cultural and historical perceptions drawn from nationalism theories is included. Further, the analysis of national narratives in the PC model is conducted and its findings are presented. The last part contains characteristics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a PC and the application of theoretical findings and conclusions in the conflict.

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 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.