Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Breaking down the controlling state's refusal to bargain with the nationalist rebels. Israel and the Palestinian territories.

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The project studies the evolving relationship among Palestinian moderates, radicals and Israeli politicians. Based on one year of field work in Israel and the Palestinian territories, the primary objective of the project is to answer the question: what caused the breakdown of a twenty-year consensus in Israel against bargaining with the Palestinians on the 1967 border question? The broader objective of the project is to specify the general conditions under which any struggle, in what the nationalists see as "occupied" territory, successfully breaks down the consensus among rulers in the controlling state against a bargained solution. Field research explores the hypothesis that divided nationalist rebels are more likely to secede and thereby to redefine the boundaries of the state that seeks to contain those rebels. Specifically, only when a split occurs between nationalist moderates and radicals, and the moderates are autonomous from the radicals, is the controlling state's consensus of non-negotiation with the rebels likely to break down. The fear that the balance of power could change in the near future in favor of the radicals gives politicians at the controlling state a crucial incentive to negotiate. The project combines a quantitative analysis, a game theoretic model, and a qualitative comparison. On the quantitative side, the development of coding criteria allows a comparison of the mix of ideological positions of all revolutionary factions. Modeling the interaction between moderates and radicals in controlled territories, and the mainstream politicians from the controlling states, helps to identify the conditions in which bargaining for territorial change is the best strategy for the actors involved. Finally, the comparative method allows the testing of implications derived from the theoretical framework. An analytic narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli case over time also provides crucial lessons for other cases of nationalist rebellion-seeking autonomy from the state.