Sandra Pogodda

Palestinian unity and everyday state formation: subaltern ‘ungovernmentality’ versus elite interests

With Palestine gaining increasing international recognition for its sovereignty aspirations, this paper investigates the ongoing Palestinian state-formation process. It examines how far grassroots movements, domestic political leaderships and international actors have promoted or undermined intra-Palestinian unity and societal consensus around the rules, design and extent of a future Palestinian state. The paper introduces the novel concept of everyday state formation as a crucial form of grassroots agency in this process. Moreover, it illustrates the internal tensions of contemporary statebuilding: without reconciliation across multiple scales – local to global – the complex interactions of structural, governmental and subaltern power tend to build societal fragility into emerging state structures.

?Assessing the Impact of EU Governmentality in Post-Conflict Countries: Pacification or Reconciliation??

European Union (EU) interventions in conflict countries tend to focus on governance reforms of political and economic frameworks instead of the geopolitical context or the underlying power asymmetries that fuel conflict. They follow a liberal pattern often associated with northern donors and the UN system more generally. The EUs approach diverges from prevalent governance paradigms mainly in its engagement with social, identity and socio-economic exclusion. This article examines the EUs ‘peace-as-governance’ model in Cyprus, Georgia, Palestine and Bosnia and Herzegovina. These cases indicate that a tense and contradictory strategic situation may arise from an insufficient redress of underlying conflict issues.

The great disconnect: Global governance and localised conflict in the cases of India and the EU

Academic scholarship displays a curious disconnect between two trends, connecting peace and governance issues. At the same time when conflicts tended to shift inwards (from inter-state to civil wars), global governance approaches seemed to decentre the management of peace and conflict outwards (from the nation state to international forums). This paper investigates this disjuncture by examining the European Union and Indias governance strategies in different conflict contexts. It studies whether their strategies operate close to the global governance model and/or whether they are able to connect with and effectively support local peace initiatives in conflict-ridden areas.

Middle East and North Africa: Hegemonic Modes of Pacification in Crisis

‘Nowhere’, Henry Kissinger observes, ‘is the challenge of international order more complex — in terms of both organizing regional order and ensuring the compatibility of that order with peace and stability in the rest of the world.’1 In the face of a devastating civil war in Syria, the seizure of significant parts of the Mashriq by Daesh (the self-styled ‘Islamic State’), the collapse of state authority in Libya and Israel’s frequent wars on Gaza, Kissinger’s statement might sound like common sense. Its implicit bias towards external intervention highlights one of the main issues undermining peace in the region, though: the historical subjection of Arab countries to interventions motivated by the geopolitical and strategic interests of external actors. Such interference has created or intensified fault lines within the fabric of Arab societies, ruptured homegrown state-formation processes, shored up authoritarian rulers and forged different types of resistance in the process. This chapter examines the complex interplay of national policies, international interventions and local agency in creating or mitigating challenges to peace in the Middle East and North Africa. It explains conflict in the light of the region’s hegemonic modes of pacification and their current crisis.