Rejecting conventional explanations for Syrian foreign policy, which emphasize the personalities and attitudes of leaders, cultural factors peculiar to Arab societies, or the machinations of the great powers, Fred H. Lawson describes key shifts in Damascus's response to regional adversaries in terms of changes in the intensity of political struggles at home. Periodic eruptions of domestic conflict have inspired Syria's ruling coalition to adopt a wide range of programs designed to buy off domestic rivals and perpetuate the predominance of individual coalition members. These programs have undermined the unity of the Ba'thi regime, increasing the chances that opponents will overturn the established order. Challenges to the Ba'thi regime become most threatening whenever crises of accumulation shake the domestic political economy, Lawson contends. Opposition forces gain strength when the state cannot sustain new investment or when competition increases between public and private enterprises. Political and economic trends inside Syria have determined why Damascus has since 1963 alternately escalated tensions with regional rivals and adopted more accommodating postures. Lawson traces this dynamic through five major episodes: the 1967 war with Israel; limited intervention in Jordan in 1970; the widening conflict in Lebanon in 1976; the defusing of conflict with Iraq in 1982; and the rapprochement with Turkey over Kurdish separatism in 1994. These patterns, Lawson suggests, may be characteristic of nations changing from one domestic economic system to a radically different one, as Syria has in the transition from state socialism to a privatized political economy.
Including a wealth of vivid detail and ranging over theology, poetry, painting, heraldry, fashion, and daily life, this book elucidates the attitudes toward color in medieval times and the effect these attitudes still have on modern society.
This timely study examines the forces at play in one of the world's most explosive nations, helping readers understand why Syria's popular uprising has been the most violent and hard-fought in the Middle East. In this insightful work, a noted expert goes behind the headlines to examine the complexities of Syrian politics and their impact on the modern world. Beginning with an overview of political and economic change after 1963 when the Ba'th Party came to power, the book focuses on developments in Syria since Bashar al-Assad assumed the presidency in 2000. It probes the evolution of the Islamist opposition and the course of the popular uprising that broke out in 2011 and explores Syria's multilayered relations with Israel, Turkey, Iran, Russia, and the United States. Readers will learn why rebellion in Syria has taken a much different path than movements that overturned autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. They will also come away with a more nuanced understanding of the pivotal role Syria plays in both the Arab-Israeli conflict and inter-Arab relations, as well as the confluence of domestic challenges and foreign threats that make Syria the most vulnerable state in the contemporary Middle East.
This book explores the emergence of an anarchic states-system in the twentieth-century Arab world. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalist movements first considered establishing a unified regional arrangement to take the empire's place and present a common front to outside powers. But over time different Arab leaderships abandoned this project and instead adopted policies characteristic of self-interested, territorially limited states. In his explanation of this phenomenon, the author shifts attention away from older debates about the origins and development of Arab nationalism and analyzes instead how different nationalist leaderships changed the ways that they carried on diplomatic and strategic relations. He situates this shift in the context of influential sociological theories of state formation, while showing how labor movements and other forms of popular mobilization shaped the origins of the regional states-system.
First published in 1989. Bahrain is at the same time unique among the Arab oil-producing Gulf states and indicative of future developments in these emirates. Its uniqueness lies in the social, political, and economic structures of the country: The indigenous population is characterized by a peculiar set of overlapping cleavages; the country's industrial work force has a history of militant action and a degree of political consciousness unmatched in neighbouring states; and the islands' economy has achieved a level of diversification into non-petroleum-related activities that is the envy of planners in the surrounding area. This study provides an overview of current trends on the islands and of the social and historical context from which they have emerged. It is intended as an introduction to Bahraini affairs for the general reader and thus makes use of the existing literature wherever possible.
Setting the Standard chronicles the emergence and implications of an ambitious experiment in civil-society-led global governance: the Forest Stewardship Council. Drawing on a pioneering case study of this negotiation process, this book explores the challenges associated with implementing the FSC's global vision on the ground. Indeed, the establishment of an FSC standard for British Columbia was achieved only after difficult and protracted negotiations at the regional, national, and global levels. This important work also undertakes a detailed comparative analysis of FSC standards and standard-setting processes elsewhere and grapples with the broader implications for global governance and regulatory theory.
Based on a study of fourteen families in which a child had contracted paralytic poliomyelitis. Passage Through Crisis: Polio Victims and Their Families, first published in 1963, was widely praised for its penetrating--and, for its time, innovative--analyses of doctor-patient communications, and for its interpreta-tion of the meaning of physical disability in American society. In his new opening essay, Davis reflects on the enduring sources of this profound problem in human relations as well as on those changes in the culture of American health care that are helping to restructure doctor-patient relations along more open, less authoritarian lines. The emergence of patient self-help groups, the political militancy of the Gay community in regard to AIDS, and the fading of the early post-World War II naive faith in the humanitarian efficacy of science are some of the developments dealt with. A parallel discussion of the importation into medical sociology of such concepts as the reality-structuring power of professional discourse and of the meta-phoric significance of different diseases for different historical eras seeks to relate developments in the culture of health care to sociology's study. Passage Through Crisis retains for today's readers that essential quality that most engaged readers of a quarter century ago: its vivid and probing ethno-graphic account of the impact of serious illness on the family, the difficult processes of adjustment that ensue and, in these connections, the role played (and toll exacted) by American values.
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