International Relations
This chapter surveys the most relevant aspects of international relations theory and foreign policy analysis literature to provide a firm conceptual basis on which to peg conceptual insights from the subsequent chapters. Works on riyal politik, economic statecraft, rentier state theory, offensive realism, dependency theory, alliance patterns, and political legitimacy are all included. The chapter also dwells on middle-power and small-state literature as pertaining to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Middle East as a regional system and conceptual developments concerning the study of the region since the Arab uprisings. A list of the key questions directing this study are also included.
The panoply of contemporary US–Arab Gulf relations is covered in this chapter. Across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, a comprehensive picture is built up about the extent to which US policy, including a carte blanche and transactional approach pursued by the Trump administration, and uncertain relations into the Biden administration, has conditioned Saudi and United Arab Emirates (UAE) foreign policy. The main structural issues in US policy towards the Middle East and the GCC states are laid out, including over energy relations, the Global War on Terror; tensions over the JCPOA (and renegotiation) with Iran, congressional disdain over 9/11 (i.e. Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act) and the war in Yemen. These have been joined by some human rights criticism, a question over US security guarantees during the 2019 attacks on Khurais and Abqaiq, over arms exports such as the F-35 to the UAE, over discrepancies between US and UAE Syria policy; and the ebb and flow of personal relations. The 2022 war in Ukraine is shown to be a potential inversion point to Saudi and UAE relations with the US, highlighting the importance to these GCC states and their continued relevance in the global economy.
This forum brings together a diverse group of scholars from political geography, international relations, critical organisation studies, global development, international studies and political sociology to explore the debates and dynamics of celebrity engagement with development and humanitarianism. The contributions here come from a series of roundtables organised in 2021, including one at the 6th World Conference on Humanitarian Studies of the International Humanitarian Studies Association in Paris that discussed the findings and insights of the book Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Gender-based violence (GBV) is a complicated challenge embedded in displaced people’s lived experiences throughout the conflict displacement cycle. Despite the awareness of existing institutionalised help-seeking referral pathways, these do not necessarily translate to the full utilisation of such services. This paper examines the critical role of refugee leaders and service providers in potentially enabling and realising a GBV survivor’s help-seeking. By adapting a meso-level analysis, it attempts to explain how social networks built within conflict and displacement contribute to responding to GBV. Based on the review of collected interviews in 2019 from refugee leaders and service providers working with South Sudanese refugees in selected settlements in Uganda, the paper reflects on the importance of network, norms and trust in effectively responding to GBV in conditions of conflict-affected displacement.
Despite its long history, plague has not been an internationally significant disease since the mid-twentieth century, and it has attracted minimal modern critical attention. Strategies for treating plague are generally outdated and of limited effectiveness. However, plague remains endemic to a few developing nations, most prominently Madagascar. The outbreak of a major plague epidemic across several Madagascan urban areas in 2017 has sparked a wider discourse about the necessity of improving global preparedness for a potential future plague pandemic. Beyond updating treatment modalities, a key aspect of improving preparedness for such a pandemic involves a process of sophisticated review of historical public health responses to plague epidemics. As part of this process, this article outlines and compares public health responses to three separate epidemics from the early modern era onwards: Marseille in 1720–22, San Francisco in 1900–04 and Madagascar in 2017. Based on this process, it identifies three key themes common to successful responses: (1) clear, effective and minimally bureaucratic public health protocols; (2) an emphasis on combating plague denialism by gaining the trust and cooperation of the affected population; and (3) the long-term suppression of plague through the minimisation of contact between humans and infected small mammals.
This roundtable was convened on 5 July 2022 and built on five years of collaborative work in Cambodia and ongoing collaborations within the Centre de Reflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires (CRASH) at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) between Bertrand Taithe, Mickaël le Paih and Fabrice Weissman. The central question raised in this discussion relates to two profoundly intermeshed issues for humanitarian practitioners and organisations: the use of history for humanitarian organisations, and the need for them to preserve and maintain archives.
This article explores some of the challenges, learnings, reflections and opportunities involved in collaborating with grassroots artist collectives in conflict-affected places in academic settings. Using as a case study the collaborative production of the animated short film ‘Colombia’s Broken Peace’, as part of a wider international research project, I reflect on our experiences in co-producing this piece by drawing out lessons that might be relevant for others interested in undertaking similar inter-disciplinary work. In doing so, I aim to re-frame notions of ‘impact’ and ‘capacity building’ in conflict research to a more complex picture of mutual learning and knowledge exchange.
International humanitarian actors, such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and United Nations agencies, often focus on gender norm change when conducting gender analysis among refugees and internally displaced persons. Dominant humanitarian narratives about gender in research reports, assessments and technical guidance reveal an underlying belief that displacement is causative – an external, intervening force. In such analysis, colonial and neoliberal ideologies may influence how refugees’ lives are represented, resulting in depictions of lack of modernity, tradition and culture as overarching (yet ill-defined) forces, and women and girls as vulnerable by default. Such analysis is frequently ahistorical, presented without analysis of the pre-displacement situation. This paper explores and challenges humanitarian narratives about gender norm change during displacement. It is based on feminist ethnographic research in Jordan with Syrian women and men as well as interviews with humanitarian workers. The paper demonstrates that assumptions about lack of empowerment of Syrian women and men may be misguided, identifying both subtle and more overt forms of Syrian women’s and men’s resistance’ to expected norms. It urges humanitarian actors to use ‘resistance’ as an alternative to analysing ‘change’, recognise heterogeneity within populations, resist ‘rapid’ data collection, challenge paternalistic and colonial stereotypes, and reflect complexity in analysis.
The chapter analyzes the third case study: Brendan Duddy, a businessman from Derry, Northern Ireland. Duddy served as an intermediary between the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and the British government at various times between 1973 and 1993. The analysis focuses on three stages in Duddy’s efforts: the backchannel that Duddy established and led during the PIRA truce (1975), Duddy’s mediation initiatives during the first (1980) and the second (1981) Republican prisoners’ hunger strikes, and the revival of Duddy’s channel in 1990–1993 for clandestine negotiations on conditions for direct official negotiations between the British government and the Republican leadership.