Gershon Shafir – författare

The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization argues that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace process will be expedited by increased economic liberalization. Israel has undergone dramatic economic change in the 1990s, shifting from a strongly protectionist, state-centered economy to a more international, ?neoliberal? one. The book maintains that

This volume examines the lessons and legacies of the U.S.-led "Global War on Terror," utilizing the framework of a political "moral panic."A decade after 9/11, it is increasingly difficult to deny that terror has prevailed – not as a specific enemy, but as a way of life. Transport, trade, and communications are repeatedly threatened and disrupted worldwide. While the pace and intensity of terror attacks have abated, many of the temporary security measures and sacrifices of liberty adopted in their immediate aftermath have become more or less permanent. This book examines the social, cultural, and political drivers of the war on terror through the framework of a "political moral panic": the exploration of threats to particular individuals or institutions that come to be viewed as threats to a way of life, social norms and values, civilization, and even morality itself. Drawing upon a wide range of domestic and international case studies, this volume reinforces the need for reason, empathy, and a dogged defence of principle in the face of terror. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, human rights, U.S. foreign policy, American politics, and Security Studies and I.R. in general.

Globalization pushes people "out of place"--across borders, out of traditions, into markets, and away from the rights of national citizenship. But globalization also contributes to the spread of international human rights ideas and institutions. This book analyzes the impact of these contradictory trends, with a focus on vulnerable groups such as migrants, laborers, women, and children. Theoretical essays by Richard Falk, Ronnie Lipschutz, Aihwa Ong, and Saskia Sassen rethink the shifting nature of citizenship. This collection advances the debate on globalization, human rights, and the meaning of citizenship.

Globalization pushes people "out of place"--across borders, out of traditions, into markets, and away from the rights of national citizenship. But globalization also contributes to the spread of international human rights ideas and institutions. This book analyzes the impact of these contradictory trends, with a focus on vulnerable groups such as migrants, laborers, women, and children. Theoretical essays by Richard Falk, Ronnie Lipschutz, Aihwa Ong, and Saskia Sassen rethink the shifting nature of citizenship. This collection advances the debate on globalization, human rights, and the meaning of citizenship.

Human rights is all too often the first casualty of national insecurity. How can democracies cope with the threat of terror while protecting human rights? This timely volume compares the lessons of the United States and Israel with the "best-case scenarios" of the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, and Germany. It demonstrates that threatened democracies have important options, and democratic governance, the rule of law, and international cooperation are crucial foundations for counterterror policy. The contributors include: Howard Adelman, Colm Campbell, Pilar Domingo, Richard Falk, David Forsythe, Wolfgang S. Heinz, Pedro Ibarra, Todd Landman, Salvador Marti, and, Daniel Wehrenfennig.

Gershon Shafir challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise. He argues that it was not the imported Zionist ideas that were responsible for the character of the Israeli state, but the particular conditions of the local conflict between the European "settlers" and the Palestinian Arab population.

Too often, the study of Israel/Palestine has focused on elite actors and major events. "Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel" takes advantage of new sources about everyday life and the texture of changes on the ground to put more than two dozen human faces on the past and present of the region. With contributions from a leading cast of scholars across disciplines, the stories here are drawn from a variety of sources, from stories passed down through generations to family archives, interviews, and published memoirs. As these personal narratives are transformed into social biographies, they explore how the protagonists were embedded in but also empowered by their social and historical contexts. This wide-ranging and accessible volume brings a human dimension to a conflict-ridden history, emphasizing human agency, introducing marginal voices alongside more well-known ones, defying "typical" definitions of Israelis and Palestinians, and, ultimately, redefining how we understand both "struggle" and "survival" in a troubled region.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the world's most polarizing confrontations. Its current phase, Israel's "temporary" occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, turned a half century old in June 2017. In these timely and provocative essays, Gershon Shafir asks three questions-What is the occupation, why has it lasted so long, and how has it transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? His cogent answers illuminate how we got here, what here is, and where we are likely to go. Shafir expertly demonstrates that at its fiftieth year, the occupation is riven with paradoxes, legal inconsistencies, and conflicting interests that weaken the occupiers' hold and leave the occupation itself vulnerable to challenge.

A timely study by two well-known scholars offers a theoretically informed account of the political sociology of Israel. The analysis is set within its historical context as the authors trace Israel's development from Zionist settlement in the 1880s, through the establishment of the state in 1948, to the present day. Against this background the authors speculate on the relationship between identity and citizenship in Israeli society, and consider the differential rights, duties and privileges that are accorded different social strata. In this way they demonstrate that, despite ongoing tensions, the pressure of globalization and economic liberalization has gradually transformed Israel from a frontier society to one more oriented towards peace and private profit. This unexpected conclusion offers some encouragement for the future of this troubled region. However, Israel's position towards the peace process is still subject to a tug-of-war between two conceptions of citizenship: liberal citizenship on the one hand, and a combination of the remnants of republican citizenship associated with the colonial settlement with an ever more religiously defined ethno-nationalist citizenship, on the other.

In this empirical and theoretical study of nationalism, ethnicity, and immigration, the author compares the reception of large numbers of immigrants in Catalonia, the Basque country, Latvia, and Estonia—developed regions that possess distinct cultures and nationalist movements.Recent years have witnessed a swell of intense opposition to immigration in the developed world. In this empirical and theoretical study of nationalism, ethnicity, immigration, and internationalism, Gershon Shafir examines and compares the reception of large numbers of immigrants to four regions at opposite ends of Europe that are relatively overdeveloped but that at the same time possess distinct cultures and nationalist movements of their own: Catalonia and the Basque Provinces in Spain and the Republics of Latvia and Estonia on the Baltic.What makes the comparison of these regions illuminating is the divergence, and reversals, in the policies and attitudes adopted by their nationalist movements during the past century. This study shows that immigrants' attitudes toward integration into their host societies cannot explain the divergence in the nationalists' positions toward them. The imbalance between the immigrants' readiness to integrate into their new societies and the measure of the nationalist opposition indicates that the causes of anti-immigrant hostility are usually found among the hosts. Shafir argues that hostility toward immigrants in developed regions is rooted not in the threat of "denationalization" or economic competition but in the danger they pose to the privileges of traditional and modern political elites, who transform regional nationalist sentiments into anti-immigration movements.

The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization argues that the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace process will be expedited by increased economic liberalization. Israel has undergone dramatic economic change in the 1990s, shifting from a strongly protectionist, state-centered economy to a more international, ?neoliberal? one. The book maintains that these fundamental changes have in turn transformed Israeli society as a whole, resulting in a significant moderation of attitudes toward the Palestinian people and Palestinian nationalism. The New Israel contains contributions from both established Israeli sociologists and promising young scholars. The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization is an insightful commentary on one of the most crucial international issues of our time.

Beyond its emotional resonance and cultural ramifications, citizenship provides the legal and social framework for individual autonomy and political democracy. Recently, the question of citizenship has gained renewed attention in response to major trends worldwide - welfare entitlement cuts, democratization in Eastern Europe, a rise in ethnic and national conflict, and an increase in global migration. In this multidisciplinary volume, scholars from sociology, political theory, philosophy, anthropology, and history offer key analyses of the multiple debates surrounding these changes while interrogating traditional views of citizenship.