Uncertainty about the state of the new global order and the dynamics that govern it permeate academic literature and policy inquiries. In this new world order “picking allies, making friends and containing adversaries […] promises to be an unclear, ambiguous and delicate process.” Using Brazil and Turkey as an example, this paper aims to understand how and why emerging countries choose to “partner up.” The paper focuses on the growing relations between the two countries in the areas of political and economic cooperation between 2008 and 2012. The theoretical proposal of the paper is to test whether realist or more constructivist explanations can account for the approximation of these seemingly unlikely partners. This is done by examining the ideas and interests behind the moves towards stronger bilateral ties between the two states.

People create, consume, and share content online in increasingly complex ways, often including multiple news, entertainment, and social media platforms. This article explores methods for tracing political media content across overlapping communication infrastructures. Using the 2011 Occupy Movement protests and 2013 consumer boycotts as cases, we illustrate methods for creating integrated datasets of political event-related social media content by (1) using fixed URLs to link posts across platforms (URL-based integration) and (2) using semiautomated text clustering to identify similar posts across social networking services (thematic integration). These approaches help to reveal biases in the way that we characterize political communication practices that may occur when we focus on a single platform in isolation.

Violent domestic conflicts spread between countries via spillover effects and the desire to emulate events abroad. Herein, we extend this emulation logic to the potential for the contagion of nonviolent conflicts. The spread of predominantly nonviolent pro-democracy mobilizations across the globe in the mid-to-late 1980s, the wave of protests in former Soviet states during the Color revolutions in the 2000s, and the eruption of nonviolent movements across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring in the early 2010s each suggest that the observation of collective action abroad encourages a desire to emulate among potential challengers to domestic autocrats. However, the need to emulate varies. Potential challengers with a recent history of protest at home are less dependent (than are those without similar experience) upon foreign exemplars to mobilize the participants and generate the resources required to make emulation practicable. By contrast, where the domestic experience of protest is absent, opposition movements are more reliant upon emulation of foreign exemplars. We test the implications of this logic using a series of multivariate logistic regression analyses. Our tests employ data on nonviolent civil resistance mobilizations that occurred across the global population of autocratic states between 1946 and 2006. These tests, along with post-estimation analysis, provide evidence consistent with our conditional logic of emulation.

The 1990s witnessed a growing rapprochement in relations between Turkey and Israel, which in a decade’s time have become strained, reaching an all-time low with the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010. This article aims to analyze the developments in relations between the two countries mainly in the 2000s. The domestic, regional, and international levels are examined, with special attention to the factors that led to the current state of strained relations between the two countries.

Despite the expectations of economic theory, a century of Arab-Jewish economic interaction in Palestine has not led to the convergence that is supposed to result from exchange between a capital-rich economy and a labor-intensive one. After 60 years of failed integration, the Arab population in Israel has fallen to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. With the Palestinian “regional economies” in Israel and the occupied territories operating as part of the same Israeli economic regime, the challenge for Palestinian economic policy makers is to build on the new paradigm in shaping a national development strategy aimed at reconstructing Arab-Jewish economic relations on the principles of balanced cooperation embodied in the Economic Annex of the 1947 UN partition resolution.

This article examines the complex and contested situation of Qadafï’s Libya within a changing international order, from the 1969 revolution as narrated by South African historian and antiapartheid activist Ruth First in Libya: The Elusive Revolution (1974) to its narrative reconstruction by exiled Libyan writer Hisham Matar in the semi-autobiographical novels In the Country of Men (2006) and Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011). Special attention is paid to contextualizing this historiography within the current debates emanating from international law—including international humanitarian and human rights law—regarding the disposition of multilateral forces, regional commitments, and the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) in responding to this latest of Libya’s “elusive revolutions.” Should Libya, that is, have been suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council? Referred by the Security Council to the International Criminal Court for investigation? What are the stakes? And what to make of the eventual historical and precedent-setting outcomes, the global implications—and yes, even the inevitable “unintended consequences”….?

The Palestinian plan to ask the UN for statehood in September has provoked intense anxiety in Jerusalem and Washington. But the move is less provocative than commonly thought. Palestinian leaders are not aiming at short-circuiting the peace process; they are trying to level the playing field in order to promote future negotiations with Israel and the United States.

In March 2013, the nineteen-year-old Tunisian woman Amina Sboui, affiliated with the group Femen, posted two topless pictures of herself on the Internet. She marked her chest with the expression “Fuck your morals” and, in Arabic, “My body belongs to me, and it is not anybody’s honor.” The controversy over Sboui’s semantics of the body inspired a group of women to form Femen Morocco on March 23, 2013. Inspired by the epistemology of the naked body, women started to post topless pictures of themselves on Femen Morocco’s Facebook page. Much earlier, in August 2011, Woman Choufouch, a Moroccan anti–sexual harassment online network, planned to organize a SlutWalk to draw attention to the bodily oppression of women and the sexualization of their presence in public space. The nude marks the visual memory of the revolutionary square, inviting a new power/knowledge configuration and a new politics of remembering along sexualized scripts, rather than moralizing ones. When inserted in the paradoxical spaces of the revolution, disruptive nudes and sexually scripted bodies create an immediate temporality in which women’s bodies and sexuality are not suspended (as usual) but are remembered as part of the entangled sensibilities of the revolution and its visual memory.