Anthropology and global counterinsurgency

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Elmer Berger

"At the outset of the 1949 armistice negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, acting UN mediator Ralph Bunche expressed his hope that the talks would "chart the road to a peace for Palestine," an outcome apparently as elusive today as when he spoke those words more than forty years ago." "Perhaps the most significant aspect of this meticulously documented analysis of those negotiations is its relevance for today's headlines. Relating the proposals and counterproposals, the conspiracies and power plays to present-day Israeli and Middle East policies, Elmer Berger suggests that the basic negotiating strategies of the main players have persisted almost unchanged into the present, a "near rigidity" that has defeated all efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East's central conflict." "Berger is a controversial rabbi, an avowed anti-Zionist who proves himself capable of examining highly flammable issues and events with objectivity, insight, and rigorous scholarship. Drawing upon newly released material from official Israeli and U.S. archives, Berger manages to paint both the large picture and the telling detail - the frustrations of the conscientious and highly respected Bunche, the pathetically unprepared Arab negotiators, the well-informed Israeli diplomats, the intrigue of the Israel-Transjordan alliance." "The work will serve serious observers of the prolonged conflict over Palestine as a guide to applicable international law and to the attitudes and negotiating policies of the countries involved."--BOOK JACKET.

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Denis Wright

<">Against a background of intrigue and manipulation on both sides, the author charts the experiences and impact of those who helped to define the relationship between Britain and Iran from the end of the 18th century to the early 20th century. We meet the diplomats, soldiers, spies, traders, travellers, missionaries, engineers and doctors who all in their often colourful, different ways contributed to Anglo-Iranian understanding and misunderstanding. The text illuminates a little-known corner of British imperial and diplomatic history.<">--Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Alex von Tunzelmann

The Caribbean crises of the Cold War are presented in this story of clashing ideologies, the rise of the politics of fear, the machinations of superpowers, and the brazen daring of the mavericks who took them on. During the period of Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, the United States and the Soviet Union acted out the world's tensions on three important island nations, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Meanwhile, the leaders of these nations--the charismatic Fidel Castro and his mysterious brother Raúl; the ideologue Che Guevara; the capricious psychopath Rafael Trujillo; and François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, a buttoned-down doctor with interests in Vodou, embezzlement and torture--had ambitions of their own. The superpowers thought they could use Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic as puppets, but what neither bargained on was that their puppets would come to life. Historian Alex von Tunzelmann's narrative follows these five rivals and accomplices from the beginning of the Cold War to its end.--From publisher description.

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Frederick R. Dickinson

"In the first full-length study of Japan in the Great War, Dickinson highlights the profound impact of the 1914 to 1919 years on Japan. Although the Japanese escaped the physical destruction experienced by their European counterparts, evidence of the bankruptcy of the old order spawned political turmoil in Tokyo that would, as in Europe, ultimately invite another war. The disintegration of modern Japan's foremost national model, Imperial Germany, aggravated a tumultuous Japanese domestic debate over national identity that generated a renewed drive for national power in the 1930s." "By linking the current fascination with cultural "invention" among social and cultural historians with the traditional focus of diplomatic history on international affairs, Dickinson offers an alternative explanation for Japan's modern wars. Japanese continental aims in the twentieth century become here less a reactive exercise in national defense than an active campaign to "reinvent" the state and Japanese society."--BOOK JACKET.