From the early years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, observers predicted that their de facto annexation might occur. Fifty-seven years later, it has happened. Although governed differently than other zones within the Israeli state, neither territory can be separated from Israel. Yet, the territories’ official status is that they are not part of the state. We offer four reinforcing analyses—legal, historical, discursive, and political—of this sustained discrepancy between what is and what is officially said to be. By analyzing Israel’s juridical techniques for regularizing the incorporation of territories occupied beginning in 1948, we show that de facto annexation has been Israel’s predominant form of territorial expansion. This helps account for the failure to implement de jure annexation, the intensity of conflict over attempts to overhaul the Israeli judiciary, and debates over the future of postwar Gaza.

Institutional frameworks powerfully determine the goals, violence, and trajectories of identitarian movements—including secessionist movements. However, both small-N and large-N researchers disagree on the question of whether “power-sharing” arrangements, instead of repression, are more or less likely to mitigate threats of secessionist mobilizations by disaffected, regionally concentrated minority groups. The PS-I modeling platform was used to create a virtual country “Beita,” containing within it a disaffected, partially controlled, regionally concentrated minority. Drawing on constructivist identity theory to determine behaviors by individual agents in Beita, the most popular theoretical positions on this issue were tested. Data were drawn from batches of hundreds of Beita histories produced under rigorous experimental conditions. The results lend support to sophisticated interpretations of the effects of repression vs. responsive or representative types of power-sharing. Although in the short run repression works to suppress ethnopolitical mobilization, it does not effectively reduce the threat of secession. Power-sharing can be more effective, but it also tends to encourage larger minority identitarian movements.

The 1990s were not kind to area studies. They were particularly cruel to Middle East specialists, and even more particularly, perhaps, to social scientists. The job market has slumped as relevant departments have lost positions. Departures and retirements were only irregularly replaced. Foundation officers and other officials in other grant-making agencies who promote guidelines and programs stressed thematics, policy-relevance, and cross-cultural comparisons. Publishers came to avoid monographic studies and seemed increasingly allergic to single-country studies (of most countries). Rashid Khalidi’s Presidential Address to the 1994 MESA conference is only the best known of a host of warnings, jeremiads, and even eulogies offered with respect to current prospects for Middle East studies.

Arend Lijphart's 1969 article on consociational democracy was a compelling critique of prevailing theories of democratic stability and the launching pad for one of the most widely regarded research programs in contemporary comparative politics. However, Lijphart and others who adopted consociational approaches encountered severe logical, theoretical, and empirical criticisms of their work. The success of the program and its apparent imperviousness to many of these attacks has been remarkable. Lijphart s primary response was to abandon standard norms of social science in favor of an “impressionistic” approach that protected the attractiveness and wide applicability of the theory at the cost of precision and scholarly rigor. The overall trajectory of the consociationalist research program is explained with reference to a shift from early- to late-Lakatosian commitments—from insisting on corroboration for one's theories through repeated encounters with evidence to a late-Lakatosian stance that expects the political and rhetorical skills of scholars operating on behalf of their research program to be more significant than evidence or theoretical coherence.

Propelled by the oil boom of the mid-1970s the Middle East emerged as the world's fastest growing region. Hopes and expectations were high for Arab political consolidation, economic advancement, and cultural efflorescence. With falling oil prices and a devastating war between Iran and Iraq, these hopes had dimmed somewhat by the early 1980s. In 1985, however, the spectacular image of an Arab great power was still tantalizing. A Pan-Arab state, wrote two experts on the region, would include a total area of 13.7 million square kilometers,

Social scientists who use history as a laboratory for theory development use the work of historians to construct background narratives which can then be coded according to theoretically relevant categories. Yet, virtually no attention has been paid to how these historical monographs are to be chosen. On most periods and themes of interest available accounts differ, not only substantively but also with respect to the implicit theories and conceptual frameworks used to establish salience or produce commonsensical explanations. Unself-conscious use of historical monographs thus easily results in selection bias. Social scientists are bound to be more attracted to and convinced by accounts that accord with the expectations about events contained in the concepts they deploy and the theories they seek to test. Consideration of recent developments in historiographical theory supports the argument that responsible techniques for using historical sources are available, but they require understanding the extent to which patterns within historiography, rather than “History,” must be the direct focus of investigation and explanation. Such an approach has the added advantage of helping to generate historically based studies where observations or cases outnumber variables.

The five-year-old Palestinian uprising, the intifada, was the first of many mass mobilizations against nondemocratic rule to appear in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the former Soviet Union between 1987 and 1991. Although the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is seldom included by the media or by social scientists in their treatments of this putative wave of “democratization,” many studies of the uprising are available. Although largely atheoretic in their construction of the intifada and in their explanations for it, the two general questions posed by most of these authors are familiar to students of collective action and revolution. On the one hand, why did it take twenty years for the Palestinians to launch the uprising? On the other hand, how, in light of the individual costs of participation and the negligible impact of any one person's decision to participate, could it have occurred at all? The work under review provides broad support for recent trends in the analysis of revolution and collection action, while illustrating both the opportunities and the constraints associated with using monographic literature as a data base.