This chapter explores feminist International Relations (IR) theory and its application to the Middle East, demonstrating how gendered power dynamics shape the region's international politics. Feminist IR challenges traditional IR theories by foregrounding gender as a fundamental category of analysis, revealing how hierarchical constructions of masculinity and femininity underpin state behaviour, security policies, and other global processes. The chapter examines key strands of feminist IR, including liberal, critical, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer feminist theories, emphasising their respective contributions to understanding the significance of gender, as well as race and sexuality, in global politics. Through a case study of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, still ongoing at the time of writing despite an announced ceasefire in October 2025, the chapter highlights the gendered dimensions of settler colonialism, militarism, and genocide. It interrogates how gendered and racialised discourses normalise violence and explores the war’s devastating impacts on women, social reproduction, and human security. The chapter critiques the complicity of colonial feminism in perpetuating oppression and underscores Palestinian women’s resistance. The chapter concludes by highlighting the role of feminist IR in offering pathways towards more just and inclusive international relations.

This book, the culmination of research initiated in 2013, offers a comprehensive examination of the persistent failure to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine. It contends that peace must be understood as a strategic necessity rather than a tactical manoeuvre, requiring sustained commitment, institutional trust and mutual restraint. Drawing on historical analysis, interviews and comparative case studies, the book identifies the structural, political and moral factors underlying the collapse of major peace initiatives – from Oslo to Camp David to Annapolis – and proposes an evidence-based framework for future negotiations. It argues that genuine reconciliation demands the renunciation of violence, control of extremist elements, and the cultivation of a shared political language grounded in recognition, empathy and coexistence. By situating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within broader international experiences – such as the Northern Ireland peace process, post-apartheid South Africa and Nordic reconciliation – the study demonstrates that protracted conflicts can be resolved through visionary leadership, ethical governance and equitable compromise. Ultimately, it asserts that peace constitutes both a moral imperative and a strategic prerequisite for the long-term stability, legitimacy and survival of Israel, Palestine and the wider region.

This chapter explores the third major peace junction marked by new leadership in Israel and the Palestinian Authority: Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas later described this as the most serious phase of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The chapter traces the transition following Yasser Arafat’s and Ariel Sharon’s departures, Sharon’s Gaza disengagement and renewed optimism for peace. Olmert and Abbas introduced pragmatic diplomacy that culminated in the 2007 Annapolis Conference, convened by US President George W. Bush. The conference endorsed a ‘Roadmap for Peace’, requiring Palestinians to unify security forces, dismantle terror networks and promote transparent governance, while Israel was expected to halt settlement expansion, dismantle outposts and ease restrictions on movement. The Quartet would monitor compliance, and Arab states were urged to curb support for militancy. Despite American investment and a structured framework, the process faltered. Persistent mistrust, political instability and recurring violence undermined progress, leaving the Roadmap’s vision of a two-state solution unrealised.

This practical chapter outlines a comprehensive proposal for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, grounded in clear premises and a structured methodology. The plan unfolds in stages: Gaza must first be rebuilt to address humanitarian and strategic needs. Israel and the Palestinian Authority should renew cooperation in civilian and economic spheres. Militant factions like Hamas and Islamic Jihad must be marginalised and disarmed. Democratic elections in the West Bank should be limited to parties that recognise Israel and reject violence. A two-state solution is central, followed by consideration of a confederation between Palestine (West Bank) and Jordan. Gaza may join this confederation if its leadership commits to peaceful resolution and the proposed principles.

To date, Ehud Olmert’s proposal remains the most far-reaching offer ever made to the Palestinians by a sitting Israeli prime minister. This chapter examines the circumstances that led to the substantive negotiations between President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert, following the Annapolis Conference and the establishment of a three-tier negotiation framework between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Despite Olmert’s evident commitment to peace and his readiness to offer unprecedented concessions, he failed to secure Abbas’s agreement.

The chapter analyses why this promising moment collapsed: the flawed structure of the talks, deep political divisions within both leaderships, the continuing expansion of settlements, Olmert’s entanglement in corruption scandals that undermined his legitimacy, his decisions to launch two wars, and persistent Palestinian mistrust in Israel’s willingness to deliver a durable peace. It concludes with a critical assessment of negotiation dynamics, extracting practical lessons for future diplomacy – lessons essential for any renewed effort to achieve a just, lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This chapter suggests practical information on the requirements for successful negotiations. Building on extensive research in archives and more than one hundred in-depth interviews with senior decision-makers and negotiators who were involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the chapter outlines the basic qualities that negotiators, mediators and facilitators should have and things they should do, and then the discussion focuses on what negotiators, mediators and facilitators should not do. The arguments are supported by examples from previous peace negotiations between Arabs and Israelis. These experiences shed important light on past events and offer yardsticks for future negotiations. Thus, this is a practical chapter that can be useful for future negotiations.

The present chapter provides a brief history of Byzantine hymnography, especially its Palestinian and Constantinopolitan origins, as well as insights into the ways different hymn genres work in presenting theological thought to the hosts of faithful in the church space. This is exemplified through an examination of hymns dedicated to the raising of Lazarus. Finally, there is a brief excursus to the apocryphal influence in Byzantine hymnography and, more broadly, liturgical arts and literature.

This chapter examines the imbrication of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century discourses on race and class, and thus of the formations of colonialism and capitalism, both within and beyond England as center of global empire and capital.  It performs readings of this imbrication in John Clare’s protestations against land enclosure in Northamptonshire in the Romantic period, and it shows how this nexus in Clare anticipates Palestinian protestations against the dispossession of ancestral land since 1948. In doing so, it juxtaposes resonant moments in connected histories of modernity and modernization that inform the history of global capitalism, which still enacts in many ways the racial antagonisms in Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.

Chapter 17 explores the implication of the failure to establish a proper legal sovereign in the Mandates under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The tension was never resolved between the Mandatory power exercising the attributes of sovereignty and actually possessing it, notably on the all-important issue of maintaining ‘public order’. Repression as interpreted politically through the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) thus shaped Mandatory rule. Three examples show dialogue between the PMC and the Mandatory powers articulated sovereignty as a system of legal practice. The repression of the Bondelswarts rebellion of 1922 and the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925–27 muddled the distinction between Class C and Class A Mandates. The repression of the Arab revolt in Palestine of 1936–38 exemplified legalist tensions within the Mandate system that had been there all along. Neither the PMC nor the Mandatory power (Britain) could either construct sovereignty over a unitary Palestine or partition it. As Europe veered towards war in 1939 and as the League itself started to disintegrate, ‘public order’ in Palestine came to exist for its own sake, disconnected from any resolution of the political stalemate.

The Second World War confronted the League of Red Cross Societies with a set of challenges and opportunities that would allow it to re-cast its position as a humanitarian institution. This chapter focuses on the League’s decisive meeting in Oxford in July 1946, when the Board of Governors set out a bold agenda for the post-war world and sought to establish the institution as the leading voice in the Red Cross movement. The chapter explores how these ambitions played out over the remainder of the decade, as Cold War tensions re-set the international order. The League consciously strengthened its democratic credentials, establishing membership criteria, and reinforcing its normative / ideological foundations through the enunciation of a new set of Red Cross ‘principles’. It likewise built on its wartime experience to mount its first independent relief operation in Palestine in 1948. The years also witnessed a vital shift within the institution, with the once dominant Americans giving way to Scandinavians. This was critical at a time when the Red Cross needed to maintain the confidence of National Societies from the socialist bloc and the emergent Global South.

In the wake of the October 2023 escalation of the Israel–Palestine conflict, NYC-based graffiti bomber Miss17 visualized her solidarity with the Palestinian people by filling her tag name with the colors of the Palestinian flag. In 2024, the largest all-woman graffiti crew in the United States – Few & Far – completed a mural with a feminist take on the “Forbidden Fruit” idea, which gave the grrlz the space to publicly claim their opposition to the genocide of the Palestinian people by painting watermelons – a symbol of Palestinian resistance similar in effect and meaning to the flag. In this chapter, visual arts scholar Dr. Pabón-Colón examines these works, the sociopolitical context in which they were made, and their reception on social media to argue that by performing their feminism in their graffiti these grrlz rejected US imperialism in favor of modeling transnational feminist solidarity.