Refreshing and revealing in equal measure, this innovative volume conducts a critical/self--critical exploration of the impact of culture on the ill-fated Oslo peace process.

In How We Missed the Story, Second Edition, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Roy Gutman extends his investigation into why two successive U.S. administrations failed to head off the assaults of 9/11 and to look at the U.S. military intervention that followed. Anyone who thinks Afghanistan doesn't matter, or that Washington can walk away once again, is "missing the story."

When the Israeli prime minister and the PLO chairman shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993, Israeli peace activists had good reason to celebrate this major step on the long road to peace.

This book tells the story of the Israeli peace movement and the role it played in that pursuit of peace. It is an eloquent, fascinating account of a remarkably diverse and determined cast of activists: from war-weary soldiers to hard-headed politicians, careful scholars to impassioned artists.

Drawing on his experience in the peace movement, Bar-On provides intimate portraits of groups like Peace Now, Yesh Gvul, and the Women in Black, he also provides a sweeping historical synthesis of the course of the Israeli-Arab conflict, especially between 1967 and 1993.

As the third book in the series from the Institute’s Muslim World Initiative on pivotal states in the Muslim world, this lucid and timely volume sheds much-needed light on Iran’s strikingly complex political system and foreign policy and its central role in the region.

Iraq, Its Neighbors, and the United States examines how Iraq's evolving political order affects its complex relationships with its neighbors and the United States. The book depicts a region unbalanced, shaped by new and old tensions, struggling with a classic collective action dilemma, and anxious about Iraq's political future, as well as America's role in the region, all of which suggest trouble ahead absent concerted efforts to promote regional cooperation. In the volume's case studies, acclaimed scholars and experts review Iraq's bilateral relationships with Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Arab States, Syria, and Jordan and explore how Iraq's neighbors could advance the country's transition to security and stability.

This volume explores the relationship between religion and politics generally, as well as the global wave of democratization in the late twentieth century, as background to different interpretations of political Islam. It analyzes the role of these movements in Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, the Persian Gulf (especially Saudi Arabia), and the Palestinian community.

For many in the West, political violence in Algeria, the Middle East, and elsewhere has come to symbolize the threat of “Islamic activism.” Terrorist attacks such as the bombing on the World Trade Towers have solidified this view. Western governments, however, must deal with the challenge of extremism in the broader context of their relations with diverse states with contrasting histories, geographies, and peoples.

To assess this challenge, the Institute brought together a distinguished group of policy analysts, practitioners, and scholars for a series of frank discussions. The sessions analyzed the nature of Islamic activism – including moderate political parties and militant extremists – and the options for policymakers to mitigate violence in a range of cases.

The main problem for the United States, participants concluded, is how to confront militant extremism while recognizing the importance of religious identity and the legitimate need in many countries for social and political reform. A foreword by William B. Quandt, Middle East expert and former National Security Council staff member, spells out how policymakers can respond most effectively to the challenge of Islamic activism.

From the opening of the Middle East peace process in Madrid in 1991 to the marathon round of negotiations at Maryland’s Wye Plantation in 1996, the unsuccessful attempt to forge a peace agreement between Israel and Syria spanned five years and many venues.

Helena Cobban here provides a fascinating look at the painstaking negotiations between the two Middle East powers that thrice went to war in the past half-century, and the role that the United States played in trying to bring Israel and Syria closer together on crucial points.

Through interviews with U.S. officials and key players in the Israeli and Syrian delegations, Cobban paints a portrait of small but important breakthroughs—and often frustrating encounters—between the Israelis and the Syrians as they sought to negotiate not just a bilateral peace treaty, but also a broader regional peace. The study concludes with a careful analysis of what went wrong in the final phases of the negotiations and future prospects for resuming the talks.

The complex, often uneasy, relationship between Transjordanians and Palestinians has profoundly influenced not only Jordan but also the entire Middle East peace process. At different times, Jordan's Hashemite royalty has sought to accommodate, embrace, exclude, or cooperate with the Palestinians and the PLO, and the impact of these efforts has been felt throughout the region. Today, Jordan has signed a peace treaty with Israel, and Palestinians account for over half of the Jordanian population--yet the dynamic relationship between the regime and its Transjordanian and Palestinians citizens still arouses powerful sentiments at home and can send shock waves through the West Bank and Israel. Abu-Odeh explores this relationship from its origins in the 1920s to the very latest attempts to cope with competing national identities and to sustain a peace process.

Suicide bombings have become a terrifyingly familiar feature of contemporary warfare and insurgency. But explanations of such attacks are typically either too narrow or too superficial to enable us to understand—and thus combat—this complex and deadly phenomenon.

In this slim but remarkably balanced, informative, and insightful volume, Mohammed Hafez delves beneath the surface as he explores the case of Palestinian suicide bombers during the al-Aqsa intifada that began in 2000. Drawing on extensive research in the West Bank and Israel, Hafez reveals an intricate web of factors that fueled the campaign of suicide attacks. To understand the bombings, he argues, we must examine the interrelation among the motives of the individual “martyrs,” the calculations of the organizations that deployed them, and the attitudes of a victimized society. This approach yields not only a penetrating look at suicide bombers but also policy-relevant lessons for dealing with extreme political violence in places such as Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan.

Highly readable, wonderfully concise, and packed with useful information, Manufacturing Human Bombs offers students an excellent introduction to its subject; for readers already well versed in terrorism and the Middle East, the volume offers a rare combination of rich empirical data, considerable analytical breadth and depth, and refreshing evenhandedness.