Does an ongoing stalemate in a peace process affect the international agenda toward the conflict and international perceptions about policies that should be adopted to resolve it? We provide a tentative answer to this question by drawing insight from analysis of developments and trends in international media attention to key terms and concepts in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during cycles of violence, as well as periods of rapprochement and peace negotiations, in the last two and half decades (1996-2021). We find that although attention to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process have been declining over the years, much of the international discussion continues to be devoted to relaunching a negotiation process leading to a two state solution. The ongoing stalemate in such “process,” we show, provide ample opportunities for alternative approaches to emerge advocating alternative endgames (e.g. one-state), international pressure (e.g. BDS), or unilateral steps (e.g. annexation). Each of this approaches promotes an alternative vision and provides a different path, employs its own terminology and vision of the future. The Israeli-Palestinian case study helps illustrate what may happen to peace when the process is stalled, and how a stalemate can produce change in the international debate on the conflict and push for the emergence of new policy directions and agendas.

Does social cohesion explain variation in violence within divided cities? In line with insights drawn from the ethnic politics, criminology and urban geography literature we suggest that explaining variation in inter-group violence is not possible by relying on motivational elements alone, and attention to social cohesion is required as well. While cohesion can facilitate collective action that aids violent mobilization, it can also strengthen social order that contributes to the group’s capability to control and prevent unrest. We test these relationships using an application of a latent variable model to an integration of crime data, survey results and expert-coded data in order to measure cohesion in East Jerusalem neighborhoods. We then analyze its impact on riots using three original geo-located datasets recording violence in the neighborhoods between the years 2013-2015. Our results reveal that even with controls for economic and political determinants of violence, as well as for spatial clustering and temporal explanations, neighborhood-level social cohesion is a robust explanatory variable - it negatively correlates with riots.

All around the world, urban spaces are disputed over issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Urban citizenship within such spaces has been found to be fragmented, or even ‘dark.’ Intermediary organizations that represent spatially concentrated communities, such as Community Councils (CCs), often operate under these contentious circumstances. This paper focuses on the role of intermediary institutions in the contested city of (East) Jerusalem. We situate this case in the discussion on urban citizenship and highlight the precarity of the concept in a non-democratic context where most people are stateless residents. Building on in-depth interviews and site visits, we suggest that CCs implement a limited form of urban citizenship via a range of functions that vary from service provision to political representation. We explain the multifaceted nature of this limited urban citizenship and the process by which it is created, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. Through this case, we seek to enrich the literature on urban citizenship and CCs in contested cities with an emphasis on the multiple logics that operate in space, including the urban and the national.