RESEARCH
- RADICALISM
- DEFENDING DEMOCRACIES
- TERRORISM
- COUNTER-TERRORISM
- OTHER
|
POLITICAL RADICALISM |
|
The field of political radicalism has interested me since my days as an undergraduate student, and I have never stopped exploring it. I have published several books and articles rooted in this primary interest of mine. In my first book Radical Right-Wing Parties in Israel: Emergence and Decline? (Tel-Aviv University – Ramot, 2000 in Hebrew), I contested Angelo Panebianco’s argument that radical right-wing parties cannot institutionalize. I re-conceptualized the term party institutionalization in the context of the radical right and underscored the mechanisms that enable and hinder the institutionalization of such parties. To test my hypotheses, I compared eleven Israeli parties, four that institutionalized and seven that failed to cross the institutionalization threshold. In a 2002 article in Party Politics, I applied the theory to the cases of the Austrian FPÖ and the French FN.
A decade later, I decided that it was time to revisit the topic. In The Triumph of Israel’s Radical Right (Oxford University Press, 2012), I departed from my original interest in political parties. Instead, I adopted the concept of ‘political networks.’ I maintained that despite consecutive electoral failures, the structural and strategic dynamism of the network turned the radical right into a veto player in Israel. Joel Migdal from Washington University wrote about the book: “Settlers, yes, but Ami Pedahzur brilliantly portrays the increasingly powerful radical right in Israel as much more than the settlers in the occupied territories. The Triumph of Israel's Radical Right portrays the evolution of the right from a group preoccupied with preventing the creation of a Palestinian state to an anti-democratic, nativist force that has made deep inroads into defining the character of the Israeli state.” The research for the book yielded several journal articles. The most recent ones appeared in Current History (2014) and Public Administration (2016).
A decade later, I decided that it was time to revisit the topic. In The Triumph of Israel’s Radical Right (Oxford University Press, 2012), I departed from my original interest in political parties. Instead, I adopted the concept of ‘political networks.’ I maintained that despite consecutive electoral failures, the structural and strategic dynamism of the network turned the radical right into a veto player in Israel. Joel Migdal from Washington University wrote about the book: “Settlers, yes, but Ami Pedahzur brilliantly portrays the increasingly powerful radical right in Israel as much more than the settlers in the occupied territories. The Triumph of Israel's Radical Right portrays the evolution of the right from a group preoccupied with preventing the creation of a Palestinian state to an anti-democratic, nativist force that has made deep inroads into defining the character of the Israeli state.” The research for the book yielded several journal articles. The most recent ones appeared in Current History (2014) and Public Administration (2016).
|
Among the four successful parties that I researched in my dissertation was Kach (the Israeli branch of the Jewish Defense League). Most institutionalized parties either endure or undergo a gradual process of decline. Kach’s fate was different. The State of Israel eradicated the party because of its opposition to the democratic system. In 1988, both parliament and the supreme court banned it from taking part in the national elections. Six years later, the cabinet added Kach to the list of terrorist organizations and deemed its activities illegal. The policies of Israel against Kach intrigued me. In my book The Israeli Response to Jewish Extremism and Violence: Defending Democracy (Manchester University Press, 2002), I presented the ‘Defending Democracy Paradox.’ i.e. What are the circumstances that lead democracies to respond to anti-democratic rivals with means that undermine their constitutional and moral foundations? I compared Israel to Germany and the US and developed a typology of ‘defending democracies.’ I also offered a theoretical framework for explaining the circumstances under which regimes lean towards harsher or more lenient modes of response.
After I published the book, Gabriel Sheffer from the Hebrew University asked me to develop the topic further and contribute a subsequent book to a series he edited. In this book, The Israeli Defending Democracy (Carmel, 2004 in Hebrew), I explored my original questions. However, this time I focused on ‘non-liberal’ or ‘procedural democracies.’ Therefore, I compared Israel’s responses to Jewish radicals, who challenged its democratic principles, to the reactions towards radical members of the Arab minority who opposed its Jewish characteristics. The Israeli Ministry of Education includes questions from the book in the nation-wide high school exams in civic studies. |
|
To a great extent, the assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995 paved my career path. Shortly after Rabin’s murder, Hamas made its contribution to the derailment of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The group orchestrated a campaign of suicide bombings in the Israeli heartland. The fact that the most radical elements in both societies shared a common goal and were willing to kill and die for it intrigued me. Thus, while I was researching the Israeli radical right, I also maintained an active research agenda on other groups that committed to attaining their goals using violence. In 2004, when I came to UT as a Harrington Fellow, I completed my book Suicide Terrorism (Polity, 2005). In the book, I developed a theory for explaining the emergence and proliferation of suicide attacks. Although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at the center of the study, I enhanced the geographic breadth of my scholarship by including case studies from Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Russia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Mark Juergensmeyer from UCSB wrote: “This is a comprehensive approach to a difficult phenomenon by someone who knows his subject well. Pedahzur writes with the cool clarity of a seasoned social scientist, but with the sensitivity of one who has lived through suicide attacks and can count former students and colleagues among the victims. Comparing cases of Muslim militants associated with Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, with Sri Lankan Tamil separatists, Kurdish nationalists and Japanese kamikaze fighters, he derives a complex analytic framework with cultural, political and socio-psychological dimensions. This book brings our understanding of this increasingly familiar form of terrorism to a new level of sophistication.” This research for the book sparked my interest in social networks analysis and led me to resume my studies of the Arabic language. It also yielded several articles in journals such as Social Forces (2006), PS Political Science and Politics (2011) and International Studies Quarterly (2016).
In the summer of 2005, after I completed my fellowship, Israel implemented its disengagement plan from Gaza. I spent that summer among the Jewish settlers in the region with my former Ph.D. student, Arie Perliger. Our observations led us to write Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2009; 2011). In the book, that Publishers Weekly awarded a starred review, we portrayed radicalization processes in times of crisis. We adopted a mixed methods approach. We researched primary archival materials and created event, biographical, and networks databases. The approach had proven useful in identifying the complex mechanisms of radicalization in times of peril. It also enabled us to answer the question, what leads some radicalized individuals to escalate to terrorism. Neil J. Smelser from UC Berkeley noted that ‘…Their use of multiple research methods including first-hand observations and interviews is admirable; their insight into the interaction among religious, political, social, and psychological forces is convincing; and their accounts of informal networks and ideological socialization are especially revealing. This book is a model of scholarship on a topic most resistant to dispassionate analysis.’ In 2016, we published a study that built on the foundations of the book in Political Studies. |
At that juncture, my interest in state responses to radicalism and violence reignited. Subsequently, I launched the research for The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle against Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2009; 2011). In the book, I combined insights from theories of military innovations and decision-making. Following Israel’s policies since its formation, I identified the motivations that drive decision makers to stick to aggressive counterterrorism policies despite their questionable and often futile consequences. Publishers Weekly that awarded a starred review to the book noted ‘[Pedahzur's] insights are so well reasoned and relevant that the pages almost turn themselves.’ The work on the book introduced me to the world of special operations forces, which I found fascinating.
At the moment, I am completing a book manuscript that I provisionally entitled The Rise of Special Operations Forces (the manuscript is under contract with Oxford University Press I intend to submit it in December 2016). My original aim was to contribute to the theories of military power by following the rise and proliferation of Special Operations Forces since their debut in the 1940s. When I began the research for the book, I encountered both conceptual and theoretical gaps that fell beyond the intended scope of the book. Hence, I invited a colleague to co-author three article-length manuscripts in which we addressed these issues.
In the first article, we focused on the inconsistent definitions of ‘Special Operations Forces.’ Using a summative approach to content analysis, we aggregated the academic definitions of special operations forces and related terms including commandos, elite forces, and special forces. We used ‘Orange,’ a Python-based package for data mining, to analyze 70 definitions. We looked for similar patterns among the definitions. Unfortunately, the analysis did not yield conclusive results. Thus, we expanded the study and added contextual variables such as the author’s nationality and disciplinary affiliation and the year of publication. The contextual analysis provided more promising results and paved the way for introducing a clearer workable definition.
The second article also deals with a conceptual challenge. We found out that the term ‘Military Innovations’, a focal concept in the security studies literature, suffers from conceptual discrepancies that generated theoretical ambiguities. We showed that scholars see military innovations differently. Some focus on technology, while others emphasize strategy or structure. We used process tracing to follow the introduction of precision-guided munitions to the Israeli land army over a period of forty years. We concluded that technological innovations often lead to both strategic changes and organizational transformations. Thus, to avoid tautology and general vagueness the three dimensions should be separated from each other.
In the third paper, we addressed a theoretical puzzle. At the early phases of the research for the book, I expected to find a correlation between the exponential proliferation of special operations forces at the branch and units levels. A review of the life cycles of individual units raised my doubts. I found out that only a handful of units in each military are responsible for the expansion of the special operations forces branch. The rest demise soon after they form. To address this paradox, we searched both for the attributes of the units that endure and the circumstances that enable them to and gain strength. We gathered data on the universe of special operations forces in Israel from 1948 to 2016 and followed Cox's partial likelihood approach to survival analysis. We concluded that the most significant predictor of organizational survival is the presence of a military entrepreneur who brands the unit, forges alliances within and beyond the army and identifies opportunities for role expansion.
At the moment, I am completing a book manuscript that I provisionally entitled The Rise of Special Operations Forces (the manuscript is under contract with Oxford University Press I intend to submit it in December 2016). My original aim was to contribute to the theories of military power by following the rise and proliferation of Special Operations Forces since their debut in the 1940s. When I began the research for the book, I encountered both conceptual and theoretical gaps that fell beyond the intended scope of the book. Hence, I invited a colleague to co-author three article-length manuscripts in which we addressed these issues.
In the first article, we focused on the inconsistent definitions of ‘Special Operations Forces.’ Using a summative approach to content analysis, we aggregated the academic definitions of special operations forces and related terms including commandos, elite forces, and special forces. We used ‘Orange,’ a Python-based package for data mining, to analyze 70 definitions. We looked for similar patterns among the definitions. Unfortunately, the analysis did not yield conclusive results. Thus, we expanded the study and added contextual variables such as the author’s nationality and disciplinary affiliation and the year of publication. The contextual analysis provided more promising results and paved the way for introducing a clearer workable definition.
The second article also deals with a conceptual challenge. We found out that the term ‘Military Innovations’, a focal concept in the security studies literature, suffers from conceptual discrepancies that generated theoretical ambiguities. We showed that scholars see military innovations differently. Some focus on technology, while others emphasize strategy or structure. We used process tracing to follow the introduction of precision-guided munitions to the Israeli land army over a period of forty years. We concluded that technological innovations often lead to both strategic changes and organizational transformations. Thus, to avoid tautology and general vagueness the three dimensions should be separated from each other.
In the third paper, we addressed a theoretical puzzle. At the early phases of the research for the book, I expected to find a correlation between the exponential proliferation of special operations forces at the branch and units levels. A review of the life cycles of individual units raised my doubts. I found out that only a handful of units in each military are responsible for the expansion of the special operations forces branch. The rest demise soon after they form. To address this paradox, we searched both for the attributes of the units that endure and the circumstances that enable them to and gain strength. We gathered data on the universe of special operations forces in Israel from 1948 to 2016 and followed Cox's partial likelihood approach to survival analysis. We concluded that the most significant predictor of organizational survival is the presence of a military entrepreneur who brands the unit, forges alliances within and beyond the army and identifies opportunities for role expansion.
Besides the work on special operations forces, I am completing several other co-authored articles. The first looks into political socialization in prisons. Previous studies had shown that before turning to political violence, many terrorists served prison sentences for unrelated offenses. In the study, we look into the ties between models of incarceration, the autonomy that inmate groups enjoy, and political radicalization within these groups. In the second project, we address a significant gap in the literature on terrorism. Since 2001, scholars have dedicated time and effort to enhance our understanding of the causes of terrorism and its outcomes. However, they gave little attention to one of the terrorists’ most important tools – the mass media. Going back to Brian Jenkin’s concept “The Theater of Terror,” we analyze the focal roles of both the old and the new media in advancing the goals of the terrorists. Beyond the theoretical contribution, we offer a new approach to countering terrorism by curtailing its media impact.
The book I want to write and have been thinking about for a while is tentatively entitled “The Other Big C: The Decline of Culture in Political Science” In 1963, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba published their seminal book: “Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations.” They paved the way for a group of political scientists who incorporated culture as an independent variable in their comparative studies and made significant contributions to the understanding of similarities and differences among groups, organizations, communities and societies. Gradually, cultural variables have moved to the periphery. The questions that I intend to address in the book are: What led to the marginalization of culture in mainstream comparative politics research? What were the consequences of the decaying interest in the concept? Should we do anything about it? If so, what and how.
The book I want to write and have been thinking about for a while is tentatively entitled “The Other Big C: The Decline of Culture in Political Science” In 1963, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba published their seminal book: “Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations.” They paved the way for a group of political scientists who incorporated culture as an independent variable in their comparative studies and made significant contributions to the understanding of similarities and differences among groups, organizations, communities and societies. Gradually, cultural variables have moved to the periphery. The questions that I intend to address in the book are: What led to the marginalization of culture in mainstream comparative politics research? What were the consequences of the decaying interest in the concept? Should we do anything about it? If so, what and how.
