Despite facing profound teaching anxiety stemming from the politically intense surroundings in Israel and his own writer’s block, Oded Löwenheim crafted an innovative college course that breaks free from the traditional classroom setting to explore the depths of Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus campus. He takes his class—and by extension, the reader—to explore the political and historical imprints scattered throughout Mount Scopus, such as the Jerusalem British War Cemetery, the botanical garden of the campus, and the bomb shelter of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute. Drawing from a rich tapestry of disciplines that include political geography, botany, literature, history, and archaeology, this book invites readers to find the international in the everyday. Expedition Escape from the Classroom offers a unique narrative where teaching and its inherent challenges intersect with the intricacies of global politics, history, and identity. While recounting his academic experiment, Löwenheim grapples with the changing landscape of academia in a neoliberal age, while illustrating how personal vulnerabilities can transform into powerful tools for growth, exploration, and enlightenment. Whether you’re an educator, student, or just a curious reader, Expedition Escape from the Classroom promises a journey of reflection, critical thinking, and profound revelations.

Disadvantaged residents in contested cities often mistrust and resist official authorities due to historical deprivation. However, their urgent needs compel them to approach municipal bodies, both formally and informally, exhibiting ‘flexible compliance’. Through interviews with Palestinians and a public opinion survey in Jerusalem, we analysed the preferences of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian residents for public goods provision. Results indicate that Palestinian residents prefer unofficial institutions, but this varies by location. Inner-city and outer-city East Jerusalem residents prefer the municipal government, while those beyond the separation wall favour the community councils. We elucidate flexible compliance and propose municipal tools to address it.

This article examines why foreign actors promote rooftop photovoltaic (PV) projects in cities characterized by ongoing ethno-national conflicts, and why the host government accepts these projects despite viewing them as undermining its sovereignty. It finds that foreign aid providers increasingly view off-grid PV technology as a low-cost solution for helping the embattled minorities of the city strengthen their autonomy and self-sufficiency by disconnecting them from the state-controlled national electricity grid. Local authorities accept these projects because they view them as benign initiatives that can help them address ‘infrastructure vacuums’ in neglected spaces of the city. This allows foreign actors to shape the status quo of the disputed city while avoiding political pushback by the host government. This dynamic is examined in the case of East Jerusalem, where EU and UN bodies invested in rooftop PV projects over the past decade with the stated goal of strengthening the energy autonomy of the city's Palestinian neighborhoods and preserving the option of dividing the city's infrastructure in a future peace agreement. Through government protocols and interviews with foreign aid representatives who promoted the projects, Jerusalem municipal officials who approved them, and Palestinian users who installed them, this article finds that Israeli authorities viewed these projects as a necessary buffer to address ungoverned areas of the city where Palestinians viewed municipal integration projects as an act of occupation. Foreign actors introduced PV solutions to these areas but struggled to overcome technical, bureaucratic, and social hurdles that limited their progress.

This chapter explains why and how changes in the security environment after the Cold War affected the growing trend toward space commercialization in the US. The primary argument is that throughout the Cold War, the US government mainly perceived the dual-use characteristic of space technology as a threat to national security. Thus, it closely monitored technology diffusion, and commercial activity was minimal. In the decade following the end of the Cold War, the decrease in the intensity of global threats led to a reduction of overall government budgets allocated to space activities. It also waived some of the restrictions on technological diffusion. At the same time, space technology matured into a force multiplier for terrestrial military campaigns. The 1991 Operation Desert Storm (First Gulf War) demonstrated to many in the strategic community that space capabilities were highly significant for future warfare. This reasoning supported a new concept of warfare, known as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Dominance in space was one of its pillars, but demanded investments in force buildup. In that context, using the same technologies for both commercial and military/civil applications had the potential for more efficient and low-cost empowerment. Consequently, the US government no longer perceived dual-use space technology only as a considerable threat but also as an opportunity. The US government began to cooperate with commercial players to develop and operate advanced space technologies. This trend led to greater space commercialization.

Scholars and practitioners widely posit that listening to other people facilitates efforts to persuade them. Listening may facilitate persuasion by promoting cognitive processing, reducing defensiveness, and improving perceptions of the persuader. However, empirical tests of this widely-theorized hypothesis are surprisingly scarce. We review the case for and against this hypothesis, arguing previous research has not sufficiently attended to reasons why listening may not facilitate persuasion. We test this hypothesis using a pre-registered, well-powered field experiment in which trained professional canvassers, acting as confederates, had ~10 minute video conversations with U.S. participants (N = 1,485) about unauthorized immigration, a salient topic of political disagreement. We independently randomized whether confederates shared a persuasive narrative about an undocumented immigrant and whether they practiced high-quality non-judgmental listening to participants' opinions. We measured outcomes immediately after the conversation and again five weeks later. Sharing a persuasive narrative meaningfully and durably reduced prejudice and changed policy attitudes. The listening manipulation also successfully improved perceptions of the persuader and increased processing. Surprisingly, however, the listening manipulation did not facilitate persuasion---persuasion was just as effective in the absence of high-quality listening. Listening also had no lasting direct effects. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for persuading across divides.

The study of populism's international links has grown significantly. Yet, there are gaps in conceptualizing potential implications for the international order. Our study contributes to filling this gap by asking: if a ‘populist international order’ (PIO) were to emerge, and populists could envision the world close(r) to their liking, what would this order look like? We pursue answers through a plausibility probe of three deductively-derived normative pillars: 1) cooperation under a PIO is characterized by more fractured, mostly symbolic, small-scale multilateralism; 2) a PIO relies on a narrow, selective embrace of the rule of law, to be respected only when seen as representing the wishes of the ‘real people’; and 3) the commitment to pluralism in ‘international society’ is replaced by an anti-pluralist, monolithic notion of popular sovereignty as the primary behavioural driver. Our analysis is based on contemporary populist leadership from Latin America: Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro and Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador. We examine how these populists have addressed our proposed PIO pillars in different ways and shaped their world-order visions in relation to them. The lessons derived from this study can contribute to bridging gaps regarding the effects of global populism in International Relations, including prospects of mitigating the systemic impact of populism on the international order.

With the global rise to power of populist leaders over the past decade, research on populism, including its international implications, has flourished. However, we still lack a nuanced understanding of the international effects of this new populist wave. The special section that this article introduces seeks to bridge this gap by systematically examining three types of international effects of populism. One group of contributions addresses the impact of populism on the processes of foreign policy-making in countries governed by populists (politics). Another group focuses on effects in terms of foreign policy agenda and its substantive outcomes (policies). A third group of contributions studies the impact of populism on states' stances towards international institutions (international polity). This introduction proposes a theoretical framework that takes into account the existent diversity among populist governments, specifically addressing how the more or less authoritarian character of populism explains variations in international outcomes across politics, policies and polities. A better understanding of these varied characters and effects can contribute new insights to lively debates about the potential challenges posed by populism and populists in the contemporary international order, and the prospects for mitigation.

Within the rich literature on politically divided cities, infrastructure has rarely featured as a medium of urban contestation. Only transportation infrastructure has merited attention of late. This paper presents an in-depth investigation of energy infrastructures as instruments of separation, control and collaboration in three iconic divided cities: Berlin, Jerusalem and Nicosia. The purpose of the paper is threefold: 1) to identify the multiple ways in which geopolitical division and unification have manifested themselves in the cities’ electricity (and gas) supply systems; 2) to analyse the strategic responses of service providers, politicians and users to their divided and united energy systems over time and 3) to use the cases to generate insight into energy infrastructures as conduits of separation, control and collaboration in politically contested cities. The research approach is distinctive for being socio-material (exploring the politics and agency of infrastructures), relational (appreciating the co-shaping of cities and infrastructures) and historical (covering 75 years of shifting responses to division and unification). The findings from this long-term analysis challenge simplistic distinctions between separation, control and collaboration. They point, rather, to the co-existence and even hybridisation of these three strategies at any one time and place, as well as to the limitations facing ideal types, as expressed in our terminology ‘seductive separation’, ‘constrained control’ and ‘conditional collaboration’. The paper emphasises the need to see beyond and within a city to comprehend the contested geographies around energy in divided cities. It also highlights the politicised indeterminacy of infrastructures in volatile urban environments, countering popular images of them as bulwarks of stability.

Building on an independent database of 180,000 UN recommendations and a novel computational method, we present the most comprehensive study of human rights (HR) debates to date. We develop a unique empirical model that measures topical density of discourse. This innovative instrument measures the discursive activity of UN HR bodies through a machine-learning textual analysis of their outputs, offering a dynamic map of evolving trends in human rights, both over time (diachronically) and across different mechanisms (synchronically) within the UN HR ecosystem. Leveraging this comprehensive dataset and sophisticated computational methodologies, we identify which protected groups are central to different mechanisms’ attention and highlight the major human rights issues that have witnessed significant changes in attention. Our research presents significant findings on the density of UN HR discourse and its implications for two major debates in the field of HR law—HR proliferation and the structural critique of UN HR bodies.

Over the past decade, economic trends in global space activity advanced greater commercialization and prompted established spacefaring nations to rapidly adapt their space strategies and programs. This is an underresearched area, especially concerning small states. Following a 2008 industry crisis, Israel’s space program, initially driven by national security concerns in the 1980s, experienced a need to shift toward greater scientific and commercial activities to assure its local space industry is sustainable and competitive. A 2010 national task force recommended that the Israel Space Agency (ISA) implement an initiative to foster a national space ecosystem, using the existing developed assets and by transitioning away from a state-centric model. For a decade, the ISA attempted to do so. The ISA followed the task force’s plan, promoting civilian and commercial activities. However, success has been partial. Financial limitations and a lack of national space prioritization hinder the ISA’s program’s full potential. Thus, the Israeli space ecosystem remains modest, falling short of ambitious economic goals.