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Professor Newman Examines Nationalist Conflicts
Not often are countries as seemingly diverse as South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel analyzed in a single study. However, Professor Saul Newman, Chair of the Department of Government in SPA, is doing just that as he compares nationalist conflicts in these countries during the latter half of the 20th century. He describes all three situations as settler nationalist conflicts. In each case, settlers from another region established states that promoted the economic and political interests of the settler population at the native population’s expense.
Saul Newman
In the 1990s, negotiations were begun to resolve all three decades-long conflicts. Newman, who has spent his academic career studying nationalism and ethnic conflict, seeks to learn why each case became ripe for resolution during the same period. Taking the project a step further, he also strives to determine why each outcome was so different.
Negotiations between settler and native nationalist leaders in South Africa produced a successful transition to democracy in 1994. In Northern Ireland, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to a significant decline in nationalist violence. However, continued political tensions and the electoral successes of anti-agreement parties have limited the ability of all sides to reap the full benefits of the agreement. Attempts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the same time frame failed, and discord intensified when the intifada began in September 2000.
Professor Newman argues that secularization and globalization influenced the groups to negotiate their differences by breaking down old patterns of behavior. While on sabbatical next year he will travel to all three places to look deeper for explanations. In describing his project Newman noted, “I feel very strongly that rigorous use of the comparative method is far more enlightening for teasing out the dynamics of nationalist conflicts than either abstract theorizing or individual case studies.”
