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Papers by Asaf Siniver

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 20, 2024

Asaf Siniver provides a systematic and comparative analysis of the role of international arbitrat... more Asaf Siniver provides a systematic and comparative analysis of the role of international arbitration in the settlement of interstate territorial disputes. He engages with International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL) scholarships to locate the unique characteristics of arbitration as a legal method of dispute settlement, distinct from the other legal method of adjudication ('judicial settlement') and diplomatic methods such as negotiation and mediation. A novel framework examines both political and legal dimensions to analyse (i) under what conditions states are more likely to pursue a legal settlement of their territorial dispute via arbitration as opposed to the more popular diplomatic method of mediation, and (ii) what explains compliance with, or defiance of international law in such cases. In so doing, the author sets to reclaim the sui generis nature of arbitration as a unique legal-political method which enables the disputants to maintain the considerable flexibility and autonomy often found in mediation, whilst providing the same final and legally binding solution that adjudication offers. Exploring a wide range of primary sources, including interviews, archival research, and official documents, and employing qualitative research methods, Siniver applies the analytical framework to four contemporary cases of international arbitration: the arbitration over the Rann of Kutch between India and Pakistan (1966-68); the Beagle Channel arbitration between Chile and Argentina (1971-77), the Taba arbitration between Egypt and Israel (1986-88), and the South China Sea arbitration between The Philippines and China (2013-16).

The SHAFR Guide Online, Oct 2, 2017

Journal of Global Security Studies, Jul 16, 2019

More than three decades after the concept of international regimes was introduced, the study of w... more More than three decades after the concept of international regimes was introduced, the study of why and how states may choose to cooperate, particularly around security, remains contested. While the field has evolved considerably over that time, there remain significant puzzles in the literature concerning the emergence of different types of security regimes. We aim to address these issues by developing the concept of a tacit security regime (TSR) literature. We define a TSR as an interest-based, limited, and informal mechanism of cooperation between states for the purpose of deconflicting their respective interests over a specific security issue. We illustrate the usefulness of our concept in the two contemporary cases of Russian-Israeli and Russian-Turkish security cooperation over the Syrian crisis (2015-2018).

Routledge eBooks, Sep 16, 2022

Foreign Policy Analysis

Scholars of international relations have long recognized the importance of soft power in great po... more Scholars of international relations have long recognized the importance of soft power in great powers’ hegemonic designs. In contrast, we know little of middle powers’ employment of noncoercive strategies of attraction and, in particular, how soft power operates in the context of middle-power antagonism. We suggest that, first, soft power enhances coalition-building strategies for middle powers. Contrary to expectations that states join forces against a shared threat, the use of soft power via development aid produces an “Us” versus “Them” distinction in target states that unites them in the absence of a common enemy. Second, middle states’ soft-power strategies are likely to support coalition maintenance so long as it does not challenge target states’ national interests. Utilizing extensive archival and interview-based data, we examine how soft power featured in Egyptian–Israeli competition across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from 1957 to 1974. We demonstrate how soft power operates be...

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 2022

This article addresses a gap in the literature on international mediation by proposing the power ... more This article addresses a gap in the literature on international mediation by proposing the power to blame as an additional source of mediation leverage that had been hitherto largely ignored. The power to blame is framed here as ‘dead cat diplomacy’, a term originally coined by US Secretary of State James Baker to describe his threats to lay a figurative dead cat at the doorstep of a disputant to publicly signal its intransigence and thus force its acquiescence during the Middle East negotiations following the 1991 Gulf War. Drawing on the case studies of Baker and presidents Obama and Trump, the article presents three conditions necessary for the successful leveraging of the power to blame in international mediation: it must be used as a last resort, be perceived as credible by the targeted disputant and take place at a time when the targeted disputant’s bargaining capacity is limited.

Social Science Research Network, Sep 22, 2020

This article draws on interviews with 198 state ambassadors and applies an interpretivist lens to... more This article draws on interviews with 198 state ambassadors and applies an interpretivist lens to provide a more nuanced conceptualization of diplomacy. In doing so, we seek to project a closer fit between scholarly definitions of the term and how diplomacy is understood by practitioners. We contribute to the literature by proposing a more refined understanding of the term, presented here as five distinct (though not mutually exclusive) ‘meanings’ of diplomacy: (1) The actors taking part in modern diplomacy; (2) the objectives of diplomacy; (3) the mechanisms of diplomacy; (4) diplomacy as a skill; and (5) diplomacy as a profession. We find that drawing on the full range of the diplomatic experience is particularly important given the growing challenges to negotiation as the primary agency of diplomacy.

International Negotiation, 2020

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2016

Anti-intellectualism is a discrete social phenomenon which eschews spatial or temporal boundaries... more Anti-intellectualism is a discrete social phenomenon which eschews spatial or temporal boundaries. While it defies a restrictive definition, it is commonly understood as a populist disdain of individuals who speak of certain universal values and engage in the pursuit of knowledge from reason; conversely, an anti-intellectual is a person who is not a 'dealer in ideas' and is not committed to the 'life of the mind'. This article focuses on antiintellectualism as a defining characteristic of the Israeli ethos which predates the establishment of the Jewish state. The article begins with a terminological discussion and a brief historical survey of the prevalence of anti-intellectualism in contemporary societies. It then traces the roots of Israeli anti-intellectualism and examines their manifestations in the case of Abba Eban, Israel's most quintessential diplomat, an orientalist scholar, a Cambridge don, a polyglot and a public intellectual. The article concludes by pointing to the uneasy fit between the political and intellectual spheres in Israeli politics and the challenges posed by the former to the latter.

International Affairs, 2016

The choice by a government of a label for an enemy group has significant consequences. As Robert ... more The choice by a government of a label for an enemy group has significant consequences. As Robert Litwak assessed in his study of the shifting terminology of 'rogue states' in the first year of the George W. Bush administration: 'Words shape and affect policy. The issue is not simply nomenclature; it is the policies that derive from the assumptions and concepts embedded in the term.' Similarly, Croft's study of America's war on terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 suggests that 'words, ideas, language matter to the policy world', and Jackson's analysis of the same period confirms that 'The enactment of any large-scale project of political violence-such as war or counter-terrorism-requires a significant degree of political consensus and consensus is not possible without language ... [words] don't just describe the world, they actually help to make the world.' 1 The most recent example of the importance of language in the shaping of foreign policy concerns the Obama administration's designation of the extremist Sunni group that calls itself 'the Islamic State' as ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), rather than as the Islamic State, ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) or Daesh. However, in contrast to the process described by Croft and Jackson, by which language gives definition to strategy and a political, economic and military approach, this embrace of ISIL can be viewed as an evasion-in strategic, policy and operational terms. By rhetorically detaching ISIL from Syria, where the Islamic State has gained further ground and has established areas of governance, the Obama administration has distanced itself from the imperative of a coherent response to the group in its local setting. Far from encouraging coherence and understanding, 'ISIL' has been a term of dissonance. It is dissonant from the Islamic State's self-definition of its ideology and system, embodied in the declaration of a caliphate in July 2014. It is dissonant from public consideration of the militants, with mainstream media using Islamic State or ISIS or, especially in the Arabic-speaking world, Daesh. And it is dissonant from public conceptions: a Google search reveals that ISIL is a far less popular * Our thanks to Balsam Mustafa, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham, who provided information and comments during the drafting of this article.

Political Studies, 2006

Despite the upsurge in the literature on third party intervention in recent years, particularly t... more Despite the upsurge in the literature on third party intervention in recent years, particularly that relating to mediation, there is still a significant gap in the field. While some theoretical accounts content themselves with describing the qualities of an ideal mediator, other studies borrow examples from a variety of case studies to emphasise the wide range of the mediator's functions or the tactics it can use. What is missing is a systematic, case study-driven analysis that draws on the theoretical literature while generating some fresh propositions about the conditions that are propitious for successful mediation. The article aims to achieve this by proposing three hypotheses about the impact of power, impartiality and timing on the mediation process: (1) The more power (leverage) the mediator has over the disputants, the more likely it is to succeed. (2) The more impartial the mediator is, the more likely it is to succeed. (3) Mediation is more likely to succeed when the c...

Foreign Policy Analysis, 2013

This paper assesses the role that analogical reasoning played in Israel’s decision making during... more This paper assesses the role that analogical reasoning played in Israel’s
decision making during the 2006 Second Lebanon War with Hezbollah.
Two analogies seemed to dominate internal deliberations: the “air power
superiority” analogy which drew on more than a decade of developments
in military theory and the air-based campaigns of the two Gulf wars and
the Balkan wars of the mid-1990s and late 1990s; and the “Lebanese
quagmire” analogy which drew on Israel’s own traumatic experience of
Israel following the its first war in Lebanon in 1982. The misuse of these
analogies by the Israeli political–military leadership during the war produced a myopic approach which advocated an almost total reliance on
air power rather than ground maneuver to win the war and refrained
from using ground forces for fear of entering another bloody and
unpopular war in Lebanon. The constraining power of these analogies
prevented the consideration of alternative courses of action or the effective calculation of cost-benefit analysis during the war. Whereas previous
studies of the war provided various explanations to singular decisions or
episodes, this paper shows that the air power and quagmire analogies
contained the conceptual boundaries of Israeli decision making during
the war and thus best explain its attraction and limitations.

One of the most protracted and intractable disputes of our time, defined along the competing poli... more One of the most protracted and intractable disputes of our time, defined along the competing political, religious, territorial, and national claims of two communities over one land, the modern roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict date back to the nineteenth century, following the first waves of Jewish immigration to the land of Palestine, an area which at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire. There are broadly two competing narratives concerning the historical and religious connections to the land: a Jewish-Zionist-Israeli narrative, and a Palestinian-Arab narrative. Questions over "who was there first," who is the victim and who is the aggressor, and ultimately whose land it is, have been contested ever since by historians, political elites, diasporas, casual observers of the conflict, and of course the communities themselves. The Arab-Israeli conflict consists of a series of enduring rivalries. Firstly, there has been an ongoing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon (and the Arab world more broadly) over Israel's sovereignty and territorial integrity following its independence in May 1948.

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jun 20, 2024

The SHAFR Guide Online, Oct 2, 2017

Journal of Global Security Studies, Jul 16, 2019

Routledge eBooks, Sep 16, 2022

Foreign Policy Analysis

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 2022

Social Science Research Network, Sep 22, 2020

International Negotiation, 2020

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2016

International Affairs, 2016

Political Studies, 2006

Foreign Policy Analysis, 2013

International Politics, 2024

This study aims to bridge the disciplinary gap between IR and international law in the study of c... more This study aims to bridge the disciplinary gap between IR and international law in the study of conflict resolution by highlighting the sui generis nature of arbitration as a hybrid political-legal method of dispute settlement that has been lost over the years due to its overly judicialized application. It reclaims the unique nature of arbitration by demonstrating its capacity to enable state flexibility and autonomy which can be found in mediation, whilst providing a final and legally binding solution, which is commonly associated with adjudication. Utilizing the case study of the Beagle Channel arbitration between Chile and Argentina (1971-77), this study demonstrates that a key reason behind the general misuse and disuse of arbitration is the failure of states to capture its sui generis nature and instead adopt an overly judicialized approach.

Foreign Policy Analysis, 2022

Scholars of international relations have long recognized the importance of soft power in great po... more Scholars of international relations have long recognized the importance of soft power in great powers' hegemonic designs. In contrast, we know little of middle powers' employment of noncoercive strategies of attraction and, in particular, how soft power operates in the context of middlepower antagonism. We suggest that, first, soft power enhances coalitionbuilding strategies for middle powers. Contrary to expectations that states join forces against a shared threat, the use of soft power via development aid produces an "Us" versus "Them" distinction in target states that unites them in the absence of a common enemy. Second, middle states' softpower strategies are likely to support coalition maintenance so long as it does not challenge target states' national interests. Utilizing extensive archival and interview-based data, we examine how soft power featured in Egyptian-Israeli competition across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from 1957 to 1974. We demonstrate how soft power operates beyond the context of great power agenda setting, therefore providing novel evidence for the importance of soft power in the interplay between interstate antagonism and noncoercion in world politics.

The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 2022

This article addresses a gap in the literature on international mediation by proposing the power ... more This article addresses a gap in the literature on international mediation by proposing the power to blame as an additional source of mediation leverage that had been hitherto largely ignored. The power to blame is framed here as 'dead cat diplomacy' , a term originally coined by US Secretary of State James Baker to describe his threats to lay a figurative dead cat at the doorstep of a disputant to publicly signal its intransigence and thus force its acquiescence during the Middle East negotiations following the 1991 Gulf War. Drawing on the case studies of Baker and presidents Obama and Trump, the article presents three conditions necessary for the successful leveraging of the power to blame in international mediation: it must be used as a last resort, be perceived as credible by the targeted disputant and take place at a time when the targeted disputant's bargaining capacity is limited.

International Negotiation, 2021

This article draws on interviews with 198 state ambassadors and applies an interpretiv-ist lens t... more This article draws on interviews with 198 state ambassadors and applies an interpretiv-ist lens to provide a more nuanced conceptualization of diplomacy. In doing so, we seek to project a closer fit between scholarly definitions of the term and how diplomacy is understood by practitioners. We contribute to the literature by proposing a more refined understanding of the term, presented here as five distinct (though not mutually exclusive) 'meanings' of diplomacy: (1) The actors taking part in modern diplomacy; (2) the objectives of diplomacy; (3) the mechanisms of diplomacy; (4) diplomacy as a skill; and (5) diplomacy as a profession. We find that drawing on the full range of the diplomatic experience is particularly important given the growing challenges to negotiation as the primary agency of diplomacy.

Global Affairs, 2020

This article examines President Trump’s foreign policy behaviour as a product of a leadership sty... more This article examines President Trump’s foreign policy behaviour as a product of a leadership style that is entrenched in a plutocratic worldview. We apply elements of Hermann’s leadership traits framework to Trump’s engagement with NATO, and characterize him as a low-conceptual complexity president, enabled by limited search for information and advice, a confrontational and insensitive approach to his environment, and proclivity to violate international norms and rules. We show that Trump’s low-conceptual complexity is underpinned by a plutocratic worldview which is transactional and money-first. We argue that while this signals change between Trump and his predecessors, this plutocratic approach has been one of the most significant sources of consistency within Trump’s administration.

Journal of Global Security Studies, 2019

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

Anti-intellectualism is a discrete social phenomenon which eschews spatial or temporal boundaries... more Anti-intellectualism is a discrete social phenomenon which eschews spatial or temporal boundaries. While it defies a restrictive definition, it is commonly understood as a populist disdain of individuals who speak of certain universal values and engage in the pursuit of knowledge from reason; conversely, an anti-intellectual is a person who is not a ‘dealer in ideas’ and is not committed to the ‘life of the mind’. This article focuses on anti-intellectualism as a defining characteristic of the Israeli ethos which predates the establishment of the Jewish state. The article begins with a terminological discussion and a brief historical survey of the prevalence of anti-intellectualism in contemporary societies. It then traces the roots of Israeli anti-intellectualism and examines their manifestations in the case of Abba Eban, Israel’s most quintessential diplomat, an orientalist scholar, a Cambridge don, a polyglot and a public intellectual. The article concludes by pointing to the uneasy fit between the political and intellectual spheres in Israeli politics and the challenges posed by the former to the latter.

This article suggests that President Obama's consistent references to the extremist Sunni group a... more This article suggests that President Obama's consistent references to the extremist Sunni group as ‘ISIL’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is not a trivial matter of nomenclature. Instead, the Obama administration's deliberate usage of the ISIL acronym (as opposed to other commonly-used terms such as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’ or ‘ISIS’, ‘Islamic State’, ‘IS’, ‘so-called Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’) frames the public perception of the threat to avoid engagement with the requirements of strategy and operations. Both the labelling and the approach could be defended as a response to the unique challenge of a transnational group claiming religious and political legitimacy. However, we suggest that the labelling is an evasion of the necessary response, reflecting instead a lack of coherence in strategy and operations—in particular after the Islamic State's lightning offensive in Iraq and expansion in Syria in mid-2014. This tension between rhetoric, strategy and operations means that ‘ISIL’ does not provide a stable depiction of the Islamic State. While it may draw upon the post-9/11 depiction of ‘terrorism’, the tag leads to dissonance between official and media representations. The administration's depiction of a considered approach leading to victory has been undermined by the abstraction of ‘ISIL’, which in turn produced strategic ambiguity about the prospect of any political, economic or military challenge to the Islamic State.

Review of International Studies

This article is concerned with a particular debate in mediation literature, revolving around the ... more This article is concerned with a particular debate in mediation literature, revolving around the merit and necessity of power as a strategy employed by third parties in their efforts to negotiate a successful resolution to conflict. We argue that by subscribing to a one-dimensional spectrum of pure-to-power mediation, students of mediation have neglected the development of how power is conceptualised and operates within the changing dynamics of conflict and its mediation.
We therefore seek to redefine the concept of power mediation to project a closer fit between conflicting parties' understanding of their situation and the methods, aims and motivations of their mediators. Breaking away from the existing pure-power spectrum, we propose a heuristic framework that includes four distinct types of power mediation, defined here as real, made, critical and structural power. The contribution of our heuristic model is threefold. First, it assists us in asking the most basic question of social science research, ‘of what is this a case’, which in turn ought to lead to a more sophisticated observation of mediation instances. Concurrently, through the frame of ‘power’, it establishes common understanding of observable phenomena that makes the study of mediation more accessible to the wider audience beyond students of our modest literature. Finally, the synthesis of epistemological and ontological inquiry of conflict and power with the established International Relations (IR) approaches of realism(s), constructivism, critical discourse and structuralism, allows respective real, made, critical and structural types of mediation power to be tested.

Oxford University Press, 2024

A novel framework examines both political and legal dimensions to analyse (i) under what conditions states are more likely to pursue a legal settlement of their territorial dispute via arbitration as opposed to the more popular diplomatic method of mediation, and (ii) what explains compliance with, or defiance of international law in such cases. In so doing, the author sets to reclaim the sui generis nature of arbitration as a unique legal-political method which enables the disputants to maintain the considerable flexibility and autonomy often found in mediation, whilst providing the same final and legally binding solution that adjudication offers.

Exploring a wide range of primary sources, including interviews, archival research, and official documents, and employing qualitative research methods, Siniver applies the analytical framework to four contemporary cases of international arbitration: the arbitration over the Rann of Kutch between India and Pakistan (1966-68); the Beagle Channel arbitration between Chile and Argentina (1971-77), the Taba arbitration between Egypt and Israel (1986-88), and the South China Sea arbitration between The Philippines and China (2013-16).

Oxford University Press, 2024