Helena Cobban's articles

Articles

To access all my CSM contributions since early 2001, click here.

To access my essays in Boston Review since 2001, click here . They cover various Middle East issues, plus post-genocide issues in Rwanda.

To access many of my longer articles, including in footnoted form, look for links down the sidebar of my Just World News blog.

I did two stories for Salon.com based on my Feb-March 2006 reporting trip to Israel and Palestine. This one is about the under-reported role that Hamas's women's networks played in bringing them their victory in the Palestinian legislative elections in January. This one is about the political fallout in both Israel and Palestine from that victory . It contains material from interviews I conducted with Hamas Chief Whip Mahmoud Ramahi and the pro-Likud, former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold. To read either of those pieces, if you're not a Salon.com subscriber, you'll need to sit through a small piece of advertising before they let you in to the full text.

The March-April 2006 issue of Foreign Policy, has a piece I wrote that challenges much of the current "liberal orthodoxy" regarding war-crimes trials. That is a late-proof version of the article... Ignore the Latin and the blank spaces for the mag's ads. (The May-June issue included a lively exchange of correspondence related to the article.)

Back in January 2006 Boston Review put up on their website my contribution to a big "Forum" they had on Exiting from Iraq . Fellow contributors there include Sen. Joseph Biden , Sen. Russell Feingold, Barbara Bodine, Juan Cole, Randall Forsberg, and Nir Rosen...

In April 2005, the Boston Review published a long piece I wrote about Lebanon's Hizbullah. You can access it or any of my other BR pieces--on Rwanda or the Middle East-- if you click here .

What follow are links to some recent article-length works that I have been able to get up onto the web at this point, grouped thematically. I am still adding to this collection, as I 'mine' some of my writings of recent years. Do please contact me if you have any queries, suggestions, or requests for other materials.

'Violence and its legacies' project (VAIL project):

Since late 2000, I've been doing a lot of research on ways societies have sought to deal with legacies of grave political violence. Some of my CSM columns have dealt with aspects of this subject (see the links to all the columns below ). But I have now also created a special section of this site for the VAIL project-- see the button for it to the left.

Some Mideast articles:

(See also my Mideast-related columns in the CSM , by clicking here .)

Dead end: Is there a future for secular Palestinian nationalism? This piece ran in the April-May 2004 issue of Boston Review . It's a report of a trip I made to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in February 2004.
Waiting for war in Damascus: This piece ran in the February-March 2003 edition of Boston Review . It is a reflection on the short trip I made to Syria at the beginning of December, which also looks at the Syrian government's arrest of journalist Ibrahim Hamidi, and more generally at the effects this American-led war effort in the Middle East can be expected to have on democratziation in the region. As such, it is part of an excellent Special Issue the BR put together on the issue of "War and Democracy", which also contains great contributions from historian of Japan John Dower and strategic-affairs ethicist Neta Crawford.
'Fenced In': This piece ran in the Summer 2002 issue of Boston Review . It starts off with an account of a meeting I participated in, along with some other 'international' scholars, with Yasser Arafat, in late May. The rest of the piece uses material I gathered while I was traveling in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Syria as a member of something called the International Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine Conflict (QWP) , in June. The major thing the QWP has produced to date is an 'Epistle to Friends'-- a very Quakerly way of communicating things. You can read the text of the Epistle by clicking here . (Non-Quakers are welcome to read it!) In the coming months, the QWP will be producing a longer report and possibly coordinating other activities, too.

On Binationalism: In the December 2001/January 2002 issue of Boston Review, I had a short essay published as part of a broader forum on the topic of whether a binational (Jewish/Arab) state in the whole of Israel/Palestine would be a better goal for the Palestinians than their presently stated goal of the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. You can see that article by clicking here .
Golan articles: These articles are a little older-- but I'm glad to get their English texts up on the web. In the first half of 1998, I was doing the research on the post-Madrid Israeli-Syrian negotiations which resulted in my book, The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks: 1991-96 and Beyond (USIP press, 2000). Along the way I spun off a series of five feature articles on the demographic dimensions of the Golan issue, which were published at the time in Arabic, but are now available here in English.

Ethics of overseas intervention:

In October 2001, I gave two public presentations at the University of Virginia, on different aspects of the ethics of current U.S. actions toward Afghanistan:

On Oct. 9, I gave a presentation titled "Having an effect on vulnerable others" , as part of an evening panel discussion co-sponsored by the Middle East Studies Program and the Institute for Practical Ethics. This presentation explored the proposition that strong nations considering interventions in very-low-income countries should consider adopting a 'Hippocratic-oath' approach to such actions, and some aspects of the 'punishment' issues underlying the intervention.
On Oct. 19th, I co-led a discussion on ethical dilemmas in the whole question of humanitarianism and intervention.

Christian Science Monitor columns and contributions on global affairs, since April 2001:

Please note that these are copyrighted texts. Copyright resides with the CSM for 90 days after the original date of publication, then reverts to me. If you would like permission to reproduce columns published within the past 90 days, you need to contact the CSM . To get reproduction rights on columns 'older' than that, please contact me . Here are the columns and contributions:

Articles

'Violence and its legacies' project (VAIL project):

Some Mideast articles:

Ethics of overseas intervention:

Christian Science Monitor columns and contributions on global affairs, since April 2001:

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