The UN and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: American Hegemony and UN Intervention since 1947 by Danilo Di Mauro (review)

Abstract

THE UN AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: AMERICAN HEGEMONY AND UN INTERVENTION SINCE 1947 Danilo Di Mauro. London: Routledge, 2012. xxv + 326 pp.Though the book's title could cover a narrative-based analysis of how the US has consistently orchestrated UN involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Danilo Di Mauro uses its pages to present the results of extended application of statistical techniques to identify patterns underlying the particular votes on resolutions by member states and efforts at mediation and peacekeeping organized under UN auspices. He organizes his analysis with input-process-output model (4) in which the inputs are developments in the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, the process is the way incident in the conflict is defined as presenting a particular kind of issue and then treated according to the rules and practices of UN decision-making, and the outputs are the particular General Assembly or Security Council resolutions adopted plus the UN-sponsored mediation and peacekeeping missions. Figure 1.2 (4) indicates the parts well, but does not capture Di Mauro's view of the UN as affected by the more general political relations among its member states and by its position as institution that is part of international system governance structure in which the US wields the governmental authority (3) but secures legitimacy for its preferences only when supported by a majority of other states.The prose is clunky in places and the presentation not always easy for readers untrained in statistical analysis to understand. Yet Di Mauro's discussions of hypotheses to be explored, data to be analyzed, and analytical approaches chosen lay out his methodological choices clearly and apply high professional standards in justifying their use. Drawing on the common understanding that the UN is both a forum and actor in world politics, UN activity is divided into (adopting resolutions) and op- erative (mediation, peacekeeping operations), and each track is analyzed separately. This separation inspired two primary analytical claims: 1) the current characteristics of the conflict (its intensity, location, and casualty toll) influence the deliberative activities more than the operational, and 2) in either stream developments in the conflict have less impact on the content and direction of UN activity than do relations among UN member states. Readers already familiar with the history of UN involvement will not find any major surprises in the results Di Mauro presents.Analyzing voting patterns with techniques of multidimensional scaling and hieratic clustering does reveal alignments and shifts of alignment that simply reading roll calls would miss. Yet treating the Arab-Israeli conflict as an issue that is able to divide the member states into opposing blocs (7 ) risks isolating it too much from the politics of other issues also being handled in the UN, particularly as the G7 yields to the G20 and triggers a revision of the informal networks of world governance through which the hegemon also operates. …