Ian LustickUniversity of Pennsylvania | UP · Department of Political Science
Ian Lustick
Doctor of Philosophy
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185
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Introduction
My new book is out, PARADIGM LOST: FROM TWO-STATE SOLUTION TO ONE-STATE REALITY
For information, chapter summaries, reviews, interviews, and additional sources go to www.paradigmlostbook.com
Publications
Publications (185)
World Politics - Volume 50, Number 1, October 1997
Arend Lijphart's 1969 article on consociational democracy was a compelling critique of prevailing theories of democratic stability and the launching pad for one of the most widely regarded research programs in contemporary comparative politics. However, Lijphart and others who adopted consociational approaches encountered severe logical, theoretica...
In this paper we consider the uses political scientists have made of agent-based modeling (ABM) and the challenges associated with designing research at differing levels of complexity. We propose a typology of ABM research designs—investigating abstractions, testing theories comprised of ensembles of simple variables, or implementing virtualization...
This paper examines the consociational approach to the study of deeply divided societies and notes its weaknesses. It argues that the absence of a well-developed alternative “control” approach to the explanation of stability in deeply divided societies has resulted in the empirical overextension of consociational models. Control models, focusing on...
Social science in general and political science in particular have been resistant to the mobilization of evolutionary and specifically Darwinian ideas for analytic and explanatory purposes. This paper documents a disconnect between political scientists and standard evolutionary theory. Historical institutionalism is identified as a subfield particu...
From the early years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, observers predicted that their de facto annexation might occur. Fifty-seven years later, it has happened. Although governed differently than other zones within the Israeli state, neither territory can be separated from Israel. Yet, the territories’ official status is that...
Two books on civil-military relations in Israel, published eighteen years apart, focus on Israel's future as a Jewish democracy. Peri's 2006 volume depicts the security establishment as a threat to civilian rule, whereas Ziv, in his 2024 book, portrays waning political influence of the Israeli military and security services as associated with democ...
Settler-colonial projects often produce states that eventually turn against the purposes of those who created them. We see this in the American and Boer revolts against the British and the sabotage by British settlers in Ireland and French settlers in Algeria of efforts to integrate the native populations of those territories into the British and F...
Political scientists distinguish between governments and regimes. A government is comprised of incumbents holding positions of authority specified within an institutionalized “regime,” that is, a legal order. Within a well-institutionalized regime, politics consists of legal struggles over what governments and government officials do. But when the...
The challenges of a career focused heavily on Israeli and Palestinian politics.
This chapter looks into a gestalt shift in Israel. It highlights the stark discrepancy between the perception of West Bank and Gaza Arabs and their actual living status. A gestalt shift is expected to trigger the actual perception of the area instead of the continued justification of the work on behalf of a negotiated two state solution (TSS). Scie...
Jerome Slater’s book impressively counters Abba Eban’s profoundly false meme that the Arabs “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” In Israeli parlance, Slater contends that hahefech hu hanachon (“the opposite is the case”). Though exploiting only English-language secondary sources, he uses the rich scholarly literature on the Arab-Is...
This book argues that a one state reality already predominates in the territories controlled by the state of Israel. The book shows that starting with the one state reality rather than hoping for a two state solution reshapes how we regard the conflict, what we consider acceptable and unacceptable solutions, and how we discuss difficult normative q...
Decades of massive Israeli settlement of the West Bank reflect a fundamental transformation of Israel from a state with a social democratic ethos to one dominated by a militantly nationalist political culture. Consequently, the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem has become unattainable. De facto Israeli rule of the entire country...
Israel and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) have been in conflict within one another for nearly two decades. In this article we compare trajectories of Palestinian-led BDS mobilization and Israeli-led counter-mobilization by deploying two theoretical perspectives, a rationalist, strategic learning model and a political competit...
The one-state reality has dramatically changed the discursive landscape of the movement of Israeli settlers and their supporters who have waged a half century campaign to prevent territorial compromise as a basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Analysis of the discourse of the Sovereignty movement, as reflected in the pages of its journal, Ribonut ,...
In geopolitics, even rough probabilistic forecasts are difficult to make. Scenario design, table-top simulations and structured discussions are heuristic activities that focus the attention of analysts and increase policymaker satisfaction with intelligence products, but their usefulness is not based on confidence that forecasts are accurate. Traum...
A 2020 APSA panel that discussed (and reprinted in ISR 2021) Ian S. Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Intelligence analysis has traditionally relied on inside‐view, case‐specific modes of thinking: why did this actor—say, the USSR—do that and what might it do next? After 9/11, however, analysts faced a vastly wider range of threats that necessitated outside‐view, statistical modes of reasoning: how likely are threats to emerge from actors of divers...
Remembering the origins of the Association for Israel Studies, First Annual Conference
Book Review of Kimmerling "Zionism and Economy" 1984
Detailed Book Review of Gabriel Sheffer's biography of Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate
More than 50 years of American diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli "peace process" have revealed it to be a carousel of constant activity with no forward movement. Despite chronic failure and embarrassment, it continues in great measure because of the cumulative effects of the influence of the Israel lobby in the United States, through cycles of opportun...
In this paper institutions are treated as stabilized sets of expectations, an approach that encourages investigation of how cultural formations, political regimes, global financial arrangements, and other institutions can be both reliable and yet also subject to sudden and sometimes catastrophic transformations. We examine conditions that make poli...
Once upon a time, the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a solution, a pretty picture of the future that good-hearted and moderate people could imagine as providing enough justice and satisfaction to both sides as to be achievable by bargaining in good faith and with support from the international community. It remains a pre...
Why have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? In his new book Ian Lustick brings fifty years as an analyst of the Arab-Israeli dispute to bear on this question. He offers a radical and provocative explanation of why continued attempts to divide the land will have...
There is nothing like being in the field to teach the comparative political scientist about politics. No matter how well equipped one might be by instructors, the "literature," prior theorizing, or a rich conceptual repertoire, a genuine encounter with politics plunges the researcher into a tsunami of potential observations that can be as mysteriou...
Ariel Handel, Marco Allegra, and Erez Maggor, eds., Normalizing Occupation: The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 244 pp. Hardback, $90.00. Paperback, $35.00.
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University...
Can Israel succeed in normalizing its relations with other states of the region without facilitating self-determination for Palestinians?
The collective memory of the Holocaust among Israeli Jews has featured competition among four related but distinct constructions: Zionist Proof-text; Wasting Asset; Object Lesson for safeguarding human rights; and Template for Jewish life. This paper will analyze this competition and the implications of the apparent victory of the Template. While t...
This volume presents new perspectives on Israeli society, Palestinian society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on historical foundations, it examines how Israel institutionalizes ethnic privileging among its nationally diverse citizens. Arab, Israeli, and American contributors discusses the paradoxes of democratic claims in ethnic state...
Social science-based efforts to achieve success forecasting events of interest, including domestic political crises in foreign countries, have advanced considerably in recent years, though controversy exists over claims of success, the validity of methods, and the credibility of codings. One issue that challenges every big data effort is the verifi...
Zionist claims to rightful rule of most or all of Palestine/the Land of Israel ultimately depend on naturalizing those claims into common sense, for Jews, of course, but also for the international community. Following the 1967 war, Israelis in favor of withdrawing from occupied territories have relied on distinguishing between the justice of the 19...
HillelFrisch, Israel's Security and Its Arab Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Pp. 228. $90.00 cloth, $72.00 e-book.
- Volume 45 Issue 3 - Ian S. Lustick
Seven years ago, heightened anxieties in Israel about an Arab threat to Israel’s
Jewish majority triggered an influential campaign to change perceptions of who
is winning the demographic battle. Proposals to annex 60% or more of the West
Bank are based in part on its success in persuading many Israelis and others of
the nonexistence of 1 to 1.5...
Party Competition: An Agent-Based Model. By MichaelLaver and ErnestSergenti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 292p. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. - Volume 10 Issue 4 - Ian S. Lustick
The purpose of the present volume is to demonstrate that a rigorous conceptual framework can enable constructivist insights to be deployed for the solution of a variety of theoretical and empirical problems. This chapter offers a use case in which the framework set forth by the editors, if not the exact details of its entire vocabulary, is employed...
Validation and Verification are legally required evaluations that the Defense Department must make of any system, model, or simulation it deploys. With extensive experience and detailed protocols for verifying and validating natural science based systems, DoD now faces the problem of how to conduct such evaluations for the social science based syst...
2 Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Trapped in the War on Terror (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
We will report and discuss results of an effort to adapt country-level modeling techniques developed in DARPA’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) program to produce forecasts and analyses at a much more granular level, focusing on districts in Kandahar and Kunduz, Afghanistan. The challenge of this work in Afghanistan is not only to br...
The original DOD objective which the process of Verification, Validation, and Accreditation exists to serve was to evaluate the credibility of models and simulations. The red-line between verification (following the blueprint correctly) and validity (accuracy for a particular domain) was convenient, but suppressed consideration of flaws in design c...
As a state founded on Jewish immigration and the absorption of immigration, what are the ideological and political implications for Israel of a zero or negative migration balance? By closely examining data on immigration and emigration, trends with regard to the migration balance are established. This article pays particular attention to the ways i...
In world politics the most important events are often rare events. Secession is a rare and important event. Secession of the center; when the dominant region of a country abandons its peripheries, is even rarer. But as the transformation of the Soviet Union into Russia and a collection of independent states demonstrates, it is an important kind of...
In five works spanning a decade, Philip E. Tetlock's interest in counterfactuals has changed. He began with an optimistic desire to make social science more rigorous by identifying best practices in the absence of non-imagined controls for experimentation. Soon, however, he adopted a more pessimistic analysis of the cognitive and psychological barr...
This paper suggests that computer-assisted agent-based modeling has the ability to move beyond abstract representations of political problems to theoretically sound virtualizations of real-world polities capable of producing probabilistic forecasts from distributions of stochastically perturbed model trajectories. In contrast to statistical approac...
This paper identifies the absence of a clear concept of violence as an obstacle to research on its causes and consequences. Standard practice in the proliferating literatures on political violence is to use damage measured in casualties as a surrogate. But damage can be produced nonviolently and, depending on how it is theorized, violence, per se,...
Social science in general and political science in particular have been resistant to the mobilization of evolutionary and specifically Darwinian ideas for analytic and explanatory purposes. This paper uses a special issue of the APSR on the “evolution” of the discipline of political science to illustrate the general lack of sophistication among pol...
WeisburdDavid, Jewish Settler Violence: Deviance as Social Reaction (University Park, Pa., and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989). Pp. 176. - Volume 23 Issue 3 - Ian S. Lustick
Science requires observation and comparison. Implicit in the notion of comparison is an expectation of the conceptual stability of boundaries surrounding types of observable events. Determining when one sees an orange and when one sees an apple, requires clear coding rules for what counts as an orange or an apple. The scientific value of the exerci...
The following is an edited version of the proceedings of a symposium sponsored by the Middle East Policy Council on March 9, 1995, in the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Former Senator George McGovern, president of the Middle East Policy Council, introduced the panel. The organizer and moderator was Thomas R. Mattair, the council'S director of...
A Debate between Efraim Inbar and Ian S. Lustick
Time is on Israel's Side
Efraim Inbar
From a realpolitik perspective, the balance of power between Israel and its neighbors is the critical variable in the quest for survival in a bad neighborhood. If Israel’s position is improving over time and the power differential between the Jewish State and i...
Questions
Question (1)
this was sent to you and Mark, but it did not get delivered to you:
Hi Mark, Alicia, I'm not sure why Jameson contacted me, but if he had in mind the epistemological hierarchy, there would seem to be an opening here. I've let NSI know about this, and they'll attend Proposer's Day. I won't be there. Didn't know if this was on your radar screen or not.
Ian
-----Original Message-----
From: Jameson, Stephen [mailto:stephen.jameson@darpa.mil]
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 2:26 PM
To: Jameson, Stephen <stephen.jameson@darpa.mil>
Cc: Carrera, Marisa (contr-i2o) <Marisa.Carrera.ctr@darpa.mil>
Subject: New DARPA Program -- Causal Exploration
Colleagues,
I encountered your work through the OSD HSCB program and wanted to make sure you were aware of my forthcoming program entitled Causal Exploration, which may be of interest to you. The proposer's day announcement recently posted:
The purpose of the program is to develop technologies for semi-automated construction, from text and other source materials, of causal models that can be used to inform military decision making in complex operational environments. I am expecting the solicitation to post by the proposer's day, which is December 19. Once the BAA posts I will not be in a position to hold direct discussions with interested parties, but there will be a formal Q&A process, and until the BAA posts I am open to brief discussions or answering questions by email.
Best regards,
Steve Jameson
Program Manager, DARPA I2O
Desk: (703) 526-1598
Cell: (571) 982-2436
