This paper addresses the phenomenon of military operation-naming, that is, the act of giving names to war practices. Based on the four strategies of War Normalizing Discourse theory, I argue that, like nation-states, violent non-state actors also use the tool of naming to disseminate their wartime perceptions and mobilize public opinion for their own interests. Moreover, I argue that in its war-naming efforts the violent non-state actor seeks to defy and undermine the official names of its enemy state, using its own names to expand the physical battlefield to other fields of war and to present itself as an equal and legitimate player. To establish the above arguments, the article presents the case study of Hamas—specifically, the movement’s naming of rounds of fighting against Israel since the beginning of its rule in the Gaza Strip in 2007.

Designing a comparative study of groups, movements, and collectives presents significant challenges. Although some of these challenges are undoubtedly case-specific, this research methods case discusses three challenges which will appear, in one form or another, in most comparative projects: identifying measurement units, designing a comparative framework, and collecting and analyzing data. Each of these is discussed by drawing on an example from a study I conducted which compared the ideological rigidity and flexibility of secular and religious terror groups. Drawing on insights from sociology’s social movement theory, from terrorism research, and broadly from qualitative textual analyses, the case guides the reader toward thinking of creative ways to manage such challenges as they develop, based on the specific needs of the study she or he is conducting.

How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed ‘normative power Europe’. Yet the research and knowledge to‐date about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the potential to undermine the coherence of the EU's identity and thus also its objective to ‘speak with one voice’. This article explores the EU's discursive management of the continuity‐versus‐change imperative by analysing the integration of new values into the text of its treaties. This issue is addressed based on a quantitative content analysis on the full texts of European founding treaties between the 1950s and 2009. Findings show that the distribution of the EU's values in the text is not uniform: while the language of market economy and democracy is pervasive, the values of peace, European identity, rights and social justice are mentioned less frequently and in restricted linguistic environments. To account for the differences in the integration of values into the EU's treaty discourse, the article develops the notion of a discursive mechanism of differentiated value integration (MDVI). This rationale echoes the logic of differentiation in policy implementation employed by the EU. It is claimed here that, applied in the European discursive arena, MDVI allows radically different readings of the same text. This helps the EU to maintain a coherent value identity while at the same time enabling change.

This chapter focuses on strategic frame building by political actors in the international arena. We reflect on studies in mediated public diplomacy, defined as the attempt to influence the presentation of a country in foreign media, and argue that it is a suitable theoretical concept when attempting to describe the strategic efforts carried out by national actors in order to achieve political and communicative objectives in the international arena. We argue that value and political proximity between countries play a key role in the ability of national actors to promote their preferred frames in the foreign media. Proximity, however, is characterized by a relative and conditional nature, which is discussed in the chapter in detail. Finally, we argue that rhetorical framing strategies, as well as the concepts of weak versus strong frames, can be used in order to build a theory that will comprehensively explore the ways in which national actors can succeed in their strategic frame building efforts.

Western societies have experienced ethnic and religious diversification in recent decades. These demographic changes have been met by efforts to defend the local dominant culture using majority nationalism laws, intended to protect the cultural heritage of the majority. We empirically examine majority nationalism laws’ expressive effects on patterns of minority discrimination using the Israeli draft Nation Law (NL) as a case study. Drawing on two experimental surveys of a representative sample of the majority population of Israel (N = 602), our results lend weak support to the hypothesis that majority nationalism laws increase bias against minorities, and modest support to the hypothesis that such laws generate unintended spillover effects across different minority groups and from the public to the private sphere. Our main finding is that majority nationalism laws provoke a backlash reaction from those who oppose them. We define this as the provocative effect of law and discuss its relation to the expressive law theory. The results suggest that the effects of majority nationalism laws may vary systematically across ideological groups and spheres of discrimination.

While focusing on the concept of liberty, this article produces a dialogue between the Talmud and western political theory, and thus expands the canon of political thought. Equipped with three concepts of liberty—negative, positive, and republican—this article offers an original reading to Babylonian Talmud Giṭ 12a–13a. The talmudic passage's pivotal question—whether liberty is necessarily beneficial to a slave—enables us to reconstruct its fundamental, albeit implicit, understandings of both slavery and liberty. The talmudic approach to slavery and liberty emerges as concrete, and hence yields a thick and multi-faceted notion of liberty. Considering that a person might prefer the benefits of slavery reveals a paradox in Isaiah Berlin's negative concept of liberty. Therefore, as this article concludes, his conceptual distinction between two concepts of liberty is unsustainable and needs to be replaced by a concrete and thick notion of liberty.

People who are more religious tend to experience more positive affect and higher levels of life satisfaction. Current explanations for this relation include social support, meaning in life, and more positive emotional experiences. Adding cognitive reappraisal as a new mechanism, we propose that religion consistently trains people to reappraise emotional events, making the devout more effective in applying this emotion regulation practice, which cultivates more positive affect and greater life satisfaction. In two studies, involving Israeli Jewish (N = 288) and American Christian (N = 277) participants, we found that more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal mediated the relationship between religiosity and affective experiences, which in turn, were associated with greater life satisfaction. Religiosity was associated with more frequent cognitive reappraisal (in both samples) and less frequent expressive suppression (in the Christian sample). Cognitive reappraisal mediated the link between religiosity and positive affect (in both samples) as well as negative affect (in the Christian sample). We discuss implications for understanding the link between religion and emotional well-being.

The article explores the political mobilization of the Ethiopian minority of Israel. Utilizing the 2015 Ethiopian protests as illustrative of larger political trends undergone by the minority, we utilize the tools of social movement theory to unpack the two-month long protest wave. Specifically, we address why the protests occurred, how they developed, and where and when they emerged, by exploring the grievances framing the protests, the collective’s
mobilizing infrastructure, and processes of local and international diffusion and emulation. The results highlight the ongoing and emerging trends and developments within the Ethiopian minority, situating the events within a larger process of politicization.

This article compares the violent activity of secular and religious terror organizations. Utilizing data compiled by the Global Terrorism Database cross-referenced with secondary and primary sources regarding the degree of religious components embedded in organizations’ ideologies, it tests the violent patterns of activity carried out by organizations guided by predominantly secular, secular/religious, and religious ideologies, between the years 1970 and 2012. The findings confirm that a) religious ideology correlates with specific, more deadly, attack tactics and violent patterns; and b) the degree of religious components within terror organizational ideology should be tested along a spectrum: the more religious an organization is, the more attacks it tends to carry out, and the deadlier its attacks become.

This article explores the ideological rigidity of secular and religious terror groups. Analyzing leaflets disseminated by two Palestinian groups during the First Intifada, it examines if and how each shifted its identity and goals in response to repression, political shifts, or resource changes. The results suggest that while similar catalysts led to ideological reformation among the secular and the religious group, the extent of ideological change within the religious group was more limited. The article argues for the need to disaggregate ideological analysis further in order to identify more subtle shifts, alterations, and omissions, in the positions held by religious terror groups, moving past the exploration of if such changes exist in ideological templates and instead focusing on the extent and type of alterations the different groups allow.