I arrived to work at the Center for Development Studies (CDS) in Birzeit University on a gloomy wet day in February 2010. A few weeks later, Brazil’s President Lula made his last tour of the region and was mobbed while visiting Palestine. In commemoration of Brazil’s growing Middle East presence, a road near to the Muqata’a in Ramallah was named after the country.

What has been the role of rising powers and the Arab-Israeli conflict? What does this tell us about conflict management more generally, and by rising powers (as opposed to great or super powers) more specifically? And what can their approaches to conflict management tell us about rising powers’ foreign policy orientations and relationship to the international system?

On May 1, 2017, an official event marking Israel’s independence took place on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. It gave way to celebrations that took place across the country, including in Tel Aviv’s Yitzhak Rabin Square where children wore inflatable blue and white headbands that echoed the national flag and sprayed each other with foam cannisters marked with the Jewish Star of David. Two...

The first period of the Arab-Israeli conflict, between 1947 and 1967, spanned the establishment of Israel and the dispersal of the Palestinian refugees. The primary parties to the conflict were Israel and its Arab neighbors. The period was not one where the five BRICS states could be labeled rising powers. Of the five only one, the Soviet Union, had global status as one of two superpowers. Yet of...

The Cold War was the main global division in 1967. But a Third World, initially conceived as a political and ideological non-alignment between East and West, was coalescing into a more economically and socially oriented separation of the world, between developed and developing countries: the North and South. This offered prospects for state and non-state actors to gain greater international...

From the 1970s space was becoming increasingly harder for rising powers to make a difference, both in the international system and in relation to the conflict. Détente, US unilateralism (e.g., the Camp David accords) and an economic downturn constrained these powers. Their interaction with the conflict had become more distant and largely focused on the occasional appeal for peace through...

The Second Intifada broke out in September 2000. It continued until the Sharm el-Sheikh conference that took place between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships in February 2005. During these two dates around 1,000 Israelis and nearly 3,500 Palestinians were killed. However, the end of the Second Intifada did not bring a resolution of the conflict; many of the causes behind it remained and in...

How have rising powers approached the Arab-Israeli conflict? What does this tell us about their approach to conflict management and international relations more generally? In answering these questions, the book examined the experience of five rising powers, the BRICS group—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and their responses to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The BRICS were...

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Guy Burton has held academic teaching and research positions at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai, the University of Nottingham’s Malaysian campus, the University of Kurdistan-Hewler in Iraq, and Birzeit University in occupied Palestine. His research interests and past publications include comparative politics, international relations, public policy, and...