What does it mean to search for trust—the constitutive element of feeling ontologically secure—in the context of protracted conflict, trauma, and forced migration? This article addresses this key question in ontological security (OS) studies in International Relations (IR) by analyzing an unrecognized consequence of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict: a Lebanese community of forced migrants created overnight on Israeli premises due to Israel's unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. Relying on 60 in-depth interviews with Lebanese migrants in Israel, the article demonstrates how forced migrants engage in various OS-seeking strategies in relentless efforts to reconstitute trust. These strategies range from self-justification and securitizing identity through religious and communal practices, to a search for recognition from statist institutions and boundary-work vis-à-vis “sibling” disempowered “others” in the host state. However, the article shows how under political circumstances of protracted conflict and repeated perceived betrayal by the state, forced migrants are unable to reconstitute the routinized relations of trust on which OS is based. By exposing the particularistic, dynamic, and highly political character of the migrants' quest for trust, the article sheds new light on the political psychology of an “old” conflict and on the multiple meanings of ontological (in)security in migration.

This article examines what I call ‘pulsing’ – visible surges of pedestrian activity. It applies a selection of Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geographic vocabulary in an ethnographic case-study of Mitzpe Ramon, a small Negev Desert town in Israel, illustrating how various spatio-temporal constraints shape flows of walking at daily, weekly, and annual scales. Pulsing, I argue, simply but powerfully communicates when events of collective interest occur, where, for which groups, and at what volumes. Pulsing embodies cultural practices through mobilities, and shapes community norms. Extending beyond this particular example, I also suggest that the concept of pulsing advances understandings of synchrony and synchory in collective pedestrianism and mobilities more broadly, including pilgrimage, urban rhythms, commuter patterns, periodicity, rush hours, and the filling and emptying of public space.

This article utilizes van Gennep's neglected theory of territorial passages to answer two key questions in the study of ontological security (OS) in migration. First, why do the members of the receiving society lose their perceived sense of OS in face of a mass of strangers arriving at their gates? Second, how, if at all, do they attempt to reconstitute it while incorporating the strangers into their world? Following the recent call within OS studies in international relations (IR) to spell out the social mechanisms that facilitate the anxiety and uncertainty of the agents, I use the case of the German societal response to the 2015 refugee crisis to demonstrate that van Gennep's classical approach, far from being structural and functionalist, offers an advanced, power-informed, and processual perspective for uncovering a possible sociosymbolic mechanism behind the perceived “losing” and “re-finding” of OS in migratory encounters. The article delineates the principles of a “thick” approach to OS in migration, explains how van Gennep's theory adds to this approach, and highlights the ultimate unattainability of OS as an essentialist category that is either “present” or “absent” throughout the migratory encounter. It concludes by discussing the added value of van Gennep's theory to the study of OS in the contemporary global milieu of the “age of migration.”

This article situates Van Gennep’s Rites de passage in the contemporary field of migration studies, arguing that his second and third chapters allow us to reformulate how we conceptualize contemporary migratory encounters. Rather than reading Van Gennep’s classical text through the prevalent Turnerian lens of “liminality” in migration, I reread it as offering a conceptualization of migration as deriving from society’s establishment on a delimited piece of earth, constituting itself against and in relation to its own limits. Society’s limit then becomes the center of social inquiry, while the strangers at the gate are seen as an integral part of these fundamental relations between a social grouping and the delimited space it occupies. The article further suggests that Van Gennep’s sociology of the limit offers the field of migration studies three practical analytical contributions: (a) its notion of the multiplicity of limits and sublimits emerging throughout the migratory encounter; (b) its emphasis on the sanctification of the limit, which opens up the possibility of analyzing the relations between migration and emotions; and (c) its pointing to the potential cycle of dread elicited by this sanctification—a notion highly relevant to analyzing contemporary migratory encounters.

Assumptions regarding space and spatiality exist in all major theoretical traditions in international relations, from realism to constructivism, but the mutual constitution of space and social interaction in the study of world politics requires further conceptual development in its own right. This article suggests a preliminary research agenda for the study of space and social relations in IR by lending insight from Georg Simmel’s classical sociology of space. Simmel’s approach offers scholars of contemporary world politics an innovative conceptualization of the relations between physical and symbolic space (‘the physical-symbolic axis’) and between space and time (‘the spatio-temporal axis’); and a set of practical analytical tools to apply in IR research by defining the foundational qualities of space (exclusivity, divisibility, containment, positioning, and mobility) and suggesting a typology of distinct sociospatial formations: organized space, governed space, fixed space, and empty space. The article discusses the potential of Simmel’s nuanced relational approach to contribute to the contemporary study of world politics, and demonstrates its utility in two particular areas of research: the study of unbundled sovereignty and mobility in late modernity; and the study of empty spaces in IR.

This article explores the trope of desert desolation in the Zionist state-building project. It traces the strategic uses of desolate imagery in the pioneer narrative (1880s–1920s), by the New Hebrew culture (1923–1948), during the ‘golden age’ of urban and regional planning (1948–1956), and through marketing the Negev desert town of Mitzpe Ramon to tourists (1993–present). These eras highlight the tension between desolation as reflecting the alienated ‘outsiders’ gaze’ versus desolation as energizing and inspiring place making. I argue that since unproductive, desolate landscapes pose an economic threat, both Israel’s collectivist and capitalist settlement projects have confronted the challenge of strategically rebranding desolation to promote its allure.

Just before twilight every Friday evening, some of Havana's elderly Jewish community congregate in the shabby, windowless basement of Adath Israel Orthodox Synagogue, located on the narrow, pocked streets of Acosta and Picota in the Old City. They come to pray, make kiddush, the ritual blessing, over sweet red wine, and sit down to share a festive, kosher-style Shabbat (Sabbath) meal, served on worn cafeteria trays. By Orthodox standards, they are not religiously observant, yet they have begun to return each Friday night religiously. Communicating the vitality of a small, local remnant, this scene is one that visitors to Jewish Cuba often witness. Yet, the most crucial detail of what is widely known as “Cuba's Jewish revitalization” is neither the reconstitution of local congregations nor their renewed practices, but rather the growing interaction with the visitors themselves.

This article asks whether an academic boycott is morally justified. It does not relate to the question whether academia and politics should be mixed. Instead, relying on the case study of the debate surrounding the academic boycott of Israeli academia by British, and later American academics, the article analyzes the various arguments applying analytical political philosophy tools. Broadly speaking two families of arguments—consequentialist and deontological—are found. Consequentialist arguments rely on three psychological, sociological, and political assumptions that are false and make them counterproductive (bearing in mind the overall goal declared by the boycott promoters). Despite some initial appeal, the deontological arguments also fail, at least to a certain extent, to justify the boycott. Finally I discuss what I call “selective boycotting.”

While many countries define poverty in a relative manner, whereby poverty threshold is set at 40% to 60% of median income, some countries use absolute definitions, according to which being poor implies lacking the minimum amount of income for meeting some basic living conditions, e.g. proper nutrition, shelter, physical and mental health, access to clean water, and so on. Recently conservative politicians and parties have suggested that the relative definition of poverty should be abandoned and that absolute measures should be applied. Those promoting defining poverty in relative terms answer, quite rightly, that the most important reason for sticking to the relative measure is that it is more sensitive to inequalities in society. In that sense Living in dignity in the 21^st Century is timely and important as it relates to poverty and inequality as a single issue. Moreover, the authors also tie in the two with human rights as well. Therefore this book can be described as a non-neutral (although very objective) treatment of poverty, and should be of interest not only to students and researchers of poverty but also to NGOs and decision makers. It is written in a very accessible manner, and while the book is not jargon free, the authors explain all the concepts very clearly, using, among other things, comics.

We are delighted to have the opportunity to respond to Martha Nussbaum's excellent Creating Capabilities. In that book Nussbaum pays us the great compliment of discussing some aspects of our own book Disadvantage (Wolff and de-Shalit, 2007), both endorsing some of our analysis yet also entering some criticisms. We would like here to explain the issues and provide our response.

The ideas from our work that Nussbaum endorses, albeit with qualifications, are essentially three-fold. The first is the idea of ‘secure functionings’, re-named by Nussbaum ‘capability security’ (Nussbaum, 2011, p. 43): that it is important to people not only that they enjoy a certain level of functioning but also that they are able to sustain it over time. Furthermore, it is important to people to be free from the worry that can be experienced if one's functionings are at ongoing risk. The second idea is that of ‘corrosive disadvantage’, where a disadvantage in one domain is likely to spread its effects to other areas. Drug addiction, homelessness,1 or possibly uncontrollable debt are examples of corrosive disadvantages. The third idea is ‘fertile functioning’, where an achievement in one area is likely to have benefits elsewhere. Self-control is increasingly being argued to be a fertile functioning in this sense, while we speculated that ‘affiliation’ and ‘having friends’ in the sense of having a supportive social network would also be fertile. We also, quite naturally, suggest that it should be a priority for public policy to take preventative steps to block the formation of corrosive disadvantages, and to build fertile functionings.