Toward a spatial model of protracted conflict management: The Palestinian case

This study contributes to the theoretical and empirical analysis of protracted conflict. The study conceptualizes protracted conflict as a conflict between two nations in which the constant-sum stakes under contention are perceived by both adversaries to be significantly linked to national as well as individual existential needs. Such a state of affairs is generally the product of the geodemographic integration of substantial portions of the two nations. As a consequence of the defining properties of protracted conflict, many members and sectors of a nation embroiled in protracted conflict are likely to have the opportunity and willingness to oppose governmental pursuit of a conciliatory protracted conflict policy. Thus, knowledge on the severity and source(s) of internal opposition to conciliatory national-level protracted conflict policies is a core puzzle of protracted conflict management. Such knowledge promotes efforts to persuade, accommodate, demobilize, and/or coerce, internal opposition to the management of the protracted conflict. To produce such knowledge, this study develops a model that synthesizes the basic premises of spatial expected utility models of bargaining/conflict with an interpretive sociological approach to the dimensionality of domestic conflict, a methodological individualist approach to the circumscription of contending domestic collectivities, and the specification of contending domestic collectivities as a function of sociopolitical cohesion as well as preference proximity. The study applies the model to the case of internal Palestinian conflict over Palestinian policy concerning Israel. This analysis is based on Palestinian public opinion data collected in March 2000.