The Israeli Settler Movement: Assessing and Explaining Social Movement Success

MaD-Colloquium

Cas Mudde and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler will present their joint book project

“The Israeli Settler Movement: Assessing and Explaining Social Movement Success” which focuses on the continuing political success of the Israeli settler movement (ISM). The ISM is one of the most enduring and successful social movements in recent Israeli history. Observers on both sides of the highly polarized issue of Israel’s politics in the West Bank agree on little, but all accept that over the past fifty years, the ISM has amassed influence dramatically out of proportion to its relatively small size. What explains this paradox?

The book summarizes the results of a joint research project with two theoretically separate but empirically overlapping aims: (1) assessing the extent to which the ISM has influenced different aspects of politics and public debate in Israel, and (2) identifying the reasons for its salient influence on public policy. Applying in particular social movement theories, Cas Mudde and Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler hope to better understand what explains the ISM’s enduring success, and what this can teach us about social movements in general.

Cas Mudde is Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, and guest researcher at the WZB research unit "Migration, Integration, Transnationalization" in the period from May 2016 till July 2016.
Sivan Hirsch-Hoefler is Assistant Professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, and a Senior Researcher and the Head of the Right-Wing Extremism and Hate Crime Desk at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), Israel.

The MaD-Colloquium is organized by the research area “Migration and Diversity” (coordinator: Prof. Dr. Ruud Koopmans).

To register, please reply by June 7, 2016, to susanne.grasow [at] wzb.eu