User:Lquandt/Helena Cobban

Helena Cobban is a British-American writer and researcher on international relations, with special interests in the Middle East, the international system, and transitional justice.

Among the major themes that run through her work are a concern for human equality and the identification and pursuit of nonviolent ways to resolve conflicts among peoples. She has been a Quaker since the late 1990s.

Biography
Born in Abingdon, England in 1952 to James Cobban and Lorna Mary Cobban, she was educated at Queen Anne's School, Caversham and St. Hugh's College, Oxford, where she received her BA (Hons) in Philosophy and Economics in 1973. She was awarded an MA from Oxford in 1981.

From 1974 through 1981, she worked as a Beirut-based correspondent for news outlets including The Christian Science Monitor, The Sunday Times of London, ABC News, and the BBC.

In 1982 she moved to the United States to take up a research fellowship at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, where she wrote her first book, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation. It was published in English in 1984, was translated into Arabic and several other languages, and remains in print.

Since then she has published six additional books: three others on questions of Middle East war and peace, and three on other international issues. Her seventh book, ''Re-engage! American and the World After Bush'' was published in 2008. Rep. Lee Hamilton, Co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, described it as, "An impassioned, thought-provoking, and accessible brief from a highly esteemed journalist on how all of us, as individuals, can act to help better our country and world." She has also contributed chapters to around 20 scholarly books edited by others.

In 1991-93 she was Co-Director of the Middle East project at Search for Common Ground, in Washington, DC.

From 1990 through 2007, Cobban contributed a regular column on global issues to The Christian Science Monitor, and from 1993 through 2006 she contributed a separate column to the Arabic-language international daily Al-Hayat.

Since February 2003 she has published "Just World News‚" a blog on global issues that has gained a broad international readership and has been cited in Le Monde diplomatique and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Boston Review, where she has published essays on Palestinian-Israeli issues, Iraq, and post-conflict justice questions. She contributes a weekly news analysis on Middle East developments to Inter Press Service and makes periodic contributions to "ForeignPolicy.com" and The Christian Science Monitor.

She is a member of Charlottesville Friends Meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia; a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies; and sits on the Middle East East Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch. In 2007-08 she was a 'Friend in Washington' with the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

She is married to Dr. William B. Quandt.

Books

 * The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics, Cambridge U.P., 1984


 * The Making of Modern Lebanon, London: Hutchinson, and Boulder, Co: Westview, 1985


 * The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, Praeger, 1991


 * The Moral Architecture of World Peace: Nobel Laureates Discuss our Global Future, University Press of Virginia, 2000


 * The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks: 1991-96 and Beyond, U.S. Institute of Peace, 2000


 * Amnesty after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes, Paradigm, 2006


 * Re-engage! American and the World After Bush, Paradigm, 2008.

Contributions to Middle East studies
Through her reporting and analytical work, Cobban has made notable contributions to the study of Palestinian politics, Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Lebanese politics, Israeli-Syrian peacemaking, the US war in Iraq, and the broader study of the Middle East:


 * Palestinian politics: She interviewed many founders and leaders of the PLO for her 1984 book, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics, and used much material gathered during her reporting work in Beirut in the late 1970s. In the book she concluded that the center of gravity of the Palestinian national movement was shifting toward those Palestinians living inside their homeland, a diagnosis that proved correct when the First Intifada broke out in 1987.


 * Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking: She has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and blog posts about issues in this field, arguing in particular that the United States and other sponsors of the peace diplomacy should aim rapidly at securing a final peace agreement rather than losing time and political capital chasing interim deals.


 * Lebanese politics: In her 1985 book, she analyzed Lebanese politics as being the result of complex interactions among the country's different population groups, which she divided-- based on an analysis by Fuad I. Khuri, into "sects" and "minorities." The book, which also built on considerable on-the-ground reporting, identified and analyzed the rise of the country's previously marginalized Shiite community. She made numerous reporting trips back to Lebanon after 1999, and has published two notable articles about the rise of Hezbollah.

Contributions to Transitional Justice Studies
Cobban's 2006 book Amnesty after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes studied the outcomes-- according to a broad range of social indicators-- of the very different policy choices that by South Africa, Rwanda, and Mozamibique made in the early to mid-1990s, as they attempted to deal with the tragic legacies of atrocities committed during earlier period of civil war and mass violence. This was one of the first attempts to adopt an essentially utilitarian approach to the challenge of transitional justice, a topic that had been approached by most earlier researchers in a more strictly deontological way.

During and after her work on the book, she conducted interviews and documentary research in the three countries studied; at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia]]; and in Northern Uganda. She published field notes and reflective essays from most of these trips on her Just World News blog and on the specially created Transitional Justice Forum blog.

Other contributions
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