special relationship

Research on the special relationship between the United States and Israel has usually been focused on strategic aspects, whilst fewer scholars have focused on non-material dimensions of the relationship. In addition, the existing research is mostly confined to the political and decision-making realms, with very few excursions into the academic arena. The current article aims to fill this lacuna through the study of pro-Israel academic discourse in America, focusing on the specific case of the field of terrorism studies. Critical discourse analysis of pro-Israel academic texts in this field is carried out to reveal the discourse, themes and arguments used to build this ideational pillar of the special relationship and move towards a common identity between the US and Israel. The common ingroup identity model (CIIM) is used to describe the process through which a common identity is constructed. The article concludes that defining the Self, defining the Other, and defining the norms are the three main strategies employed in the studied texts to achieve this goal.

WWII and its consequences served to bring a new era of extensive cooperation between the United Kingdom and the United States, leading to the birth of the Anglo-American special relationship (AASR). However, the two countries’ global widespread interests led to inevitable conflicts of interest, mostly favoring the US. Here, the question arises: Why did postwar Britain maintain its attachment to the AASR in times of conflicting interest with America? The paper, motivated by Gidden’s definition of ontological security, discusses that the consequences of WWII not only generated for the UK physical security concerns, but also ontological insecurity. In this respect, postwar Britain, accepting an inferior role, sought a special relationship with the US to consolidate this mutual partnership in order to mitigate its ontological insecurity in the postwar world order. The paper then, by investigating two cases of British-American conflicting interests in Iran, and raising a material-ideational debate, aims to identify the advantages of ontological security theory in explaining Britain’s “mechanism of tolerance” in preserving the AASR. Otherwise stated, through the proposed conceptual framework, the paper explores the way in which ontological security needs shape the postwar UK’s behaviors to prioritize its close relations with the US, regardless of the costs.