Tibet, Palestine and the Politics of Failure
Fred Halliday is a well-known and authoritative scholar on Middle Eastern affairs and a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He writes on opemDemocracy.net:
Two current and high-profile events - the crisis in and around Tibet following the Lhasa riots of 14 March 2008, and the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment on 14 May 1948 of the state of Israel - have more in common than it may first appear. Indeed, their commonalities are shared to a degree by other political and ethnic disputes across the world, to the extent that they compose a distinct phenomenon - which may be termed “the syndrome of post-colonial sequestration”.
The category may sound abstract but the lived experience it denotes is real and multiple: that is, the cases where countries or peoples have - at a decisive moment of international change, amid the retreat of imperial or hegemonic powers - failed (through bad timing and / or bad leadership) to established their independence.
