856 jour nal of P E A C E R E S E A RC H
wars are starkly portrayed, alongside more hopeful 䊏 Krämer, Gudrun, 2008. A History of
tales of cures and solutions. The analyses of statis-
tics and trends come across as reliable and thor-
ough. The book should be useful for a wide range
of academic, activist, corporate and political actors
who strive to tackle the scourge of child labour on
a continent still deeply affected by widespread
poverty and armed conflict.
Henrik Syse
䊏 King, Mary Elizabeth, 2008. A Quiet
Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and
Nonviolent Resistance. London: Nation. xvi ⫹
464 pp. ISBN 1560258025.
The First Intifada, launched by Palestinians in the
Occupied Territories in late 1987 and maintained
with impressive solidarity and discipline until
1990, led to negotiations with the Israelis on a
two-state solution, culminating in the 1993 Oslo
Accords. Mary King was active in the US Civil
Rights Movement, and her focus is on the
Intifada as a much misunderstood example of pri-
marily nonviolent resistance to military occupa-
tion. She draws on the theory of nonviolent
action (Gene Sharp is often cited) and makes
comparisons with other popular movements
using nonviolent methods. But the book also
examines the historical background to the
Palestinian–Israeli conflict, including Palestinian
resistance to the proposed creation of a Jewish
state in the 1920s–30s, and explores the role of
often conflicting political and religious groups
within the Intifada, in particular the relationship
between the activists inside the West Bank and
Gaza and the Tunis-based PLO leadership. King
highlights three strands leading to the events of
1987: the evolution of civil society in the
Occupied Territories from the 1970s, which
empowered villagers, women and students and
provided a base for self-help and resistance; the
role of Palestinian intellectuals discussing alterna-
tives to guerrilla warfare and the destruction of
the Israeli state; and the circulation of informa-
tion about the methods of nonviolent action. She
also explores why the First Intifada was so often
seen, especially by the Israeli government, simply
as a continuation of armed struggle. The First
Intifada has been examined before, both in the lit-
erature on nonviolent action and in studies of
Palestinian/Israeli politics, but The Quiet
Revolution combines scholarship in both areas to
provide a readable, original and detailed analysis.
April Carter
volume 45 / number 6 / november 2008
Palestine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press. xvi ⫹ 357 pp. ISBN 069111897.
Gudrun Krämer opens her book by stating, quite
correctly, that it is no easy task to write a depoliti-
cized history of Palestine. Despite the difficulties
inherent in such a task, she has done a formidable
job. From an early point, she shows how the
choice of words are political, and she manages to
create for her readers a language void of politics
by defining all her words in their historical
context, tracing them back hundreds of years. Her
account of Palestine combines religious history,
political history, history of ideas and demograph-
ical studies in an elegant way, leaving few stones
unturned. By applying such a spectrum of method-
ologies, she is able to trace ideas from their early
beginnings up to modern times, as they gradually
became integral in the politics that shaped the
modern conflict of Palestine. Admirably, she is able
to trace both the Palestinian and Jewish narratives
without taking sides. Thus, she both proves certain
claims made by the parties and disproves others.
For example, the Israeli claim that Palestine was ‘a
land without a people for a people without a land’
is proven to be a racist myth, based on the assump-
tion that Palestinians were ‘people’, but not ‘a
people’. Further, she brilliantly contextualizes Arab
anti-Semitism by investigating how, for the
Palestinian population, the borders between Jew
and Zionist gradually became blurred. By making
a series of similar investigations, tracing all the
defining points of the conflict, she has been able to
write a book that stands out as necessary back-
ground reading for all scholars intent on investi-
gating the current situation in Palestine.
Jørgen Jensehaugen
䊏 Sachs, Jeffrey D., 2008. Common Wealth:
Economics for a Crowded Planet. New York:
Penguin. xiii ⫹ 386 pp. ISBN 9781594201271.
Jeff Sachs, professor at Columbia University and
renowned economist, has embarked on a very
brave and ambitious endeavour with this book. His
aim is no less than to address the three greatest eco-
nomic and political challenges of our time – the
sustainability of the environment, the stabiliza-
tion of the world’s population and the end of
extreme poverty – and to prescribe remedies for
how to best meet these challenges. And he has
done it all in a non-technical way to benefit the
non-expert reader. Sachs generally strikes a good