David Apter

Personal and Family Information

David was born on 18 DEC 1924, the son of unknown parents. The place is not known.

He died on 4 MAY 2010 in North Haven, Connecticut.

His wife was Eleanor S. Selwyn, who he married in 1947. The place has not been found. Their two known children were Emily (1954-?) and Andrew H. (1956-?).

Events

Attributes

Notes

Note 1

<P>Seeking The Peace
<P>David E. Apter From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002
<P>http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20020701faresponse8541/david-e-apter/seeking-the-peace.html
<P>May/June 2002
<P>To the Editor:
<P>Compared to most efforts, "The Last Negotiation" by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (May/June 2002) is a model of clarity, intelligence, and even-handedness. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become so complex and loaded with history that the authors should be commended for outlining the principal claims and arguments of both sides and offering a way out of an otherwise intractable situation. They oppose pursuing further interim agreements insofar as these are more likely to reinforce suspicions and further underwrite the game of claims and counterclaims. So great is the mutual mistrust by both parties that only a politics of intervention by outside powers can guarantee the security of the region.
But is the authors' solution likely to work any better than the one they reject? Three principal questions might be raised in this regard.
<P>First is the problem of how and where to draw a line of parity. There is no common standard of equity. Ironically, democracy becomes part of the problem when party politics in both Israel and the United States come under pressure from the right and undermine any solution broadly acceptable to the protagonists.
<P>Second, the present situation is not so much a war between combatants as a conflict similar to other guerrilla campaigns such as those of the Algerians against the French, the Jews in Mandate Palestine, the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya, or the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. All these follow roughly familiar lines of nationalism versus colonialism. In such cases, police, army regulars, and conscripts are pitted against underground and terrorist movements and find themselves at a disadvantage. The usual response is to rely on brutal countermeasures, ever more vengeful reprisals, and torture. But rarely are such measures effective in ending violence or isolating those who orchestrate it from their support networks. More often, military campaigns bog down while violence simply becomes a way of life.
<P>In that case, violence creates its own objects. Indeed, the longer it continues, the more violence converts clandestine networks into a form of social life. Moreover, when "normal" activities are restructured around violent actions and episodes, the enemy becomes more sharply defined. Hatred becomes the all-consuming center of life. Indeed, violence is in these terms addictive and offers special roles for its adherents: the young to sacrifice and kill; their parents to provide moral support; the leaders in clandestine undergrounds to plan, mobilize, and supply weapons; the old to roll bandages or serve in medical posts or food supply chains; and so on. Resistance, then, redefines obligations. Even in male-dominated "honor and shame" societies, violence changes the relationships between men and women. Above all it exempts participants from conventional moral principles. Such circumstances defy the conventional land-for-peace bargaining rationality. In short, within the madness of the general conflict, a different rationality forms that marches to its own drum.
<P>As the above examples suggest, the longer the conflict rages, the more of a quagmire it will become for the Israeli military. Insofar as it is their long-term strategy to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli state, the Palestinians have succeeded to a remarkable extent. Time does not appear to be on the Israeli side, so what is the incentive for the Palestinians to go to the bargaining table? And what is the Israeli solution -- to condemn Palestinians to a fate equivalent to that of historical Judaism, making them permanently stateless persons?
<P>This is the basic paradox that Agha and Malley need to confront. The Palestinians may well be persuaded to agree to a cease-fire and accept a U.S. or UN presence on the ground, but only if they believe it will not prejudice their long-term strategy: the eventual elimination of Israel. In that case, how willing will the United States be to guarantee the existence of Israel, and for how long? Without an answer, the last negotiation may itself be as illusory as any other alternative.
<P>David E. Apter
<P>Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Comparative Political and Social Development, Yale University
<P>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Apter
<P>He was born on December 18, 1924. He taught at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago (where he was the Executive Secretary of the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations), the University of California, (where he was director of the Institute of International Studies), and Yale University, where he held a joint appointment in political science and sociology and served as Director of the Social Science Division, Chair of Sociology, and was a founding fellow of the Whitney Humanities Center. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
<P>He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science in Palo Alto, California, a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, as well as a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer. He has done field research on development, democratization and political violence in Africa, Latin America, Japan, and China.
I<P>n 2006 he was the first recipient of the Foundation Mattei Dogan prize for contributions to Interdisciplinary research. Apter died in his home in North Haven, Connecticut, from complications due to cancer on May 4, 2010.
<P>Literary works
<P>The Gold Coast in Transition, 1955
<P>The Politics of Modernization, 1965
<P>Political Change, 1973
<P>Choice and the Politics of Allocation, 1972 (received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation award for the best book of the year on government, politics, or international affairs)
<P>Ghana in Transition (Princeton)
<P>The Political Kingdom in Uganda (Princeton PUP; London: Frank Cass)
<P>The Politics of Modernization (Chicago, Japanese, Turkish, and Indonesian editions)
<P>Against the State (Harvard; Iwanami, Japanese ed)
<P>Political Discourse in Mao's Republic, with Tony Saich (Harvard)
<P>The Legitimization of Violence (Macmillan; NYU)

<P>http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/dapter.html