Governance & Public Policy

There have been many initiatives undertaken to reconcile Hamas-Fatah conflict and to
establish Palestinian national unity government. Though these initiatives ended up with
signing three agreements, the reconciliation processes seem to be doomed to failure at
their early stage. The main cause of the conflict is lack of equilibrium of power between
Hamas and Fatah. Hence, Morgenthau’s classical realism theory is used to conceptualize
the interstate political struggle within Palestinian society. Quantitative historical
analysis is employed to explore the stumbling blocks of reconciliation process between
Hamas and Fatah within their historical contexts. The paper argues that it is crucial to
see Hamas-Fatah conflict at its own broader nature and relate Palestinian domestic
political schism to broader world structure, such as the logic of power politics and balance
of power within a state-under-the-making.

This paper focuses on the content features of intentional deceptive information in the news (i.e., fake news) and on social media. Based on an extensive review of relevant literature (i.e., political journalism and communication, computational linguistics), we take stock of existing knowledge and present an overview of the structural characteristics that are indicative of intentionally deceptive information. We discuss the strength of underlying empirical evidence and identify underdeveloped areas of research. With this paper, we aim to contribute to the systematic study of intentional deception in the news and on social media and to help setting up new lines of research in which intentionally deceptive news items can be operationalized in consistent ways.