Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (New Texts Out Now)

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Feb 23, 2018 Kuwait
Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (New Texts Out Now)

Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (New Texts Out Now)

By : Attiya Ahmad

Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait (New York: Duke University Press, 2017).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Attiya Ahmad (AA): Over the past twenty years, tens of thousands of domestic workers—migrant women of diverse ethnonational, linguistic, educational and religious backgrounds—have converted to Islam in the Greater Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Gulf) region. Among the region’s vast population of noncitizens, groups often referred to as migrant workers, expatriates, and foreign residents, domestic workers are by far the largest group of converts. These women’s experiences in the Gulf also contrast with those of migrant domestic workers in other parts of the world, where religious conversions are little reported in what is now a robust body of policy reports and scholarly literature focusing on the feminization of transnational labor migration.

I learned of domestic workers’ Islamic conversions while conducting preliminary research on an ostensibly different topic: the transnational development of Al-Huda, a South Asian women’s Islamic reform movement, in the Gulf. Like many in the region, I was puzzled and curious when I learned about domestic workers’ Islamic conversion. Two things struck me: first, how widespread and widely debated their conversions are within the region, yet how little scholarly attention they receive; and second, the disconnect that exists between how domestic workers understand and discuss their conversions, with how others perceive and depict them. The issues animating my interest in Al-Huda—how transnational processes are reworking gendered geographies of religious piety and belongings crosscutting the Middle East, South Asia and Indian Ocean region—took on a new and unexpected configuration, one encapsulated by a question whose constant refrain would weave through my subsequent research and this book: Why are domestic workers converting to Islam in the Gulf?

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AA: In broad and succinct terms, I would describe Everyday Conversions as necessarily interdisciplinary in scope and ethnographic in approach. The book brings into conversation a perhaps unexpected set of works, including scholarship on religious conversion, Islamic ethical formation and reform movements, domestic work and affective labor, the development of migration and labor regimes in the Gulf region, transnational feminism, and recent writings in feminist theory. 
Through analysis of domestic workers’ experiences, the book provides an alternative reading of household relations and activity as sites engendering newfound possibilities and transformations indexed by domestic workers’ Islamic conversions.

In terms of the specifics and substance of the book, Everyday Conversions is an ethnographic account of the circumstances through which South-Asian migrant domestic workers convert to Islam in the Gulf region that argues these women develop Islamic pieties through their gendered experiences of transnational migration and work centered on household spaces. The book brings into focus how domestic workers’ experiences of cooking, cleaning, and caring for their employers in the Gulf, and of provisioning their families in South Asia—everyday activities that are often disregarded or their importance assumed—lead to transformations in their subjectivities, affinities, and belongings.  An everyday process, these conversions mark the confluence of two realms that are often assumed to be distinct and separate: the reshaping of migrant women’s comportment and personalities related to their undertaking of affective labor, and the ethical formation of religious subjectivities related to their engagement with Islam.

Everyday Conversions furthers prevailing work on the feminization of transnational labor migration, a phenomenon accounting for half of the total migration in the Middle East and Asia. Existing scholarship depicts households as everyday spaces that produce and reproduce familial networks and ethnonational belongings. Through analysis of domestic workers’ experiences, the book provides an alternative reading of household relations and activity as sites engendering newfound possibilities and transformations indexed by domestic workers’ Islamic conversions. These migrant women’s everyday conversions constitute a form of transnational subjectivity and belonging that does not supplant but develops alongside and reconfigures their existing familial and ethnonational belongings. Domestic workers’ experiences underscore how transnational processes are marked not simply by the diffusion or extension across borders of kinship networks, ethnonational forms (including diasporic ones), and religious movements. Rather, transnationalism constitutes a dynamic field in which gendered, religious, occupational-class, and ethnonational differences are invoked and reworked, configured and reconfigured together, a field generative of everyday conversions. Here, the everyday functions not just as a space of routine and continuity, but of contingency, emergent possibility, and ongoing conversion.

Everyday Conversions also challenges hegemonic understandings of religious conversion as an eventful moment that marks a rupture in converts’ lives and a rejection of their previous religious traditions. Instead, through careful examination of domestic workers’ utterances and stories, the book analyzes religious conversion as an ongoing process rooted in the everyday, where differences between the subject’s preexisting and newfound religious practices, as well as the outcomes of the conversion process, are not evident at the outset.  The book’s analysis of religious conversion builds on prevailing scholarship in the anthropology of religion (in particular Islam) and gender. Both realms of scholarship emphasize differences and the incommensurability between discursive traditions (most notably Islam versus secularism and liberalism), in particular the different forms of gendered subjectivity and agency that these discursive traditions entail. This approach focuses on converts’ socialization or striving in relation to their adopted religious tradition and their replacement of one set of religious precepts and practices in favor of another—a process that reconstitutes and in many cases reinforces differences between religious traditions.

Everyday Conversions provides an alternative reading of religious piety and gendered subjectivity by drawing on the work of transnational feminists—and the genealogies of feminist, critical race, post-colonial, historical-materialist and post-structural theories they intersect with—who examine the complex ways in which discursive traditions are interrelated and historically situated. The book not only analyzes how domestic workers become Muslim through their practice of Islam and the gendered forms of subjectivity and agency that these entail, but like other converts and practicing Muslims, how they apprehend, approach and actualize their pieties through the texture of their everyday lives.  For these migrant women, everyday life includes their preexisting traditions of religious practice, and a gendered discourse of South Asian women’s malleability. Domestic workers’ Islamic conversion underscore the importance of examining the everyday not simply as the raw materials through which pieties are enacted and actualized, but as substances with their own particularities and vitality—including other intersecting discursive and religious traditions, as well as transnational and material relations—that shape the development of piety. These women’s experiences of conversion point to a process that is not linear and unidirectional, marked by an abrupt or radical transition from one religious tradition to another. Rather, their conversions are a recursive process characterized by sticky entanglements and messy overlaps where differences between religious traditions are porous, fluid, and negotiated on an ongoing basis.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AA: Everyday Conversion marks the culmination of my first major research project, so in the absence of a preexisting oeuvre, perhaps I’ll say a bit more about the underlying circumstances animating my research. Though I had never lived or worked in the Gulf, it was far from an unfamiliar place.  Growing up in the thick of Canada’s (then nascent) Muslim diasporic communities, and then working with social justice groups and NGOs in South Asia and the Middle East, in particular Pakistan and Palestine, the Gulf constituted an important nodal point in our lives. Through a combination of family members, friends and colleagues’ stories and gossip, and directly observing some of them moving to, visiting from, or settling back from the Gulf, I had developed a palpable sense of the often complex and layered interconnections between transnational mobilities, laboring, and Islamic movements. This sense butted up against prevailing accounts where the region’s Islamic movements (often glossed as Wahhabi) and the region’s migration and laboring regimes (often reduced to the kefala system) were largely treated in isolation from one another; or, when examined together, were examined in somewhat simplistic and formulaic terms, for example, where migration was treated as a vector in the spread of Wahhabism.  The underlying challenge of this project was to not only learn more about the region’s transnational Islamic movements, non-citizen populations, and migration and laboring regimes, but to also develop a flexible and encompassing analytical framework to account for the interrelation of these processes.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AA: My hope is that this book will be of interdisciplinary appeal to scholars in anthropology, gender and feminist studies, Islamic and religious studies, Middle East, South Asia and Indian Ocean studies, as well as work on migration, diaspora, and transnational studies.  Scholars in these fields will likely recognize the debates different parts of the book take on, but in addressing these overarching questions, I purposely pared down disciplinary jargon and I approached them through an examination of what I think are the most important and compelling parts of the book: my interlocutors’ utterances and experiences. I designed the book in this way in the hopes that it would be broadly accessible across disciplines; that readers would not only be poised to, but also interested in reading across different disciplinary and area studies driven issues and questions—for example, migration specialists would not simply read the ‘migration parts’, Islamic studies scholars the ‘conversion parts’, and Middle East scholars the ‘Gulf parts’, etc.  As I mentioned earlier, one of the underlying goals of this project was to develop modes of research, analysis and writing account for the interrelation between phenomenon and regions that are often treated as distinct and separate.  I tried to accomplish this in both the substance and form of the book.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AA: I am in the midst of conducting ethnographic research on transnational halal tourism networks centered on the greater Istanbul area and Andalucía, and spanning outwards to the Gulf, the United Kingdom and South-East Asia. A recently coined term, halal tourism references an interrelated set of transnational processes that are reshaping Islamic pieties and practice, neoliberal logics and relations, gendered relations, national/world heritage sites, and interregional relations between the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.  My research strives to understand and contextualize sociocultural aspects of why entrepreneurs and consumers consider tourism to be an important site through which to produce Islamic piety and Muslim belongings—even in the face of the uncertainty and risk that mark shifting landscapes of conflict in the contemporary Middle East.

Halal tourism is a rapidly expanding sector of Islamic enterprise that is modeled on and developing on the heels of Islamic banking, finance, and charitable institutions.  A ‘niche’ sector that is projected to grow from $140 to $230 billion over the next several years, halal tourism is developing at twice the rate of the international tourism market as a whole—an industry vital to economic development (accounts for 10% of global GDP and 1/11 jobs worldwide), state-making and nation-building projects, and that constitutes the largest global circulation of goods, services, information, and populations of our time. Halal tourism also accounts for the largest cross-border movement of Muslims in history. While there exist longstanding traditions of travel for the sake of religious striving among Muslims, including forms of scholarly travel, pilgrimage to Mecca, and travel to religious shrines, modern forms of tourism among Muslims are a recent phenomenon that remain little examined. The overwhelming majority of halal tourists are women, and the halal tourism infrastructure centers on producing what actors deem to be proper gender relations among Muslim.  

My hope is that this project on halal tourism will contribute to our understanding of how gendered Muslim strivings are formed in relation to economic relations and circulations, affective and immaterial forms of laboring, new media and e-commerce technologies, and engagement with historical artifacts and monumental/heritage spaces.  

J: How does your book approach the question of gender relations?

AA: Feminist theories and gender analyses animate Everyday Conversions in both content and form. Different sections of the book examine how gender relations and discourses undergird transnational migration, laboring relations, subject formation, biopolitics, household relations, religious conversion and practice, as well as emergent forms of transnational belonging and socio-political organizing. Following a long tradition of feminist ethnography, black, Chicana and postcolonial feminist scholars, narrative renderings of domestic workers’ migration experiences, and evocative tracings of everyday affects, the book uses storytelling to tease out and convey my interlocutors’ experiences without stabilizing, foreclosing, or overgeneralizing their meaning and significance. If narratives have long been the preeminent form and medium of conversion, retellings in and through which conversions are enacted, in this book I have sought to tell a more modest and mundane set of stories that convey moments of slippage, tension, and traces of feelings, thoughts, and impressions of domestic workers’ gendered experiences of everyday conversions.

 

Excerpt from the Introduction:

The politics of the [Gulf] region’s belonging and exclusion, and its politics of Islamic reform, informed much of my thinking when I first began research in Kuwait. As the initial contacts I established with South Asian domestic workers through friends, neighbors, and colleagues snowballed into a network of two-dozen domestic interlocutors, and as polite small talk deepened into sustained conversations and visits, I started to develop a textured sense of my interlocutors’ everyday lives. Yet, I was impatient about what I was learning—what I often dismissed as tidbits of household gossip and details about their everyday routines. To me this was merely background information. I suspected my interlocutors were prevaricating about the circumstances surrounding their Islamic conversions. With time, as I developed more trusting relationships with them, I hoped they would begin opening up to me in earnest and that our discussions would be more frank and forthright.

I attributed what I took to be South Asian domestic workers’ silence about the reasons for their conversions to the different factors that each explanatory frame emphasized. Far from being conspicuous, domestic workers’ silence was readily assimilable to the logics of these explanatory frames. Both liberal-secularist and Islamic reformers understood domestic workers’ silence as further evidence of the veracity of their respective explanations. For groups who analyzed their conversions in terms of the region’s politics of belonging and exclusion, it was clear why domestic workers would not want to discuss their conversions: such discussions would raise uncomfortable questions about the sincerity and motivations for their conversions. Domestic workers’ conversions and their silence were both read as symptomatic of the hierarchical relations that existed between themselves and their employers. In this view, they converted because of their precarious positioning, which also accounted for why they would be loath to discuss their conversions. The reason for domestic workers’ silence was also obvious to Islamic reformers. These women’s becoming Muslim was understood to be an act with its own justification. They had come to understand the truth of Islam, to recognize and return to their fitra, a God-given ability to distinguish right from wrong that marked them as Muslim, for which explanations were superfluous.

When I began my research I was looking for materials—responses, comments, stories and observations—that would confirm or counter these two explanatory frames, yet what I was learning from South Asian domestic workers seemed to evade them altogether. It took me some time to realize that in the repetitive folds of their utterances about everyday work, experiences of migration, and transnational networks of family and friends, domestic workers were not being silent or evasive about their Islamic conversions. Rather, they discussed and experienced their religious conversions in a register that was more muted and subtle, one that is easy to overlook, particularly amidst the din of public debates undergirded by liberal-secularist and Islamic reformist explanations. Both these explanatory frames emphasize a particular set of factors to account for domestic workers’ Islamic conversions, namely, their precarious positioning and hierarchical relations with their sponsor employers in Kuwait, or the influence of Islamic reform movements in Kuwait. The alternative explanation domestic workers were pointing to pushes us to consider how these factors are embedded in their everyday activities and relations. Migrant domestic workers’ Islamic conversions do not develop because of, in spite of, nor do they mitigate the hierarchical relations that exist between themselves and their employers. Their Islamic conversions also do not develop through the direct outreach of Kuwait’s Islamic da‘wa movement. Though related to these factors, domestic workers’ conversions are not reducible to them. These women’s precarious positions and hierarchical relations with their employers, and the activities of Islamic da‘wa movements in Kuwait tell part of the story of their everyday conversions, but not in the ways envisioned by liberal-secularists or Islamic reformers. Domestic workers’ conversion experiences point to how these factors come into confluence and are configured by their everyday gendered experiences centered on household spaces and routed through longer histories of interregional connections between the Gulf and South Asia. More succinctly put, domestic workers’ experiences foreground a realm—the everyday—as crucial to their Islamic conversions. Their conversions are inextricable from their everyday experiences in ways that necessitate a more expansive understanding of both “conversion” and the “everyday.” Their conversions are not marked by an eventful moment, or by an abrupt, radical transformation. Rather, their conversions develop through ongoing processes of transformation, a gradual reworking of their lives embedded in the everyday where the outcomes are not clear at the outset. Domestic workers’ experiences push us to consider how the everyday is not just a space of habit, routine and continuity—a space through which discursive and disciplinary regimes are produced and reproduced—but how the everyday also constitutes a space of contingency, emergent possibility, and ongoing conversion.

Domestic workers’ Islamic conversions were inextricable from their everyday activities and relations, ones centered on their households—both those in Kuwait and more remotely mediated through letters, phone conversations and occasional visits, the households in the places they had migrated from. Although radically different from one another—one focusing on political-economic factors, the other religious processes, one positing a self-interested, cost-benefit maximizing subject, the other a subject shaped through pious practice—both liberal secularist and Islamic reformist explanations of domestic workers’ conversion or “reversion” to Islam emphasize the importance of the household. For groups promoting secular-liberal forms of governance domestic workers’ conversions underscore an important yet fraught gendered limit point to state authority and intervention. Among members of Kuwait’s Islamic movements, households are considered to be sites of paramount importance to the production and reproduction of pious Muslim subjects. Domestic workers’ utterances and my own observations of their experiences in Kuwait highlight the importance of their everyday relations within Kuwaiti households to their Islamic conversions, but in ways that resist reduction to self-interest, pressure or simple assimilation, and that are not accounted for by general public discourse. Households constituted dense and vital spaces of everyday work, intimacy, economic exchange, affect, and hierarchical gendered, aged, raced and kinship relations through which these women came to convert to Islam—sensibilities and practices through which they then came to reexperience and rework their lives. Routed through the household, domestic workers’ Islamic conversions mark the confluence of two realms often assumed to be distinct and separate: the everyday ethical formation of religious subjectivities related to their engagement with Islam, and the reshaping of their comportment and personalities related to their undertaking of affective labor. Their experiences mark the interrelation of political-economic and religious processes without eliding or fetishizing the importance of each to the other. Undergirded by gendered logics and relations, in particular a gendered discourse of South Asian women being naram—a Hindi-Urdu word denoting malleability—these processes are reshaping domestic workers’ subjectivities, affinities, and transnational social networks. Rather than marking a rebirth or abrupt change in their lives, they experienced conversion to Islam as a gradual process through which they came to reengage and rework their lives. This process was neither unidirectional nor linear, but cyclical and recursive: they apprehended, approached, and actualized Islamic precepts and practices in and through the stuff of their everyday lives, which included their hierarchical and often fraught relationships with their employers; the gendered labor they undertake; and their preexisting languages, religious traditions, familial relations and other forms of belonging, including those based on ethnicity and nationality. Domestic workers’ conversion to Islam were marked by emergent relationships and affinities, ones that did not supersede or subsume their existing familial and ethnonational belongings, but developed alongside them, in tandem, and reconfigured them.
Oct 16, 2016 Lebanon
Mandy Turner By :
Mandy Turner

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

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Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.