Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (New Texts Out Now)

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Jul 6, 2018 Region
Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (New Texts Out Now)

Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (New Texts Out Now)

By : Cyrus Schayegh

Cyrus Schayegh, The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).

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

Cyrus Schayegh (CS): Biographical reasons aside, I was looking to answer three questions in this book. How can we leverage what we know about the Middle East to think beyond that region—in “my” case, about the socio-spatial making of the modern world? What do we see when we look beyond nation/alism and empire in the modern Middle East? And how does the Yishuv/Israel fit into the broader history of the Middle East?
Why, how, and in which stages did well-rooted cities and regions mold a dynamic modern world economy and powerful modern states?

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

CS: I will cite the monograph’s opening paragraph to give your readers a sense of the book’s question and scope; then, the excerpt below will give you an idea of how I have tackled that question. The paragraph reads: “This book is an interpretation of the socio-spatial making of the modern Middle East. Why, how, and in which stages, it asks, did well-rooted cities and regions mold a dynamic modern world economy and powerful modern states? How, in return, were cities and regions remolded? And what does the Middle Eastern case tell us about the world as a whole?”

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

CS: I was trained as an Iranist—my first monograph was Who is Knowledgeable, Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900-1950 (Berkeley, 2009)—and continue working on Iran. In this sense, my second monograph, which pivots around lands to Iran’s west, is a departure. It is a continuation in that questions of space already interested me, if vaguely, in graduate school. Also, like this monograph, my recent articles have used the Middle East to develop questions that, I hope, also interest non-Middle Eastern historians. Here are four examples. “Iran’s Karaj Dam Affair: Emerging Mass Consumerism, the Politics of Promise and the Cold War in the Early Post-war Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2012), examined two intertwined processes shaping post-war Tehran: a ravenous demand for electricity, part of a surge in popular expectations for consumer goods and higher standards of living, and the construction of the Karaj Dam to meet that demand. Middle class consumerist expectations developed together with a West-centered but ultimately global maturation of mass consumer culture, with the cultural Cold War, and with the shaky post-1953 regime’s politics of promising higher living standards. The dam became possible when that regime frightened its patron—the U.S. administration, dreading Soviet influence—into helping pay for the project despite reservations in the U.S. Congress and among technical specialists. This dam was not, then, simply a top-down state (or U.S.) project—it was also caused by, and in that sense belonged to, Tehranis. “1958 Reconsidered. State Formation and Cold War in the Early Post-Colonial Arab Middle East,” International Journal of Middle East Studies (2013), posited interlinked state formation surges in response to the 1958/59 crises, and drew three conclusions. 1958/59 formed a milestone for state formation; Syria’s, Jordan’s, and Lebanon’s postindependence histories were shaped by persisting affinities and a shared regional position; and Washington’s low-profile involvement in the state-formation surge illustrates how domestic sociopolitics and regional geopolitics—including the United Arab Republic’s (UAR) peaking popularity and influence in 1958–59—affected U.S. policy in the Cold War postcolonial world. “The Inter-war Germination of Development and Modernization Theory and Practice: Politics, Institution Building, and Knowledge Production between the Rockefeller Foundation and the American University of Beirut,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2015), used the story of the Social Science Research Section (SSRS), founded in 1928 with Rockefeller Foundation money at AUB, to argue that the interwar years in the Middle East were a germination period of development and modernization theory and practice. The period was one of transition: Ottoman influences lingered into the age of European colonialism while decolonization gathered pace and international actors increasingly spoke up. The SSRS reflected this transitionality. It was institutionally part of a new university-foundation-development-missionary complex that would build a social science empire by connecting Western and Middle Eastern networks. Its political aim was to guide decolonization. And, finally, the SSRS addressed the epistemic problem of being Western in the now decolonizing non-West by terming its research/proto-development sites "laboratories" and insisting that its research was universally valid. Lastly, “The Mandates and/as Decolonization,” in Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates (London, 2015) held that in the A Mandates decolonization began around 1930, when independence demands started dominating European authorities’ political agenda. Iraq received "independence light;" in other mandates, parties and institutions were recognized, treatises signed, and elections held. This affirms scholarly views that decolonization had strong inter-war roots. Positing one periodization for all Mandates, it shows that colonial politics ought to be studied within a spatially broad and temporally deep framework (here the Arab East and the Ottoman Empire).

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

CS: “Who’s your audience?” is every editor’s, and hence academic’s, 64,000-dollar-question. My answer turned out to be, “historians in general and interested laymen.” In consequence, the monograph is chronologically ordered  (thematic structures normally work well for area specialists in the know, less well for others.) Each chapter is preceded by a prelude, the story of a person that serves as a human-interest “historical probe” for what follows. Each chapter starts with a concise historical contextualization that, while little news to Middle Eastern historians, helps other readers to orient themselves. On a separate note, while the monograph focuses on the 1830s-1940s, a postscript traces the story to the 2010s. Finally, I tried to improve my English, that is, to get passed my indomitable Germanic urge—I am Swiss Iranian—to write five-line-long sentences with four subordinate clauses that include at least three verbs, all at the end rather than the start of the sentence, while taking pride in too long compound nouns like Obergerichtsbarkeitsinstanzenkurzschlusshandlung (although these are of course dazzingly obfuscating if not plain gibberish) and making sure to liberally salt and pepper the prose with mixed metaphors and baroque punctuations (--) all of which left readers scratching—or shaking!?—their head. Like now.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

CS: I am trying my hand at texts that use Middle Eastern stories to address broad historical questions and/or treat conceptual issues fundamental to the historian’s craft. One article I am currently working on concerns scale, for example; another, “The Misplaced Gift: An Essai on Global Political Culture(s) during Kennedy’s American Empire,” interprets why an Iranian woman, Fakhri Garakani, sent U.S. President John F. Kennedy a needlework masterpiece of Pope John Paul XXIII in 1961.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

To answer the[se] questions [posed above], th[is] book focuses on a transformative stretch of time. It starts in the middle third of the nineteenth century, when a now clearly West-centric form of economic globalization, and modern state formation in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, began in earnest. Rather than concluding in 1918 with the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution and the expansion of European rule in the Middle East, it continues until the 1940s, when a number of Middle Eastern states gained independence. A postscript traces the story to the present. Further, this book has a pivot: Bilad al-Sham, a region central to the Middle East. Its European name was Syria until 1918; thereafter it became known as Greater Syria, in distinction from the new country Syria, because that region was divided into French Lebanon and Syria and British Palestine and Transjordan following World War I. From Bilad al-Sham, the book looks beyond: to neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey, to diaspora communities, and to a variety of imperial and transnational connections. And it peers deeply into the region, at cities, at their ties, and at the global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post- Ottoman nation-states at work within Bilad al-Sham.

What the book finds is that the socio-spatial making of the modern world cannot be fully grasped by studying globalization or state formation or urbanization. Certainly, the world's accelerated interdependence, states’ unprecedented ability to penetrate their territory, and record urban growth all have been instrumental in creating the modern world, distinguishing it from premodern times. But no single one of these developments has been clearly dominant. Hence, neither has any single one been the distinguishing feature of the socio- spatial making of the modern world. This is the case not the least because these developments were inherently interlaced. It is indeed this fact—that cities, regions, states, and global circuits reconstituted and transformed each other much more thoroughly and at a much faster rhythm than at any other point in history—that is the primary distinguishing feature of the socio-spatial making of the modern world. I call that feature transpatialization. It is not one single process. (Neither are globalization, state formation, and urbanization, for that matter.) Rather, it denotes a set of processes: of socio-spatial intertwinements. Put differently, transpatialization is not an empirical unit. It is a heuristic umbrella. Its use, by a historian, makes sense because the processes it bundles unfolded in tandem. Also, it does not assign artificial primacy to any one presumably unitary process or to any one seemingly distinct scale like “the global” or “the urban.” As such, this book picks up the “real challenge” to scholars that global historian Sebastian Conrad recently identified: To “shift between, and articulate, different scales of analysis rather than sticking to fixed territories. . . . In many cases,” Conrad added, “historians have opted for novel geographies, but in the end have tended to then treat these spaces as given.”

…

This book has two sets of conceptual implications. One concerns its underlying argument that the socio- spatial making of the modern world is characterized by cities, regions, states, and global circuits reconstituting and transforming each other much more thoroughly and at a much faster rhythm than before in history. What were fundamental features of that process of transpatialization? The present answer to that question addresses diachronic and synchronic features; I will circle back to, and elaborate on, this answer in the book’s Conclusion.

One diachronic feature was that the structure, function, and even very meaning of cities, regions, states, and global circuits changed over time—and that they did so hand-in-hand. None of these fields—not even cities, which at first glance may appear to be an obvious unit—can be clearly delimited in space or function, as geographers have long recognized. Instances abound. Bilad al- Sham shifted from a patchwork to an umbrella region; moreover, it was both nationalized and globalized in the late nineteenth century, and from the 1930s it was increasingly framed as an integral part of the “Arab world.” Cities became reframed—nationalized—from 1918, and some of their hinterlands became transnationalized. Meanwhile, new nation-states were framed and functioned as multiurban spaces, and furthermore were linked up to transnational spaces.

Moreover, the rhythm of diachronic changes in structure, function, and meaning accelerated compared to the premodern period. Thus, this book is divided into two stages—Ottoman and post-Ottoman. Both stages have phases, each with its own distinct hierarchies and interactive patterns. To make matters more complex, there were two transitional phases, the 1830s–1840s and the 1920s, and the two world wars were not inert interludes but phases of their own that gave transpatialization a distinct spin.

Finally, the accelerated rhythm of diachronic changes meant that characteristics of one phase easily affected later phases. For example, Ottoman state power and European capital at work in Beirut before World War I, together with the city’s intense social networks, for all matters and purposes compelled France to choose Beirut as its Mandate capital. Similarly, Bilad al-Sham’s prewar integration convinced Britain and France to create a customs free zone after 1918 and to coordinate policies, although the two had just divided the region. Such a sociospatial dialectic did not equal geographical determinism, however. For instance, cities and interurban axes did not rise or fall because of their absolute location but because combined urban, state, and global interests and investments in them waxed or waned, as the shifting fates of Beirut, Haifa, Damascus, Aleppo, Amman, and other cities illustrate.

Two synchronic features of transpatialization stand out. One is that relations between the urban, the regional, the state, and the global were not a zero-sum game. For instance, a more intense presence of state power in a city did not mean less city. As a matter of fact, more intensity in one field often meant more intensity in others. The result was a wide range of mutually transformative dual relationships. Some linked a city and the region, for instance, or an interurban axis and world economic forces. Others involved the nation-state. From their very birth following World War I, Bilad al-Sham’s nation-states were shaped by transnationalized—formerly urban, hinterland, and regional—ties. Similarly, the urbanization of nation-states and the nationalization of cities were two sides of the same coin. Moreover, the continued impact of cities’ hinterlands on nation- states had its mirror image in the transnationalization of those hinterlands that now straddled a border. And nation-states’ regionalization went hand-in-hand with the transnationalization of the region, its transformation from a patchwork into an umbrella. Accordingly, Bilad al-Sham’s new nation- states did not simply evolve individually but also as one single set. In the region’s central periphery—the mostly rural zone composed of northern Palestine, southern Lebanon, southwestern Syria, and northwestern Transjordan—this had an ironic effect. Although each post- Ottoman national bit was peripheral and marginalized in its own national economy, the fact that these four bits formed a transnationalized transport crossroad at the center of a still firmly integrated Bilad al-Sham somewhat attenuated their peripheral position within their respective nation-state.

All this has a crucial conceptual implication. It makes little sense to explicitly or implicitly choose any one scale—say, the national—as the “ground floor,” as it were, of one’s historiographic imagination, below and above which are local and global (and regional and imperial) floors. The same goes with choosing “the global” as one’s ultimate yardstick. There is no clear hierarchy among what we may call socio-spatial fields. While focusing on one has advantages (as the below discussion of Christopher Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel shows), it has just as many drawbacks, because the implied hierarchy and order obfuscates as much as it clarifies.

A second synchronic feature of transpatialization was the wealth of triple and quadruple linkages. These embody the above statement that city, region, state, and world economy are not mutually exclusive but enmeshed; hence, change in one affects all. Examples abound. The Ottoman state propped up cities to keep world economic forces at bay—and in the process affected the structure of the region. After 1918, cities exploited and indeed highlighted and built up both old transnational and newly transnationalized linkages to strengthen their position within their new nation-state. And European empire-states helped to open up Bilad al-Sham to neighboring regions and to international circuits of governance and administrative collaboration, and in the process helped to strengthen some cities while weakening others.

…

This book’s second set of conceptual implications concerns modern Middle Eastern historiography as a whole, and the Yishuv’s place in it.

…

[The] book is divided into five chronological chapters. Each one is preceded by a prelude, the story of a person or group, which serves as a “historical probe” for its immediately following chapter. Moreover, each has the same three-part structure. A historical contextualization is followed by an outline of the chapter’s argument, which in turn is substantiated in the chapter’s core part. Relying on secondary sources and on a wealth of primary sources—archival materials, newspapers, books, and open-ended oral history interviews, collected in Lebanon, Syria, Israel / Palestine, Jordan, France, Britain, Germany, the United States, and Switzerland—those core parts work by way of illustration. They present examples that reflect on key dimensions of transpatialization and on their variations. Throughout, those examples concern three broad areas—culture, the economy, and administration.

Chapter 1, “Rise of an Urban Patchwork Region,” covers the late Ottoman period except for World War I, which is the focus of Chapter 2, “Crucible of War.” Chapter 3, “Ottoman Twilight,” moves on to the transformational decade of the 1920s. Chapter 4, “Toward of a Region of Nation- States,” studies the 1930s. Chapter 5, “Empire Redux,” zooms in on World War II. Finally, the Postscript, “The More Things Change . . . ?,” shows that cities and regions mattered—if in yet again changing ways—even after Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan became independent nation-states in the 1940s and after Palestinian statelessness crystallized.”
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.

[…]

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.