New Texts Out Now: Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy, eds., American Studies Encounters the Middle East

New Texts Out Now: Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy, eds., American Studies Encounters the Middle East

New Texts Out Now: Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy, eds., American Studies Encounters the Middle East

By : Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy

Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy, eds. American Studies Encounters the Middle East. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

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

Alex Lubin and Marwan Kraidy (AL and MK): In 2011, just as the so-called “Arab Spring” was underway, the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut hosted an international conference to explore historical and contemporary connections between the United States and the Middle East. The conversations at the conference ranged from historical analyses of the role of Muslim immigrants in the United States to the contemporary United States geopolitical relationship to the Arab world in general. Scholars came from over twenty countries, and from fields like political science, history, communications and media studies, literature, Middle East Studies, and American Studies. It occurred to us (Alex was directing the center and Marwan was the Edward Said Chair of American Studies at AUB the year that the conference took place at a pivotal moment in U.S. relationships with the Middle East. Amidst a moment of decline in American prestige across the region, coupled with seemingly ubiquitous American cultural products, the Arab world was making new demands for autonomy from the super powers, as well as local demands for new forms of citizenship. How could we explain the seeming dominance of American culture across the Middle East alongside the obvious decline in the United States’ ability to dictate political change in the region? The book emerged, then, as an attempt to understand not only what American Studies looks like in the Middle East, but also how the Middle East makes sense of America during a particular historical conjuncture characterized by the end of the Cold War and the American Century, and the rise of new calls for Arab sovereignty and citizenship.

The project also emerged from a recognition that American Studies in the Middle East was different than American Studies in the U.S. To take one examples, where the question of Palestine in the U.S. discourse was largely ignored–except by a notable group of Arab American intellectuals and their allies–in Lebanon and across the Middle East, one couldn’t attempt to understand the U.S./Middle East relationship without studying the U.S./Israel “special relationship”. The Palestine question, and U.S. geopolitics across the Arab world, are central to American Studies in the Middle East and therefore, the field had to engage with the geopolitical realities of U.S. empire in ways that the discipline in the U.S. did not.

American Studies Encounters the Middle East attempted to shift the vantage point from which we normally study America, by considering how America looks in and from the Arab world and beyond, as well as how it looks in the movement from one place to another. 

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

AL and MK: The book explores transnational encounters by considering early American literary representations of Islam, nineteenth century Muslim encounters in the United States, contemporary cultural exchanges in hip hop music, as well as geopolitical relationships and histories between the two regions. The collection strikes a balance between U.S. visions of America in the World, and Arab reception of, and projections about, American culture. It combines the work of American studies scholars, cultural studies scholars, media scholars, and political and literary historians, and Middle East Studies scholars.

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

AL and MK: The book connects to both authors’ recent publications.  Alex’s Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro Arab Political Imaginary (UNC Press) and Marwan’s recent, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard UP) each engage the sort of transnational scholarship evoked in American Studies Encounters the Middle East, and by this we mean relationships of circulation and exchange between Arab countries, and between these countries on the one hand, individually and as a group, and Africa and/or America on the other hand. Both of us worked on our single-authored monographs while developing our co-edited project; so, in many ways, our recent monographs are reflections of, as well as contributors to, this co-edited volume.

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

AL and MK: We think that the book will be useful not only to scholars in American and Middle East Studies who think about the meaning of transnational scholarship, but also to less specialized audience interested in various topics covered in the book, such as the historical encounters of Muslim migrants with the U.S., or contemporary audiences of Arab hip-hop, or readers interested in the U.S. political relationship to Gulf monarchies.  The book may also be useful to anyone interested in a snap-shot of scholarship taking place at a particularly optimistic moment of the Arab uprisings.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AL and MK: Alex is writing a history of the cultural politics of what he calls the Afro-Asian decade in Cairo, Egypt during the 1960s.  At a moment when several Third World conference took place in Cairo, there was a vibrant cultural encounter between African American poets, novelists, and musicians with Egyptian counterparts.  In the dissonant politics and cultural encounters that characterized the third world movement in Cairo, new cultural forms developed, including a “free jazz” that would inspire artists ranging from Sun Ra to Randy Weston. 

Marwan is working on a critical-theoretical excavation of the war machine as a historical figure, tracing an arc that goes back to the historiography of Ibn Khaldûn to the postcolonial thought of Achille Mbembe, by way of the new materialism of Deleuze and Guattari. It uses the rise of the organization that calls itself “Islamic State”—or, as many Arabs call it, Daesh—to revisit our comprehension of the connections between speed, spectacle and securitization, and seeks to elaborate an understanding of globalization through the prism of temporality.

Excerpt from Introduction:

In the hills above the Casino du Liban, in the predominantly Maronite Catholic Keserwan district of Lebanon, sits El Rancho, a Texas-style dude ranch that hosts the Cedar Stampede Rodeo, a Sunday Texas barbeque, evening campfires, and deluxe lodging in “genuine” Sioux Indian tepees. El Rancho is a tourist destination in which visitors, some of whom may be both Lebanese and American, recreate a mythic U.S. frontier, a landscape populated by images of cowboys and American Indians made popular in globalized U.S. culture. El Rancho promises visitors “an authentic Tex-Mex experience,” where they can “set off on a dude ranch escape.” For Lebanese and regional visitors who may not know the meaning of the term “dude ranch,” the El Rancho website provides ample definition and examples. According to its advertising, “El Rancho Lebanon is modeled on the history of ranching in the United States, a history that can be accessed through the iconography of the ‘wild west’ made popular in the Hollywood Western.” Visitors can go to El Rancho to indulge in Angus beef hamburgers imported from the United States in a restaurant that recreates a western saloon, with John Wayne paraphernalia. Moreover, visitors can walk through a recreated western town filled with wooden statues of cowboys and forlorn images of defeated, but noble, Indians.[1]

El Rancho is a private venture owned by a Lebanese businessperson, but the U.S. consulate and several U.S.-based corporations such as Baskin-Robbins and Krispy Kreme sponsor some of its activities, including the annual Cedar Stampede Rodeo. In this sense, although El Rancho is a private Lebanese venture, it is connected to the United States not only because it features a version of U.S.—Tex-Mex—culture but also because it receives authenticity through occasional sponsorship of the U.S. consulate.

Although El Rancho promises an authentic Tex-Mex experience, its symbols and icons have been reorganized and shuffled so that various particularities of western U.S. expansion are confused. The advertised “Sioux Indian Teepees,” for example, might be found in the Northern Plains of the United States, but not in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Moreover, the activities available at El Rancho are not exclusively related to the mythical U.S. west. Among the activities advertised on the El Rancho website are “Espionage Wars” or “Roman Games.” This mish-mash of seemingly random cultural activities presents a mediated vision of American culture, inaccurate in its history and geography but compelling in its iconography, disassociated from its original referent.

What makes El Rancho so fascinating is not only how U.S. culture travels internationally and is received in non-U.S. destinations but also how American culture circulates between and within complex geopolitical realities. The United States relationship with Lebanon is currently tense, as Hezbollah—a political party the United States regards as a terrorist organization—controls many areas of the Lebanese government. Moreover, Lebanon’s capitol, Beirut, was the scene of a major U.S. military defeat, as U.S. forces intending to intervene in Lebanon’s bloody civil war came under attack in 1983. Following the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut, in which 299 American and French soldiers died, President Ronald Reagan prevented all direct, nonstop flights from Lebanon to the United States, a ban that continues to this day. Moreover, U.S. support for successive Israeli military occupations and attacks in Lebanon has only escalated Lebanese criticism of U.S. foreign policy. During last two decades of the twentieth century Lebanon had been the scene of covert U.S. military intervention as well as kidnappings and assassinations of U.S. diplomats and American citizens. Given the thorny realities of U.S.–Lebanese geopolitics, it is even more curious why American culture circulates so prominently in Lebanon at places like El Rancho. Why would the American frontier play such a prominent role in a Lebanese tourist venue at a time when U.S. foreign policy is under intense Lebanese scrutiny?

Within the United States, the western frontier mythology thrives as well. It sutures together stories of cowboys and Indians in sparsely populated western landscapes with an imagined past—one that is used to explain who Americans are (or are not) as “a people” and often to hide the way this past is tied to a legacy of settler violence that underwrites much of the United States’ national development. But what might these things mean in Lebanon? Perhaps the U.S. west represents something altogether different. It might signify how icons of American culture circulate in the Arab world, but it might also mean something about the borders and frontiers of Lebanon or about the location of colonized “reservations”—Palestinian refugee camps—within Lebanon’s borders. 

Perhaps El Rancho is rooted to a genealogy of American exceptionalism intended to elide the legacy of conquest in the making of American culture and to a Lebanese desire for a (translated) version of American frontiers. Beyond the influence of the United States, El Rancho assumes many meanings as American culture gets reconstituted in ways that make tenuous its cultural and material referents. Hence, there is both something especially American and something foreign to America that El Rancho Lebanon is attempting to market and that the U.S. embassy is occasionally willing to sponsor. The seeming chaotic pastiche of El Rancho Lebanon might expose the contradictions inherent to both states and in this way becomes something that resides beyond any one nation. In its travels, American culture gets translated in ways that reveal the political unconscious of both its location of origin and its arrival destination.

American Studies Encounters the Middle East attempts to understand the dense and overlapping global cultural processes that make El Rancho intelligible as well as the complex narratives El Rancho tells about the United States and about globalized American culture. We are interested in how U.S. culture travels and the curious ways that notions of “America” transform in the process of international and global circulation. Moreover, in this collection, we are interested in how American culture circulates in the Middle East and North Africa within changing geopolitical contexts. We therefore focus our analysis on the historical encounters, especially of the Middle East in America in the making of early American culture as well as the contemporary encounter as it is shaped in the context of changing U.S. global prestige and political realities across the Arab world. These are topics that have renewed currency in the present moment given the changing geopolitical relationship of United States to the Middle East in particular.

El Rancho is but one example of the ways that cultural meanings are produced through movement, travel, and media—the Hollywood western being a relevant and familiar example in this case—as the idea of America is translated by and for Lebanese audiences. Yet, like all travel, cultural flows move within particular and shifting geopolitical topographies. It was the great contribution of Birmingham cultural studies scholars to illustrate how culture and material conditions are dialectically related in ways that suggest culture as a site of negotiation of material politics and not merely a reflection of representation. And yet, despite the important influence of Birmingham cultural studies over the discipline of American cultural studies, and despite the internationalist bent and transnational approach of leading figures like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, questions of international geopolitics and U.S. foreign relations—in the Middle East, especially—have been largely overlooked by the discipline (and were sometimes relegated to postcolonial theory, a formation that U.S. cultural studies has tended to keep at an arm’s length). As a result, and despite the avowedly anti-exceptionalist bent of American studies since at least the 1970s, the field remains largely rooted to an exceptionalist framework in which knowledge about the United States produced within the United States remains a privileged vantage point.[2]

Our goal with this collection is not merely to continue the ongoing process of internationalizing American studies approaches by including non-U.S. scholars and viewpoints but rather, by featuring multidisciplinary perspectives on the Arab–U.S. relation from scholars based in both the Middle East and the United States, we aim to place the discipline in transit in order to explore how cultural forms circulate transnationally and are shaped by and contribute to international geopolitical contexts. In particular, we seek to understand the possibilities of American studies during a moment of profound geopolitical transformation and during a historical conjuncture we identify by the end of the “American Century” and the ongoing social upheaval of the so-called Arab Spring. This is a conjuncture dominated by global economic and political crises that have momentous implications for the Middle East and pose unique challenges to scholars attempting to understand the meaning of U.S. economic, military, and cultural power.

The internationalization of the discipline of American studies is not new, having its roots in the earliest years of the institutionalization of the field. Throughout the 1950s as American studies programs were forming across the American academy, similar programs were formed in allied European countries. American studies institutes at Salzburg and Bologna led to the formation of a European American studies center in the mid-1950s. By 1964 the Fulbright-Hayes Act instituted an American studies international exchange program that helped foster university exchanges and American studies lecturers abroad, especially in allied Western European countries. Alongside the Fulbright program, the United States Information Agency (USIA) spread American history and culture as cultural diplomacy, and in this way the spread of the discipline of American studies would be carefully managed alongside efforts to spread an image of American power. American studies programs emerged in allied countries as a means to consolidate U.S. power over “the West,” even as scholars within international American studies centers brought their own interests and agendas to the project.[3]


1 www.elrancholebanon.com (accessed January 21, 2013).

2 Amy Kaplan made the observation in her introduction to her 1994 coedited volume with Donald Pease that the study of culture often lacks an analysis and accounting of imperialism. While much has changed in fields of cultural studies since the publication of Cultures of United State Imperialism, it remains the case that the Middle East is something of an absence in studies of U.S. imperialism. Moreover, Donald Pease has argued that as American studies has criticized American exceptionalism, it has regularly reinscribed another sort of exceptionalism whereby the America becomes the world, or American always signifies the U.S. State. See, for examples, Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); and Donald Pease, “Re-thinking ‘American Studies’ after U.S. Exceptionalism,” American Literary History, September 29, 2008, 19–27.

3 For an analysis of the history of American studies in the Middle East, see Alex Lubin, “American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine,” American Quarterly 68, no. 1 (March 2016).

[Excerpted from American Studies Encounters the Middle East by Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy. Copyright © 2016 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu.] 

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.