Behrooz Ghamari, Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (New Texts Out Now)

Behrooz Ghamari, Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (New Texts Out Now)

Behrooz Ghamari, Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (New Texts Out Now)

By : Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Behrooz Ghamari, Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution. New York: OR Books, 2016.

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

Behrooz Ghamari: (BG): Originally, I did not conceive this as a book. Every New Year’s Eve I began writing little vignettes and character portraits about my years as a political prisoner in Iran. I was released from prison on New Year’s Eve of 1985, so that was the significance of the day for me. For one day every year I removed myself from the routines of everyday life and spent the whole day writing. Writing these stories for me was a mode of meditation and remembrance honoring a life that seemed so distant and disconnected to the entanglements and concerns of my current existence. I did this for more than twenty-five years. Each year I would send whatever I wrote during that one day first to my own family and close friends and then, as I settled more in the United States after I migrated here in 1985, to an increasingly larger circle of friends. Gradually, my New Year’s Eve ritual became something that some people began to look forward to. If I was late sending that year’s story for a couple of days, I received emails asking about that year’s story.

I didn’t want to publish the stories because I feared that they might be appropriated politically in ways that I did not necessarily agree with. I didn’t want my writing, in any shape or form, to serve as a justification for the demonization of Iran. Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, successive governments in the US have pursued a policy of regime change in Iran. In principle, I do not support this kind of colonial intervention. I firmly believe that these kinds of policies, whatever their intentions, inevitably lead to disastrous consequences. By the second term of Obama administration, I thought that the danger of an open policy of regime change in Iran had passed and when a number of my friends told me that I should consider publishing these stories in a collection, I was amenable to the idea.

Of course, in order to publish these meditations, I needed to put them together in such a way that made sense to a reader who did not know me and was not familiar with the historical and political context of the story. I spent a year or so trying to figure out how to create a coherent, publishable manuscript. I tried a number of possibilities and different experiments in genre till I reached the format in which the book exists now.

Rather than a memoir, I think of Remembering Akbar as an autobiographical novel, very similar in terms of genre to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. The main narrator of the story, Akbar, takes the reader through different moments of imprisonment and introduces different characters with intimate details. Although the circumstances are all real in the story, some times the characters are based on composite real people. Writing in the form of a novel also gave me the ability to move with more ease between different planes of reality and imagination. By moving freely between what is real and what is imagined, I thought I could get closer to the experiences of prisoners who do actually live in that kind of space. 

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

BG: After a few years of writing every New Year’s Eve, I realized that a theme had emerged that linked these stories together. Rather subconsciously, I stayed away from retelling the stories through a narrative of tragedy. It seemed peculiar at first to think and write about years of imprisonment, three of which were spent on death row, during one of the darkest moments of Iranian history and not accentuate the pain, the suffering, the extreme violence, and death. Not that I don’t write about all that, but those topics while always present were not at the foreground of my recollections and stories. They were always present without being addressed. Death always appears in every scene abruptly and ephemerally, as something that I don’t dwell in.

I always felt that there was a disconnect between my own experience of imprisonment and the way much prison literature conveys life in prison. Even the insiders’ accounts often replicate the view from the outside that prison life is defined by tragedy. Often, prisoners are depicted as victims of violence without the agency of political actors. I wanted to stay away from that kind of narrative and instead stress the significance of life, rather than death, humor, rather than horror, and inner sources of strength and creativity, rather than suffocating external conditions of inertness.

I am also reluctant to see the world, no matter under what kind of circumstances, in Manichean terms. One might think that in a situation like a death row political prison, the line between good and evil is easily drawn, the boundary between the perpetrators and victims of violence is stable, and moral imperatives are self-evident. I wanted to create a world that could depict the imposing absurdities that shaped prisoners’ lives and produced many layers of ambiguity in a world ruled, at least the way it appears from the outside, by certainties. 

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

BG: I am a scholar of the Iranian revolution. My entire body of work in one way or another deals with the conceptual, political, and historical significance of that revolution. Although I do consider Remembering Akbar as an extension of that work, the experience of writing this was totally a different kind of labor. I think in literary writing, as in art and music, we can see the reflection of our own world in imagined realities. Of course, Akbar inhabits a real world, but I tell the story of that world without reproducing exactly the same geographies and temporalities that conditions it.

I also consider Remembering Akbar to be a book of history from below. The book’s subtitle, Inside the Iranian Revolution, has a very literal meaning here. In our scholarly works, revolutions are often depicted with a fervent romantic appeal. I think there is a certain truth to that kind of depiction. After all revolutions are rare instances in history, moments that societies go through fundamental rearrangement of their political and social orders. During revolutionary movements, people act and behave in ways that are unexpected even to themselves, transformative acts that generate new kind of relations with one’s self and others. I address that in my other book Foucault in Iran. But here, I wanted to move away from that romantic depiction and focus more on the price that one pays for committing revolutionary acts. I wanted to situate the appeal of speaking truth to power next to its actual consequences. This does not mean that Akbar is a position of regret or that he turns away from speaking truth to power, only that he is awash in the consequences.

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

BG: My hope is that the book is read both for its literary merits as well as its substantive significance. I hope that the book could rescue the agony and hardship of torture and imprisonment from the narrative of victimhood and restore a form of dignity in that struggle. I am aware of how effectively these narratives generate sympathies for the alleged victims. But by doing so, the same narratives turn the protagonists into objectified subjects, rather than actors in a political struggle. I have written the book in a language that I hope would have a more universal appeal. There is enough love of Persian poetry or Mahler and Sibelius music there that a wide range of readership would find, I hope, something to relate to Akbar’s faithful struggle to remain sane and whole during his imprisonment.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

BG: I think I would like to continue writing literary works. I have some ideas about a historical novel, but can’t be more specific than that about it for now. I am also working on a project about bringing the work of Ali Shari‘ati, the Islamist political theorist, into conversation with postcolonial theory and introduce the significance of his work to a wider audience. 

Excerpt from the Prelude:

I died at 7:30 in the morning, on December 31, 1984. I do not say this as a metaphor, but in a real existential sense. At that exact moment, I set foot into another world with a reluctant signature at the bottom of a page, a release form. The blurry lines from under my blindfold apparently granted me a medical parole with the proviso, as the guard clarified it, that my body had to be returned to prison for an official identification. It took me a few years to realize that I had actually died in that early morning. That had nothing to do either with survivors’ guilt, or with the weight of life’s banalities. I left behind the self I knew without any worldly means of retrieving it.

Death happens piecemeal. It devours one small part of life at a time. By signing that release form, I simply acknowledged that I had spent too many pieces of my life––a threshold was crossed. After three years on death-row, with a body enfeebled by cancer, I was to leave Tehran’s infamous Evin prison. The euphoric leaders of the revolution had stood at its gates only a few years earlier, pledging to turn it into a museum bearing witness to atrocities of the past. “In Iran,” they declared on that frigid evening in February 1979, “there will be no more political prisoners.”

That was not meant to be.

The boisterous voices that called in unison for the end monarchy now only sang in dissonance.  Communists, socialists, liberals, nationalists, women, workers, university students, ethnic and religious minorities, young revolutionary clerics, and grand cautious ayatollahs claimed with injudicious certainty the true meaning of the revolution. The thirst for power turned friends into foes, revolutionaries into security officers, prisoners into interrogators, community leaders into spies, urban guerilla fighters into assassins, teachers into morality police, students into snitches, friendly chats into insoluble quarrels, and family gatherings into political disputes. In less than two years, we saw with sober eyes that prison walls grew taller and behind them atrocity thrived virulently.

“I am not accepting any conditions for my release,” I said, thrusting the words painfully out of my closed throat.

“Bastard!” A guard smacked me in the head. “You’re done.”

They resumed the banter they’d began the previous evening.

Twelve hours earlier, two guards had come to the infirmary room that I shared with another prisoner, Mohammad, and asked me to pack my belongings. “Pack your belongings” had become the most dreaded expression of my death-row years, and usually had only one meaning.

“You’re going to be freed,” one of the guards announced without trying to hide the self-congratulatory smirk on his face. He turned around and repeated the word “freed,” seeking recognition from the other guard of his ingenious exploitation of the double meaning it evoked.

“You came in vertically, and you’ll leave here horizontally.”

He wanted to make sure that Mohammad and I appreciated his pun.

“But you’ll be crawling,” he added, laughing. “Like the animal that you are.”

I put the few items I owned in a tiny brown bag without engaging the guards. I put my blindfold on without being asked. I knew the routine and only wished to be spared hearing the grating voice of the guard. They took me to the main hallway of prosecutors’ offices and asked me to sit there until someone called me.

I had another, much better incentive for putting my blindfold on without being asked. I wanted to make sure that I used the one I had owned for a couple of years. The one from the middle of which I had carefully pulled out a few threads to make the outside world visible, no matter how shadowy it seemed.

I scouted the crowded hallway, knowing that I was not the only one with the secret see-through blindfold. Majid spotted me first. He inched his way over slowly and finally reached my corner.

“You’re still alive,” he said.

I wasn’t sure whether it was a question or a statement of fact.

“Everyone thinks you’re dead.”

Majid had been 16 at the time of his arrest in 1981. I had witnessed how the soft line above his upper lip turned dark and coarse into a real moustache during the period we spent together in a death-row cell.

“Tonight is the night, Majid,” I told him. Although I did not want to sound pathetic, my wobbly voice suggested otherwise. “They’re setting me free.” I repeated the guard’s words almost involuntarily.

I had been retried for the fourth time a few days earlier. The judge had told me that all options were exhausted and my sentence was going to be carried out soon. “Unless,” he blurted out like an afterthought, “you agree to recant in public.”

Weary of these ultimatums, I’d told the judge that I was already dead and his threats were meaningless.

The judge asked me to take my blindfold off.

Hajj Agha!?” the courtroom guard protested. For fear of reprisal, the judges and interrogators never allowed prisoners to see their faces.

“That’s all right,” the judge assured the guard. “The protocol is irrelevant here.”

The judge had asked me again to remove my blindfold. He too must have thought that I was already dead and thus seeing his face would do no harm.

“When you stand before your Maker on the Day of Judgment, He will ask you the same thing,” the judge warned me. “Why did you not recant? You were given so many chances.”

His face looked tense despite the calm and concerned tone of his voice. He did not look like any of the faces I had imagined him to have. A brownish copious beard, light skin, and dark blue eyes gave away his northern origins. How unusual for an obdurate judge to come from the shores of the Caspian Sea. I thought I should sometime tell mother, who always blamed my father’s obstinate character on his Azeri roots.

“Tonight is the night, Majid.”

I pulled out a few pieces of handicrafts I had made, two prayer beads, though I had no faith in prayer, made with date pits, and a miniature picture frame put together with rolled up paper.

“This is all I have.”

He refused to accept them.

“You’re going to be fine,” he told me, which was the kind thing to say.

“Take it.” I insisted, and he did.

In exchange, he gave me his precious volume of Hafez’s Divan.      “Remember our poetry nights?” Majid whispered as he put the book on my bag. “Drink,” he said, reminding me of how we used to find reading Hafez intoxicating.

I closed my eyes and made a wish. Opening the book somewhere in the middle, I silently asked Hafez to tell me without ambiguity what would happen to me. That was asking for too much. The poet never spoke unambiguously. I opened the book repeatedly with no resolution. I read page after page of the most beautiful words, strung together for the sole purpose of evoking infinite possibilities. I do not know why at the center of such certitude, knowing my fate, I needed Hafez to speak to me with clarity. He refused.

When they called my name, I kissed the book and put it next to Majid’s bag. Even the screeching voice of the guard who called me did not wake him up. I did not realize that almost twelve hours had passed since I’d started reading the poetry.

That was how I died, by stepping out of an inconceivable world and entering another universe of perplexing banalities. I left my former self behind in a place that exists only in incommensurable terms.

For many years, I tried to open a conduit to the world I left behind––to the moment of death, to the humor that preceded it, to the horror that defined it. I tried to describe the unfathomable.

Every New Year’s Eve, I still try to relive the last day of my previous life. I vacate the present at 7:30 in the morning on December 31st and do not return until a new year has begun. Every December 31st gives birth to a story. I write for twelve hours, exactly the same number of hours I spent with the poet Hafez during the last day of my previous life. Sometimes I write five pages, sometimes twenty, and other times only a few lines. I never know what will come when I sit to write. I only know that I should let my body feel the coldness of the hard floor on which I sat for those last twelve hours.

[Excerpted from Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution, by permission of the author, (c) 2016.]

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

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.