Samuel England, Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (New Texts Out Now)

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Aug 24, 2018 Region
Samuel England, Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (New Texts Out Now)

Samuel England, Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (New Texts Out Now)

By : Samuel England

Samuel England, Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

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

Samuel England (SE): First of all, I became fascinated with the anxious lives that courtly people led. Figures like al-Sahib Ibn ‘Abbad, ‘Umara the Yemeni, and Don Juan Manuel imbued their belles-lettres with false modesty and vicious little barbs. It seemed to me implausible that their motivation was limited to their personal relationships with the courtiers whom they addressed, which was what most intellectual histories had assumed. I arrived at the conclusion that a great many of these moments of insult, coercion, and self-promotion advanced larger imperial goals that the authors (who generally also held high political posts) had in mind. Not only did that seem more plausible to me than the standard narrative, but it also animated my reading of the whole category of the Middle Ages. I began to see the era’s politics in a new light, which I could not have fully appreciated without an understanding of medieval literature in Arabic and Romance languages. 

Secondly, I sensed that real problems were holding back our modern critical conversation on medieval culture, especially in Arabic studies. The field is very territorial. In my experience, too many scholars take shots at each other over questions of authority and minor philological details, rather than engaging in good faith the new arguments that are coming out. Even if my contribution is small, relative to the general structure of my field, it is a sincere attempt at thesis-driven work, and a statement against disciplinary gatekeeping. I hope that my book encourages open debate among scholars of culture, and Arabists in particular.

An equally timely problem I think the book addresses is even more widespread: scholarship on premodern arts is still not historicist enough. That is especially true of literature. We are still trying to shake off the restrictive theories that our predecessors wrote over the past century—claims about organic unity, “the world of the epic” and its inherent harmony, the constricted religious viewpoint of “medieval man,” etc. Colleagues of mine are working hard to change all that right now. I wanted to be a part of their ongoing effort when I wrote Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition.
By exploring how the sultan formed a vigorous court to produce Arabic martial literature, I examine the Crusades as the engine of cultural production in the Mediterranean.

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

SE: It covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric, and Italian narrative works. The historical span is 950-1350 CE.

Beginning with the Persian Buyids’ takeover of the great Arab caliphate in Iraq, the book focuses upon the courtly struggles that marked and articulated geopolitical conflicts. The struggle over high culture—who best qualified as a poet, the questions of race and religion in forming a courtier, what languages to use in which official ceremonies—informs the crusades, to which the book moves first with the example of Saladin. By exploring how the sultan formed a vigorous court to produce Arabic martial literature, I examine the crusades as the engine of cultural production in the Mediterranean.

From that point, Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition makes its shift to Latinate sources with the profusion of sovereign literature in thirteenth-century Spain, where Alfonso X fashioned himself into a crusading king as well as a combative troubadour. His court would lay the groundwork for the last cultural movement analyzed in this study, the fictions of Saladin and the crusades in Spanish and Italian narrative. It is there that I present my findings on Don Juan Manuel, along with Boccaccio and Dante.

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

SE: Before publishing the book, I had written a number of articles on premodern and modern Arabic. A point to which I kept returning in those short studies was that modern Arab intellectuals have never really stopped reading and rewriting medieval sources in their own works. Even the most stridently modernist writers, who scold other Arabs for being too nostalgic, connect deeply to venerable texts like the Epistle of Forgiveness by al-Ma‘arri (d. 449 H/1058 CE), just to take one example of a piece that has inspired a huge amount of today’s literature and drama.

So, when I wrote Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition, it helped me to understand why certain premodern works and authors remain so compelling in the fields of performance and literary production. The simplistic explanation is that al-Ma‘arri, or Alfonso X, or Dante, was a genius. But I think the more interesting answer has to do with the rapport these medieval writers maintained with their colleagues and their own audiences, the people who lived with them. Reading their works now is an invitation to imagine the full scope of such courtly relationships. The literature holds our interest not just because it is aesthetic or ingenious but because it is a communal project, even if the members of that community did not get along very well.

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

SE: I am very happy to think that medievalists will read it. Beyond that, I am flattered to think that scholars of antiquity and modernity might read it. And, if non-academics read it, then I am ecstatic. The more the merrier, of course.

I guess I am an old-fashioned believer in the value of liberal arts—your basic pro-humanities soapbox speech. It is important that I read good new books coming out on Sappho, the stories of Dhat al-Himma’s exploits, studies on drone warfare, the history of batik dyes, and Edmo Zarife’s career in Brazilian media. In other words, I like to learn what my colleagues are researching. A clear, bold argument is more important to me than the specialty or subspecialty that a book is supposed to represent. I think I offer a new argument about the Middle Ages, and I hope people will enjoy my writing and the topic enough to see how I shape that argument.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SE: My next book is provisionally titled Dictating the Middle Ages: Classical Arabic Performance in Modern Military Regimes. It directly approaches the point I mentioned above, about how Classical Arabic from past centuries inhabits the world now.

The kernel of my current project may be found in the concluding section of Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition, when the study turns to literature festivals of the Iraqi Ba‘ath Party during Saddam Hussein’s rule. As I concluded my first book, I found that the most effective means of showing my reader the impact of long-term medieval movements was for me to investigate their many revivals over the past century. After completing Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition, I kept coming upon revival stories—in archives, state-sponsored dramatic works, historical fiction, poems, and writers’ personal correspondence. Dictating the Middle Ages is my way of bridging my premodern and modern interests, and more importantly, a message to my field that it is not just Islamists who love to talk about medieval glory. Secular military governments rely upon the Classical tradition to legitimate themselves, and oftentimes writers take an active role in that political effort. 

J: What’s a motivation for your teaching and research that would surprise readers?

SE: The Peugeot 504. I realize that it may not seem relevant to my daily work but, if I ever somehow earn royalties from anything I write, I am going to indulge myself and see if I can afford to buy one of those pokey old Peugeots. A close friend of mine in Egypt convinced me long ago that it was the world’s strongest car. We took a ride along the Red Sea coast in the massive station-wagon model that they call the “Break” in French auto-speak. I have never questioned my friend since; that 504 was extremely powerful. Every year, Egypt boasts fewer and fewer specimens of the once-mighty national generic taxi model. The 504 is noble and deserves better than the scrapyards that it is filling, in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.

 

Excerpt from Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts, chapter two:

The Sovereign and the Foreign: Creating Saladin in Arabic Literature of the Counter-Crusade

During the late Abbasid era, the vizierate had become its own industry of cultural contention. As Saladin’s (532–89 H, 1137–93 CE) dynasty consciously adopted Abbasid models of authority and literary means of courtly ascent, the new sultanate fashioned a new such industry. Ayyubid intellectuals around Saladin saw that emphasising administrative prowess – his and their own – in literature had paid dividends for both the Abbasids to whom Saladin cannily pledged fealty and for the Fatimids, whose Egyptian caliphate he would supplant. What was starkly different was the existential threat of the Crusades in many of the cities and fortresses where Islamic rule was supposed to be most powerful. In the centre of the military campaign, courtiers consolidated their ideological efforts around the vital figure of the ruler. Viziers, knights, legal officials, and secretaries engaged one another in order to articulate an effective counter-crusade. Through their ongoing work to win advantage in the court system, they compunctiously maintained some of the rituals of the outgoing Fatimid caliphate in Egypt, while appealing to the more hegemonic Abbasid notion of adab. Composing adab texts allowed Crusades-era authors to claim the kinds of authority enjoyed by Buyid administrators generations earlier in Iraq and Iran. It also gave Saladin’s court key intellectual credentials as it marshalled support for the Levantine military campaign. The discourse of repelling and dominating the Crusaders required authors to contribute not just martial poetics but also a narrative of progressively mastering the enemy. Their texts meant to comprehend dangerous foreigners by using the material knowledge Muslim elites developed at court.

For authors, the social, political, and economic ravages of war seem to have been more of a boon to their livelihood than a threat. The games in which they were engaged for recognition logically fit into the larger struggle for control of the Levant. Framed by the counter-crusade, they acquired a sense of motivation, immediacy, and urgency as courtiers explored well-established rituals of literary contention. Along with the reassuringly unitary image of an invader, they also sought benefit from the presence of a dynamic, literarily minded sultan at the centre of the production. Saladin provided the court with an actively fighting object of praise and a type of organising principle that the courts had not had for several generations. The Ayyubid sultanate, a dynasty of great importance to Islamic cultural development and political history despite its relatively short period of sovereignty, enjoyed a particular form of success unknown to those regimes preceding and succeeding it in the Levant. Faced with a unique cosmopolitan experience of Crusader war, poets constructed an image of the Ayyubid ruler that I term ‘panegyric concordance’: they tapped the hyperbole of their own tradition to make Saladin necessarily world-conquering and just beyond their own powers of description. The sense of an unfinished portrait of glory helped to make the literary craftsman indispensable, the potential challenges from his peers ever-present but also involved in a collaborative effort to form the mot juste for Saladin.

At the same time, the less glamorous but equally contentious exchanges of literature instrumentalised war in multiple genres. Their results in text were highly evocative, and continue to play a paradigmatic role in literature. Fascinating, alien ifranj (‘Franks’, Arabic writers’ catchall to describe Western European enemies) lent invective poetry a special telos, as we will see in the last moments of official Fatimid rule, when Muslim armies were just beginning to gain momentum against the Crusaders in the Levant.1 It is well documented in scholarship that Ayyubid poets consciously reproduced previous stylistic idioms, many of them from Abbasid war poetry. We find the residues of Byzantine and Persian stereotypes in counter-Crusades literature, the familiar enemies providing fodder for new ones. But that observation does not take into account the unprecedented events occasioned by the Crusades, nor their effect upon the production of court texts. For the first time, Islamic sovereignty over one of its three holiest cities had been overpowered by non-Muslims who were furthermore uncontrolled desecrators in Arabic descriptions. Poets and chancery scribes practised their respective arts in places bearing the signs of both Crusader-inflicted damage and collaboration between the enemy and co-opted Muslim officials. Because the threat was multiple, and revealed the conflicted loyalties of Muslim subjects, elites in the empire needed to imagine a reassuring singular figure presiding over the court. In the course of two generations, the elite intellectual sphere would come to group around Saladin. As political and military leader, successful antagonist to Crusade forces, courtly conspirator, and of course patron, he provided a logical centre-point for literary creation. His literary persona synthesised the major thematic ‘objectives’ (aghrad) of the era’s poetry: through him, the court exalted in panegyric, tapped the imagery of amorous verse, ridiculed enemies, and called the populace to arms. In official prose documents, too, scribes wrote the language of political authority into his pronouncements and their own descriptions of his sultanate. Then, in Europe, Saladin would become a versatile and potent caricature in Western literature during the eight centuries following his death, a phenomenon addressed in this book’s final chapter.

The scenario of politically minded belles-lettres centring around an extraordinary individual anticipates modern academic treatments of Saladin. He presents us with a major challenge as we undertake a sociopolitical, historicist critique of the court – not because of any inherent features of his reign but because modern writers still contend with the fantastic elements of his European portrayals from the Middle Ages onward. While he is among the most studied figures in Islamic history, the copious poetry produced for and about him is largely terra incognita for philologists and critics. The trend has attracted notice in recent decades, even as little work has been produced to reverse it. ‘The Sultan loved poetry,’ Robert Irwin notes.

He was saturated in it. He knew by heart the Hamasa of Abu Tammam. Saladin even composed poetry himself. Besides Arabic, he seems to have some Persian ... We won’t fully understand Saladin ... until we come to grips with the role of poetry in shaping [his] ideals and sensibilities.

Saladin’s well-documented poetic attachments and sophistication are, as Irwin contends, ample reason to begin studying him as a major figure in Arabic literary history. His Persian knowledge and his reputation as an author – bringing to mind Ibn Abbad – are not proven in documents of his own court. If it is true that Saladin composed literature, such texts have not been discovered. What survives, however, is the work of his courtiers, the focus of this chapter.

Judged from a Formalist remove, there is little that is exceptional about the texts of Saladin’s court. Much as his political role was distinct but not revolutionary, literary norms were by no means upended during his tenure. The sultan’s politics themselves were very much a logical function of his predicament first in Syria, where he became a military officer, and in Egypt during the twilight of Fatimid rule, where he achieved supremacy. There can be no doubt, however, that his reign created distinct paradigms for his Ayyubid successors and the much longer-lived Mamluk regime that would go on to dominate the region. What distinguishes his reign, so far as literary culture is concerned, is the unique role that Classical Arabic writers assigned him over two centuries of textual production. During his ascendancy and reign, but even more so in retrospective work of historical adab, Saladin became an uncommonly potent symbol of ideology and individual monarchical rule.

The sultan was, as befitted any logocentric ruler, an arbiter of taste. But what will compel our critical attention is his extraordinary status as a literary fiction, a figure invented for the many ideological purposes that literature served in his time. To articulate the name Saladin in the context of studying medieval Islamic life is to invoke multiple historic and artistic identities – this was true during his lifetime and is perhaps even more the case now. This chapter will attempt to understand the first such identity formation, the process by which poets and prose writers strove to make the sultan an icon, and the consequences that process had for the Middle Ages. I will examine two distinct but deeply interdependent forms of competition in literature, one in the service of the other. The poetic contests of the kind we have seen in the Abbasid empire continued under Saladin and, for the most part, set the same priorities as antecedent courts had done. But they also set the terms for a larger conflict. Throughout Saladin’s vizierate and then his sultanate, his courtiers designed a literary Saladin who held the promise of success against the Crusades. He relieved the trauma of the Franks’ presence in Islamic territory and the radical difference that they represented to the Muslim administrative class of society.
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.