Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (New Texts Out Now)

Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (New Texts Out Now)

Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (New Texts Out Now)

By : Johan Mathew

Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism across the Arabian Sea (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

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

Johan Mathew (JM): I can answer this question in two ways, one rather boring and mundane, the other somewhat more interesting and long-winded. In one sense, I wrote this book because it was my Ph.D. dissertation project and I needed to publish it to get tenure! On the other hand, the book has its origins in a long family history that crisscrosses the Indian Ocean. I come from a small Christian community in India known as “Syrian Christians.” Historians tell us that Christian and Jewish traders from the Levant lived and traded along the Malabar Coast of southwestern India from at least the third century CE, and over time they intermarried and converted local families to the nascent faith. The community then grew and divided into various sects, but orthodox members of the community still look to the Patriarch of Antioch as the head of the church. So my ancestors had maintained long-standing but fragile links between the Middle East and South Asia. Then—quickly moving forward two millennia—I was five years old when my father’s job took us from Bombay to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I proceeded to spend most of my childhood (from five to fourteen) growing up as part of the large expatriate community in the kingdom. As many of you may know, the status of South Asians in Gulf is a rather fraught one. My family was solidly middle class, so I was sheltered from most of the negative aspects of this status, but nevertheless, I left the Gulf with a rather ambivalent attitude towards Khaleejis and the wider Arab World. With time and distance, the frustrations and slights of everyday life in the Gulf faded and my fondness for Arab cuisine and culture came to the fore. After college, I began to look back at Riyadh as a fascinating microcosm of late twentieth century globalization, and my own experience as part of a much longer history of connections across the Indian Ocean. So when I began the research for my dissertation, I was anxious to understand my own particular history within the broader strokes of trade and travel across the Indian Ocean. These varied personal experiences and histories slowly seeped out of my subconscious and pushed me to write Margins of the Market.

Margins of the Market is ultimately an effort to reinterpret the history of capitalism through the lens of illicit trade.

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

JM: Margins of the Market is a history of trade and trafficking across the Arabian Sea. As a result, it engages with histories of the Middle East but also South Asia, East Africa, and the Indian Ocean world. Along with a number of recent works in Middle East studies, it turns to the ocean and the connections across these waters to gain a new perspective on what is happening on shore. Moreover, rather than looking west to Europe and the Mediterranean, it looks from the Arabian Peninsula to the East and situates Arab history within a broader network of connections within the Global South.

Margins of the Market is ultimately an effort to reinterpret the history of capitalism through the lens of illicit trade. The book examines how illicit traffics contest and subvert the conceptual and institutional underpinnings of capitalist markets. So it explores the history of slave trafficking to reveal how the notion of “free labor” was defined and subverted; similarly, the history of violence and firearms traffics exposes the constitution of private property rights, and the history of gold and silver smuggling demonstrates how money itself was never a stable unit for measuring value. Consequently, the book argues that this trafficking was constitutive of capitalism itself. Margins of the Market draws particularly on scholarship in economic sociology and science and technology studies for the conceptual framing, and seeks to engage with and push forward this interdisciplinary literature on social studies of the economy.

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

JM: To be perfectly honest, I do not have any previous work to connect this to! I have published several articles and chapters in edited collections, all of which are either chapters from this book or loose ends from this research that did not quite fit in the book.

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

JM: I had written this book, hoping to reach as large an audience as possible. I valiantly worked to excise theoretical jargon, historiographical references, and my own tendency to revel in the complexity of history so that the book might be widely accessible. However, given that it is an academic book about places and people unfamiliar to audiences in the United States or Western Europe, it was never going to be read by the chattering classes. I do hope, though, that the book will be read by faculty, graduate students, and perhaps even the odd undergraduate interested in the history of capitalism or the Indian Ocean world. Initial reports do suggest that the book is being assigned in graduate courses and is receiving a hearing beyond simply historians of the Middle East or South Asia. I hope that the book helps to increase interest in histories of capitalism and political economy in the Global South, as well as deepen a growing trend towards scholarship that takes the material world as a vital object of analysis.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JM: I am currently working on a book, tentatively entitled: Opiates of the Masses: A History of Humanity in the Time of Capital. The project is about hashish and opium and what the consumption of these narcotics can tell us about capitalist labor regimes and the physical strains that capitalist economies impose on human bodies. So I have been researching how industrial workers in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia consumed narcotics as a means of pain relief that made repetitive labor and the physical discipline of factory work tolerable. Rather like the “opiate crisis” in the contemporary United States, I am finding that addiction and the abuse narcotics were connected to the loss of employment and the despair of communities without opportunities for remunerative labor. Thus my interest is not in drug trafficking but rather histories of medicine, the body, and what they can tell us about the lived experience of capitalism.

J: What can these illicit activities, whether smuggling or narcotics consumption, tell us about the larger law-abiding population?

JM: People are often a little suspicious that my work revels a little too much in the salacious details at the margins of normal society. On the one hand, I do confess that I am fascinated by scandalous and sensational quality of these issues, and that they are often not representative of the majority. However, there is little question that illicit trade constitutes a significant proportion of overall economic activity particularly in post-colonial societies. There is even less doubt that the consumption of narcotics is widespread in many if not most societies. Most importantly to me, the very scandalous quality of these commodities suggests that they conceal points of cultural sensitivity. The very sensational quality of trafficking allows us to pretend that these exchanges do not shape the formal free market of our everyday lives. Lurid and traumatic stories of addiction conceal the ways that our bodies and minds are routinely altered by substances we consume. I hope in my research and writing to reveal how the seemingly marginal corners of society are actually peeling edges where the structures that undergird our societies are brought into the light.

 

Excerpt from the Book:

Chapter 2: Trafficking Labor

As Political Agent in Muscat, S.B. Miles had heard some strange excuses from slave traders, but Abdulla al-Kasadi’s excuse was stranger than fiction. Abdulla al-Kasadi, a merchant from the Hadhramout valley in present-day Yemen, was returning from a long sojourn in the Indian princely state of Hyderabad. Accompanying him were his family as well as two young Indian boys, Mohsin and Mubarak, whom he insisted that he had legally purchased in India. Al-Kasadi even produced a deed of sale on government-issued, stamped paper, registered and witnessed by the government of Hyderabad. Perplexed and outraged by this document, Miles sent a letter to the British Resident at Hyderabad, demanding to know how it was possible that slavery was being legally recognized in British India. The resident eventually explained that the Hyderabad government issued this document during the recent famine to facilitate parents or relatives wishing to hand over their child for ‘maintenance’ to a charitable individual. This deed was issued to insure that the biological parents could raise no further claims over the child and to serve as official recognition of this charitable act of adoption. Though he was not pleased, Miles had to accept the exigency of the crisis in Hyderabad and the government’s interest in protecting the rights of adoptive parents. Al-Kasadi, however, had attempted to re-sell the boys in the port of Sur, so he was arrested and the boys were sent to Bombay.

The tortuous transactions of Abdullah al-Kasadi and the convoluted journeys of young Mohsin and Mubarak illustrate the vastly different ways that slavery was framed-out of the Arabian Sea. The same transaction could be documented as selfless charity and as self-interested enslavement. As colonial officials and trading networks engaged each other across the sea, each sought to make visible different characteristics of their transactions. Colonial officials examined this traffic through the paradigm of markets, particularly the slave markets and the slave trades that they had encountered in the Atlantic World. Slave traders, like al-Kasadi, responded by framing their transactions as familial affairs. Colonial officials could not discern exploitation or slavery when it was obscured by relationships like marriage and adoption. European businessmen elided these same relationships of social dependence in order to portray their transactions as the operation of a market in free labor. Free labor was only defined in the negative: anyone that was not enslaved could be categorized as a free and independent market agent. Human beings were still entrenched in networks that constrained participation in social and economic life, but human bodies were de-commodified.  

The visibility of the slave trade was determined by the materiality of human bodies: their size, shape, color, and how these bodies were affixed to ships and other people. A market in free labor necessitated the movement of free bodies, so abolishing the slave trade required the evanescent distinction between enslaved bodies and bodies engaged in free labor. Consequently, abolition in the Arabian Sea was intimately tied to new racial distinctions, and affiliating certain kinds of bodies with slavery. Mobile African bodies were marked as slaves, while mobile Indian bodies were marked as free labor. Furthermore, determinations of age and gender would become flashpoints of conflict between traders and officials, and ultimately these bodies would be marked as labor or family through official certificates of marriage, adoption and manumission. Bureaucracies attempted to disembody labor, but abolition was constantly subverted by traffickers who contrived to frame family bonds as exclusive of bonded labor.

Colonial officials imagined that by destroying slave markets and liberating slaves, a free market in labor would spontaneously form to distribute their labor. While labor could be conceptually abstracted out of laboring bodies, it was much more challenging to disembody labor in practice. Human beings were neither commodities nor independent market agents, rather they were enrolled in multiple socio-economic networks. Absolute freedom was rarely very attractive, rather people wanted control over which networks they were attached to and under what conditions. Thus we are confronted with slaves who when offered freedom, emphatically wished to remain with their former masters. These slaves believed that they could sustain themselves more successfully by mobilizing the networks that they were situated in, rather than liberating themselves from all social bonds. “Independent” freedmen tended to live a very precarious existence or their independence was little more than a contrivance of colonial documentation. Transactions within colonial networks were documented as the movement of free labor, while similar transactions through Arab diasporas were maligned as slave traffics. These regulations did not establish a labor market so much as they framed the flow of bodies through particular networks as the operation of a market in free labor.

Transactions in labor, rather than laboring conditions, were consequently the central concern of British officials. A number of historians have highlighted the persistence of relations of social domination after abolition. While the word slavery was slowly excised from colonial discourse, its characteristics persisted in everything but name. Indeed, colonial officials across the Arabian Sea were hesitant to abolish slavery itself for fear of alienating cooperative elites and the social revolution that this would entail. So, for all their sanctimonious rhetoric, British officials were very much complicit in the perpetuation of slavery. Even their ostensible success in abolishing of the slave trade did not prevent transactions in bonded labor. The illicit slave trade easily overcame the meager imperial efforts to stop it. Abolition also turned a profit for the British Empire, as it became the manager and beneficiary of a massive trade in Indian “coolie” labor. This chapter consequently traces out these multifarious impacts of the abolition of the slave trade in the Arabian Sea. If abolition was a process of framing-out slaves from the market, then the movement of bonded human bodies continued to undergird the market in free labor.

The process of abolishing the slave trade in the Arabian Sea began in 1822 when the British Empire negotiated a treaty with Sayyid Saʿīd al Bu-Saʿīdi, the Sultan of Muscat and Zanzibar. Under this treaty, Sayyid Saʿīd prohibited the export of slaves from his dominions, declaring this “external” trade as piracy. This label granted the ships of the Royal Navy the right to seize slave-trading ships beyond an imaginary line extending from Cape Delgado to Diu. In 1845, Sayyid Saʿīd signed another treaty prohibiting the export of slaves from his African dominions and the import of slaves into his Asian dominions. Sayyid Saʿīd died in 1856, and with his sons warring over their late father’s empire, British officials decided to play Solomon. In 1861, they divided the empire between Asia and Africa, severing the very maritime connection that had made it so wealthy and powerful. Finally, in 1873, the Sultan of Zanzibar agreed to completely abolish the slave trade. This treaty was supposed to be the culmination of Britain’s abolitionist mission, however it proved to be a veneer over the tumultuous process of suppressing the commerce in human beings.

The export of slaves from East Africa continued on a significant scale for a quarter of a century after the abolition treaties of 1873. This large scale trade was mostly stanched by the de-facto colonization of Zanzibar in 1897, yet despite the consolidation of colonial rule along the east coast of Africa a small traffic continued particularly across the Red Sea. In the 1930s, a new slave trade from Iranian and British Baluchistan developed across the Gulf to the Arabian Peninsula. By the 1950s when oil wealth of the Gulf states started to increase their demand for labor, these same networks were activated to supply labor from South Asia and Africa. Thus the abolition of the slave trade altered and re-routed the flow of bonded labor without stopping it.

This chapter argues that abolitionist efforts neglected the smuggling traffic, condoned those slave transactions which resembled kinship transactions, and privileged British businesses in transactions of “free” labor. From their experiences in the Atlantic, British officials assumed that the Arabian Sea slave trade was structured by slave markets. However, the trafficking of slaves across the Arabian Sea did not depend on markets but was largely facilitated by dispersed social networks. Abolitionism in the Arabian Sea had three consequences, firstly it produced a distinct smuggling traffic in slaves. Secondly, adoption and marriage became non-market exchanges by which the substantial traffic in women and children was legalized. Thirdly, British bureaucrats and businessmen simply replaced slave traders in profiting from the disposal of laboring bodies. Subtle semantic shifts allowed British official to document a victory against the slave trade by overlooking, condoning and co-opting labor traffics for their own benefit. The abolition of the slave trade was supposed to establish a free market in wage labor. Instead, both imperial officials and diasporic merchants contrived to frame-out enslaved bodies from the market, while facilitating a traffic in bonded labor.

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.