Teresa Pepe, Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (New Texts Out Now)

Teresa Pepe, Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (New Texts Out Now)

Teresa Pepe, Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (New Texts Out Now)

By : Teresa Pepe

Teresa Pepe, Blogging from Egypt: Digital Literature, 2005-2016 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

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

Teresa Pepe (TP): I started this research in 2008, when I met a number of young women and men in Cairo who were blogging in Arabic. I was a blogger myself at that time, and I was so fascinated by the fact that whereas for me this was merely a hobby, for them this activity was a very serious one, to the point that they would dedicate hours to reading, researching and writing online, and to the point that they would describe their occupation as “blogger” (mudawwin). Blogging had emerged in 2004 mostly as a tool for political activity, to coordinate the activities of the newly emerged Kifaya grassroots movement. For this reason, academic research had primarily focused on blogging using a political and public sphere perspective, often leaving behind what was actually written on these blogs. However, by 2008, the community had expanded from a few hundreds to forty thousand members: while some were still preoccupied with politics, the majority of Egyptian bloggers at this time were using blog as a means of self-expression and literary creativity, experimenting with the anonymity and interactivity provided by the medium. When I accessed this online community, I discovered beautifully written text, full of imagination, humor, social criticism, and written in a style that significantly departed from the one used in print Arabic literature. It was clear to me that these texts deserved to be studied as literature, while at the same time they were changing the way Arabic literature is written. 

...a journey that takes the readers through an exploration of the blogging literary movement...

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

TP: The book is organized as a journey that takes the readers through an exploration of the blogging literary movement in Egypt. It explores young Egyptians’ blogs as forms of autofiction. The research is based on a sample of forty personal blogs written and distributed online between 2005 and 2016, which is before and after the events of the 2011 revolution and the “Arab Spring”. Among this corpus, six blogs are presented as case studies and analyzed more closely in the book, namely: Wassiʿ Khayalak (Widen Your Imagination) by Ahmed Naji; Ma Bada Li (What Seemed to Me) by Amr Ezzat; Tanatif Maʿat (Ma3t’s Bits and Pieces) by Mona Seif; Yawmiyyat Imraʾa Mithliyya (Diary of a Gay Woman) by the writer who uses the pseudonym ‘Emraamethlya’; Al-Kanaba al-Hamra (The Red Sofa) by Bilal Husni; and Yawmiyyat ʿAnis (Diary of a Spinster) by Abeer Soliman.  

Borrowing methods and theories from print and digital literature, sociolinguistics, media studies and anthropology, the study investigates choices of authorship, titles, narrative strategies, linguistic and stylistic varieties, and recurrent themes in the texts. The literary investigation of the blogs is carried out on the backdrop of the qualitative interviews made with the blog authors. The book examines the bloggers’ reasons for blogging, the effect of fictional self-construction on their daily life, and how blogging helped them to depict their internal world (their emotions and bodies) and to deal with the constraints of the outside reality, including their families and social groups, traditional religious authorities and the spheres of politics and professional life. 

In addition, the book discusses the relation between the blogs under examination and the events of the “Arab Spring” in Egypt. It describes how the revolution was “imagined” before 2011 and how it was then experienced by the bloggers. Finally, it discusses how blogs have evolved in the last years after 2011 and what is left of the blog in Arabic literary production. Here, I show how blogging continues to impact Arabic print literature, in terms of young authors’ access to the literary field, their experimentation with language and genre, and the importance of the visual. The novel Istikhdam al-Haya (Using Life, 2014) by Ahmed Naji, mentioned before, and Youssef Rakha’s novel Bawlu (Paulo, 2016), are recalled here to discuss the link between the blog, the dystopic novel, and new literary styles in Egypt.  

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

TP: This book is based on the doctoral dissertation that I completed in 2014 at the University of Oslo. The book focuses on the same sample of primary sources, but it differs from the dissertation in significant ways. First of all, it addresses a longer time-frame, as it follows the blogging community and its literary production from 2005 until 2016, while the dissertation stops in 2011. Secondly, the book addresses some issues that I did not have time to explore in my PhD research: one is the question of language, and the stylistic choices made by bloggers; the other is the impact of blogging on recent print literary production. 

J: What were the challenges for writing this book?

TP: The first challenge derives from the extensive amount of texts present on the Internet. Navigating through the blogosphere and choosing blogs that might be classed as "representative" was a huge task. The sample I eventually came up with cannot claim to be fully representative. Yet, I have tried to give it at least a certain degree of representation by applying some precise criteria for the selection of the sources.  

Another challenge lies in the language in which Egyptian blogs are written. Since the texts are not edited and are written by non-professional authors, they include typographical errors and unclear sentence structures. In the book, I have inserted the Arabic text as it appeared on the blog, because I wanted the reader to get direct access to these sources and familiarize themselves with this style. 

The final challenge has to do with the fact that this study analyzes a very recent cultural phenomenon. On top of this, the political situation in Egypt has changed drastically since I started this research. I started in October 2010 when “something was in the air”, but nobody was expecting a “revolution” to take place. I carried out fieldwork in Egypt immediately after the 25 January revolution (February–May 2011), and in the following year (December 2011–May 2012) At that time, many of my informants were often busy with political activities, interviews, or were simply stuck to their mobiles or laptops to check what was going on and to share news and updates. When I returned to Cairo in 2015, for one year, I found several of my informants struggling with political despair. The revolution seemed like a far-off dream that had been replaced by a much crueler nightmarish reality. 

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

TP: I hope this book will be read by undergraduates, graduates, and scholars in different disciplines with an interest in Arabic literature and culture. As the book offers a wide range of texts in Arabic retrieved from the Internet (and translated by me into English), I hope it will also be read by specialist and students in Arabic sociolinguistics, and open up new venues for research on how Arabic language transforms on the Internet. In addition, I hope the book will appeal to anthropologists and social scientists with an interest in Arab societies and youth cultures. On a methodological level, I hope the book will inspire future scholars to integrate more closely philological approaches like textual analysis within anthropological research, conducted through interviews and participant observation, and vice versa; I hope it will inspire future literary scholars to enrich their textual analysis with an observation of the literary field in which authors and texts are situated.  

Finally, even though the book focuses on a certain genre and on one Arabic cultural region, I hope the wider scope of the book will appeal to a readership beyond Middle Eastern studies, particularly among those interested in digital humanities, life-writing and technologies of the self. The autofictionality of the Internet is a timely topic that needs further exploration. Blogging from Egypt explores the original features that autofiction develops on the Internet in the Arabic-speaking realm, but develops a theory and methodology of "digital autofiction" that could be applied to subsequent studies of digital texts written from different geographic areas. 

Most of all, I hope the book will be translated into Arabic and will be read by the bloggers who participated to this study. Their artistic talent needs to be recognized on a local and global level, and I hope Blogging from Egypt will contribute to that. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

TP: I am currently working on a project dealing with future fictions, ecology and climate change. Several bloggers have turned to dystopian novelistic writing, after experimenting with blogging. I am researching the political implications of this dystopia, and its relation to environmental questions in the Arab world. This work is part of a wider research network that I have built at the University of Oslo, interested in comparing this phenomenon across the Middle East and South Asia. 

Besides this, I am preoccupied with the history of media in the Arab World and its impact on literature and culture. Together with my colleague Barbara Winckler, I have set up a research forum on “Media Transitions in Arabic Societies,” where we work with a number of colleagues interested in analyzing the impact of digital technologies on Arabic literature and cultures by comparing it to previous media transitions, such as the invention of writing in the ninth century, and the implementation of print technologies in the nineteenth century. 

 

Excerpt from the Book

From the Introduction: Egyptian Blogs between Fiction and Autobiography (pp. 1-4) 

The adoption of the Internet has favoured the proliferation of new forms of autobiographical writing and literary creativity all over the world. Blogs, in particular, are used by Internet users worldwide as a means of recording and sharing their writing. The popularity attained by the blogging phenomenon and the original features of blog texts have attracted the interest of international scholars. More specifically, a specific kind of blog defined as the ‘personal blog’, which consists of ‘a blog written by an individual and focusing on his or her personal life’, has spurred significant debate. Most academics agree that personal blogs should be considered as forms of diaries, thus inserting them into the category of biographical writing (in effect, history). It is true that the personal blog shares a number of features with the diaristic genre, as its content is mainly autobiographical and it consists of dated entries, arranged chronologically in reverse order.

However, besides recording one’s life, personal blogs allow users to play with their identity, to reveal aspects of their personality while inventing new ones. Take for example, the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, which in June 2012 spurred on so much controversy worldwide. This personal blog was purportedly written by ‘Amina Abdalla Arraf Omar’, who claimed to be a lesbian Syrian-American living in Damascus, in the midst of the political uprising instigated a few months before. Her story left readers worldwide in suspense when a post appeared on her blog, claiming to be from her cousin, announcing that Amina had been kidnapped by three armed men. International human rights organisations, journalists and even the American embassy took active steps for her release. The Facebook page rallying to the cause to ‘Free Amina’ gathered 15,000 people from all around the world. When it turned out that ‘Amina’ was actually Tom MacMaster, a forty-year-old American living in Edinburgh, and that the blog was fictional, everybody accused him of ‘lying’. The above incident points to the fact that blogs are usually read as factual accounts, but at the same time the form gives their authors the opportunity to play with identities, to reveal aspects of one’s personality, while at the same time inventing new ones. It shows that blogs are symptomatic of how the Internet questions many of the assumptions we make about texts, and therefore their generic conventions need to be studied in greater depth.

Besides the record of the blogger’s daily life, personal blogs include short stories, film reviews, comments about music, book reviews, song videos, and calls for meetings, social events and political demonstrations; therefore, the fictional is blended with the outside reality and the extra-literary world, the personal is strongly fused with the public, and the personal and the political are not discernible. Therefore, reducing the personal blog to no more than online diaries or domestic ranting, we are effectively casting aside un-theorized an entire mode of blogging that has a significant literary potential, while personal blogs might fruitfully be approached as an emergent literary form. So far, the question of how blogging may be studied as a literary form remains to be investigated. This book takes up this challenge by focusing on the Egyptian blogosphere as a case for analysis. 

Indeed, since 2005, blogging has emerged as a noteworthy phenomenon in Egypt. In January 2002, the Egyptian government invested largely in IT infrastructure while keeping the Internet relatively uncensored. As a result, the number of users – that was estimated at 220,000 in 1999 – increased to 5.2 million by September 2006. In particular, the introduction of Web 2.0 technology and blogging tools to write in Arabic in 2005 encouraged many young Egyptians to use blogs as a space for self-expression and literary experimentation, rendering the subgenre of personal blogs particularly prominent. In a period of political and social turmoil, and of state and self-censorship in both traditional media and society, blogs appeared to many Egyptian young people as the best tool for self-expression and self-discovery. The availability of personal spaces, unedited and relatively uncensored, encouraged amateur and more skilled writers to pursue their literary ambitions and to try their hand at writing in the form of a new, uncategorised genre. The anonymity of the medium allowed young people, and particularly women, to talk about themselves in a way they were not allowed to, both in traditional media (for religious and political reasons, but also because of the difficulty of entering the cultural field) and in public (because of social pressures), to express criticism and frustration about daily life without losing social credibility. The interactive nature of blogs made it possible to connect people with similar interests and values, and to receive immediate feedback and advice on their writing. In addition, the possibility of combining writing with hyperlinks to other texts, audio and video elements favoured the proliferation of new styles and new aesthetics. The absence of gatekeepers on the Internet allowed bloggers to experiment with a writing style that mixes elements from the vernacular, standard Arabic, youth slang and English, in a way that finds no precedent in modern Arabic literature. 

Since 2008, blogs have also left an important mark in the Arabic/Egyptian literary field. This came after more and more publishers started to search the Arabic blogosphere to find new literary voices, attracted by the original style and content of these blogs, and by the high number of followers that they had managed to gather. In particular, in 2008, three Egyptian blogs written by three women bloggers were published by Dar al-Shuruq, the biggest private Egyptian publishing house, and entered the best-seller lists of Cairo bookshops. Arab literary critics and academic scholars were divided into those who devalued the digital space as a space for amateurs and non-professional writers, and those who highlighted the original literary features of these texts. Thus, since then, terms such as ‘mudawwanāt adabiyya’ (literary blogs) and ‘adab al-mudawwana’ (blog literature) have appeared frequently in several newspapers, literary journals, academic papers and conference panels. The use of these terms evidences that blogs are looked at as a unique genre in Arabic literature. However, their specific literary features, including the reading pact on which they are based (whether they should be read as fictional/non-fictional), remain unexplored. More than ten years after its emergence, blogging has prompted a boom of literary publications written by young emergent writers that span memoirs, novels and satirical literature and that mix formal and more informal varieties of Arabic. Many of these authors have come to print publication after testing their writing in the form of blog posts, Facebook notes and tweets. Among them, names like Ahmed Naji (Aḥmad Nājī), Mohammad Rabie (Muḥammad Rabīʿ), Nael Eltoukhy (Nāʾil al-Ṭūkhī), Muhammad Aladdin (Muḥammad ʿAlāʾ ad-Dīn) and Youssef Rakha (Yūsuf Rakhā) appear now at the forefront of the Arabic and global literary scene, as their novels have appeared in multiple prints in Arabic and have been translated into several European languages. This new Egyptian writing deserves further exploration; it needs to be studied at the intersection of print and digital, as the novel is in continuous dialogue with the author’s blog and social networks profile.

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.