Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (New Texts Out Now)

Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (New Texts Out Now)

Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (New Texts Out Now)

By : Joanna Allan

Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (University of Wisconsin Press, April 2019).

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

Joanna Allan (JA): I unconsciously started to write this book thirteen years ago, when I first visited the Saharawi refugee camps/state-in-exile. I was struck, on that visit, by the high representation of women in the national parliament and local councils. My visit was shortly after the Saharawi 2005 intifada in the occupied zone, of which Aminatou Haidar was the figurehead. 

From outside, it looked like women totally dominated the nonviolent resistance movement in occupied Western Sahara, and that intrigued me. Years later, when I started to follow what was going on in Equatorial Guinea, and to read histories of the country, I was struck that the gendered dynamics of resistance to authoritarian regimes there were, at first sight, strikingly different to those in Western Sahara. What made Equatorial Guinea’s anti-colonial, and later anti-dictator, resistance movements so “male,” and Western Sahara’s seemingly dominated by women? My book project began as a response to this question. What I found was—unsurprisingly—Equatoguinean women have always resisted Spanish colonialism and the postcolonial Macías and Obiang regimes, but their efforts have been silenced, or deemed unworthy of attention. In Western Sahara, Saharawi gendered roles, and Spanish and wider Western preconceptions about “African,” “Muslim” women, create various spaces and surprising possibilities for women’s resistance efforts. 

For both regimes—the Equatoguinean and the Moroccan—the key is to silence women’s voices of dissent.

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

JA: As well as charting the history of Equatoguinean and Saharawi women’s nonviolent resistance to dictatorships from the Spanish colonial period until now, I am interested in how various constructions of gender and so-called gender equality intersect and impact upon the gender of resistance movements. This leads me to make use of the concept of genderwashing. Through this, I show how US corporations and the US state back Equatoguinean dictator Obiang’s efforts to paint himself as a gender equality champion. This is a PR exercise, I argue, to detract attention from the fact that the United States is investing in one of the worst dictatorships in Africa in order to access oil. In occupied Western Sahara, the Moroccan regime is keen to avoid any embarrassment that might tarnish its attempt to brand King Mohammed VI as a women’s empowerment pioneer. Therefore, military trials and hefty prison sentences are today reserved for male activists, while women activists are quietly punished by torture in secret detention centers for short periods of time. For both regimes—the Equatoguinean and the Moroccan—the key is to silence women’s voices of dissent.

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

JA: My previous publications focused on Saharawi literature in Spanish, and gender politics in the Saharawi state-in-exile. In this project, I moved away from cultural studies and borrowed methods from the social sciences and anthropology during fieldwork in Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, Spain, Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, and POLISARIO-controlled Western Sahara. 

Also, whereas my previous work relied on the archives of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) national archives, for this project I also delved into the archives of the Spanish Falange Women’s Section, which attempted to transform Saharawi and Equatoguinean women into models of Spanish domestic womanhood. 

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

JA: I hope policymakers will read it, specifically those working for state aid agencies in the realm of women’s empowerment, or gender and development, because my book illuminates how well-meaning, aspirational feminist campaigns and policies might face a risk of being co-opted by authoritarian regimes and their corporate partners.

Of course, I hope other academics specializing on Western Sahara, Morocco or Equatorial Guinea, or resistance studies will pick up a copy. But beyond that, I would be delighted if Hispanists engaged with the book. Despite Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea being Spain’s only former colonies in Africa, and despite the fact that Spanish is an official language in the SADR and in Equatorial Guinea, there is a lack of engagement with the two countries in Hispanic studies in terms of research and teaching. One might also note the relative absence of research on Western Sahara in Middle East and North African studies, or Equatorial Guinea in African studies. 

In terms of impact, and outside of academia, I hope my book will contribute to my wider work with other activists to hold Morocco accountable for human rights abuses against the Saharawi people, and, linked to this, to pressure corporations and groups of states (such as the European Union) to stop exploiting Saharawi peoples’ natural resources against their wishes. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JA: I am working on a project funded with a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, entitled “Powering Conflict, Fuelling Resistance.” Fossil fuels are notorious for their implication in neocolonialism, violence, and environmental degradation. Mainstream discourse envisages green energy as the unproblematic solution to “blood oil.” However, the green transition is replicating the violent, neocolonial models of the fossil fuels industry in some African contexts. My project seeks to establish how this replication is occurring, and how it can be resisted. I critically interrogate the use of green energy by authoritarian regimes and their partners, and, through interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and ecocritical analysis of resistance literatures, seek to understand the coping strategies and resistance of communities faced with energy injustices.

J: You mentioned above that Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara are generally missing from Hispanic studies. Why is that? 

JA: The answer is complex but, in brief, I think it is partly due to Spanish (historical) politics. Upon Equatorial Guinea’s independence in 1968, the Spanish administration declared classified all information relating to its former colony. Spain never decolonised Western Sahara, and continues to exploit the country’s natural resources in ways that are legally and morally questionable. Therefore, it does not pay for the Spanish state’s cultural bodies to celebrate Hispanic legacies and links in Africa, which I think has a knock-on effect in academia. 

It is also due to structural racism. To overlook all African contributions to Spanish-language cultural production risks reinforcing the white superiority complex, not to mention the concomitant potential effects on students of color (and indeed on white students).

 

Excerpt from the Book

Imagine the air as Fatima felt it on her skin on 8 January 1976. Imagine the biting cold of winter near the sea, the eerie half-light that dusk casts on us, the dead quiet and paranoia of streets already invaded. Imagine the terror of a lonely car engine humming behind you, the eyes burning into your back as you gather pace, the car doors creaking open, the four men leaping out, their hands all over you, over your mouth—don’t bother screaming!—then the smallness and blackness and airlessness of a shut boot. Saharawis saw police bundle Fatima into the back of a black Renault 16. They didn’t see Fatima again for fifteen years.

As the Moroccan army descended on Western Sahara, it attempted to clear the southern regions of Morocco, which were once part of Spanish Sahara, of suspected POLISARIO sympathizers. Among the first to be taken was twenty-four-year-old Fatima Ghalia Leili. Fatima was well known in Tan Tan, her hometown. Despite her youth, she had a high-profile civil service job and was a leader of a local women’s group. Indeed, it was on the walk back from work that she disappeared.

Until her arrest, Fatima’s public façade was far from an activist one, yet she had been secretly proindependence for years. When the POLISARIO was formed, Fatima had become a double agent, collecting information from her place of work and passing it to the Saharawi nationalists. She also trained women and men in protest techniques. On top of this, she had a brother who was a POLISARIO founder. In other words, Fatima was dangerous. She had to go. 

After Moroccan agents had disappeared her, they came back a month later to disappear most of Fatima’s extended family, which was common practice. “They also kidnapped her father, her sister, most of her brothers, her mother, her aunt, and her uncle,” Soukaina Yaya, who, when a small girl in Tan Tan, watched the events of 2 February 1976 from her window with dread, tells me. Police broke down the door of the Leili family home and took all who were there, pulling Fatima’s father, ill with asthma, from his bed. His crime was having relatives linked to the POLISARIO.

Yaya, now a human rights activist in El Aaiún, finishes her former neighbor’s story: “When [Fatima] came out of jail, she had suffered a lot. She married, but she wasn’t able to have children due to injuries inflicted through torture. They tortured her very, very badly.”

In her summary of Leili’s post-prison life, Yaya emphasizes her compatriot’s marital status and inability to procreate. In our interview, Yaya explains the fate of one other female friend, the novelist El Bataoul Mahjoub Lmdaimigh. El Bataoul, also known as “the woman with the black pen” because of her refusal to follow the conventions of the Moroccan education system by writing in black rather than blue ink, witnessed the kidnap of her father and other relatives. Says Yaya of El Bataoul: “When they took her father and other members of her family, her childhood stopped. This was in 1977. And she decided then that she would never marry, because the regime had taken all the male members of her family, so from then on she would accept males only as friends but not as a husband.”

Again, El Bataoul’s marital status is part of the primordial information given in the brief summary of her life. I have previously argued that the role of mother and caregiver in Saharawi society is constructed as feminine in hegemonic discourse and that marriage is a key aspiration for women. Yaya, indeed, has given motherhood and marriage central importance in her recounting of women activists’ life stories. While Leili is unable to pursue what is seen (in hegemonic Saharawi nationalist discourses) as her role as a woman owing to the torture inflicted on her, El Bataoul resists her gender role in the name of the nationalist cause. In this chapter, I further explore the relationship between marital status, compulsory heterosexuality, gender, and resistance in occupied Western Sahara. 

I tell the story of Saharawi resistance to Moroccan colonialism chronologically, thereby setting the complicated and nuanced relationship between resistance and gender in its wider historical context. During the Moroccan and Mauritanian invasion, we see how Morocco made use of Saharawi constructions of gender to traumatize its victims. Focusing on the years of war, I illustrate how everyday resistance (the tool so important to Saharawi and Equatoguinean women resisting patriarchy and, for black Saharawis, slavery in the Spanish colonial period) resurfaces as the main arm of Saharawis opposing the Moroccan occupation.

The first major public protest in 1987 of Saharawi nationalists under Moroccan rule allows us to use and develop Scott’s theorization of when the hidden transcript becomes public. I then use a testimony of a former disappeared woman, captured in the 1987 demonstration, to argue that Morocco’s policy of targeting mothers backfires as women make their status as mothers a site of, and spiritual fuel for, resistance.

Moving to the time of the 1991 ceasefire, the nonviolent movement grew when hundreds of former disappeared emerge from Moroccan dungeons. I analyze the intifadas of the nineties as well as the bolder 2005 intifada. This section is largely narrative, but some knowledge of the diplomatic intrigues that helped provoke the intifadas is essential for understanding the wider story of gender and resistance. Furthermore, a look at the story of Embarka Hassan, whose first street protest was in 2005, helps us to understand why young women decide to become activists.

Next I move to the 2010 Gdeim Izik protest, by far the largest protest in Saharawi recent history. I build on arguments made in chapter 1 concerning the external ideological function of state constructions of gender equality in a world where the West is currently prioritizing women’s “emancipation” in “backward” countries. I look at how pressure from the West influences Moroccan oppression of resisters and how this, in turn, affects the gendered makeup of Saharawi public protest. I also explore how Saharawi femininities and masculinities affect who resists.

A look at how Morocco tortures Saharawi prisoners and detainees reveals how constructions of gendered sexuality are used not only to invoke trauma and horror but also to prevent the reproduction of Saharawi nationalism itself. However, I also argue that Saharawi women have found ways to resist even the most terrifying types of torture. The centrality of female chastity in Saharawi culture, and how Morocco darkly takes advantage of this in its prisons and secret detention centers, leads us to a discussion of Saharawi women’s reactions to current gender inequalities in Saharawi society. Finally, I conclude that while the relationship between gender and resistance is dependent on the idiosyncrasies of Saharawi gender norms, which affect greatly who resists, why, and how and which also determine Morocco’s response, the relationship is, as in Equatorial Guinea, inseparable from the globally hegemonic Western orientalism and its constructions of gender.

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.