Nathaniel Greenberg, How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt (New Texts Out Now)

 Nathaniel Greenberg, How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt (New Texts Out Now)

Nathaniel Greenberg, How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nathaniel Greenberg

Nathaniel Greenberg, How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Tunisia and Egypt (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

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

Nathaniel Greenberg (NG): 25 January 2011. I was living in downtown Cairo with a grant to research the literary fallout of the 1952 revolution. The uprising against Mubarak swept in and “swept me off my feet.” Like a lot of us, I have been writing about the experience ever since. 

But this book is about something slightly different. It is about misinformation and how major world powers used the Arab uprisings to fashion their own political agendas; how domestic regimes capitalized on their alliances abroad; and how media became a weapon of war in the post-revolutionary struggle for power. Its seed was the sense of an extreme disparity between the rhetoric I was hearing on the ground in Egypt—outside of Tahrir—and how entrenched the narrative of the uprising had become among people who were consuming news about the uprising abroad. I became entranced with the paradoxical notion that Information and Communication Technology had both enabled more voices and consolidated the narratives through which news and history are retold. I wanted to unpack this paradox and I wanted to do it through a very immediate, eye-level perspective.

... democratic activism in Egypt has never recovered from the damage unleashed by WikiLeaks.

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

NG: The biggest discovery behind this book happened by chance. I do not want to give away too much, but it has to do with going back to look more closely at what WikiLeaks was doing during the outset of the uprising in Egypt. Tarek Ramadan, Linda Herrera, and others had looked at some of this material. But what I found was shocking and it served to totally undermine, in my view, the accepted narrative paradigm (shared by many academics, myself included) regarding WikiLeaks’ role in the uprisings. What I found was a concerted effort—or willingness—on the part of Assange’s organization to allow their stolen documents to undermine the work of democratic activists in Egypt. It started with a stolen State Department memo, released by WikiLeaks and published in the Daily Telegraph of London, strategically, on the eve of the Friday of Rage (28 January). The document was from years prior but framed in a way (The Telegraph published it under the headline “Secret US Backing for Egyptian Rebels”) that was sure to compromise the legitimacy of the April 6 movement in particular. Al-Ahram published a translation of a similar “leak” regarding the NGOs that appeared in Norway’s Aftenpost the day after. All of this gave fuel to Mubarak’s famous midnight speech on the 28th about a “plot” to undermine the State. It is arguable that democratic activism in Egypt has never recovered from the damage unleashed by WikiLeaks. 

But the big discovery was that, apart from the article itself, the comments section revealed a huge cache of bizarrely patterned discourse. The Telegraph article carried thousands of comments, almost all of them written with the same kind of racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric that would surround the Trump campaign in 2016. This surprised me and when I looked more closely I saw that some of the very same “commentators” who had helped fuel the viral spread of the Telegraph article (it exploded on the Drudge Report) had reappeared in 2016 pumping racist, bellicose commentary in favor of Trump across a range of far-right media outlets, like Breitbart News and The Hill. Some of the commentators had literally tens of thousands of comments to their name, which confirmed for me (in consultation with security experts) that they were professional trolls. Just as with the American elections, the WikiLeaks dumps on Egypt served as a springboard for an elaborate information war aimed at undermining the spread of democracy and empowering an authoritarian agenda sympathetic to Russia. I contacted the lead reporter on the Telegraph piece to ask about the history of that article. He responded that he would talk to the editors and get back to me; a week later, all of the comments were erased. Fortunately, I captured a lot of it through screenshots, which allowed me to pursue several of the major lines of inquiry that are now in the book.

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

NG: I am interested generally in the relationship between political transformation and cultural innovation, basically a Marxist-humanitarian mode of thinking that I think comes across fairly strongly in my first two books. But I would say this book also crystalizes what has been a long-standing theoretical position of mine that—in line with a Habermasian mode of thinking—rejects post-structuralism and the notion that narratives are produced in a vacuum—that the “author is dead,” so to speak. While much of the proxy-information war that I discuss in this book was waged through viral memes and false narratives, I work to uncover the origins of these campaigns, to identify, if not the individual or organization that initiated rumor x or narrative y, who stands to benefit from one narrative or another and what kind of historical patterns those narratives mirror. 

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

NG: I think we need to reexamine almost everything about the so-called Arab Spring, beginning firstly with the way in which the uprisings were talked about from the outset. My hope is that this book will serve as a valuable resource for cultural historians, political historians, and the counter-intelligence community—not least because it sheds new light on the communicative strategy of Russia in Egypt, in particular, as well as the long-standing narrative identity of groups like AQIM and Ansar al-Sharia. But there is also quite a bit of traditional literary analysis in this book—the final chapter examines the rise of Arab Sci-Fi, as well as the popular Egyptian film studio al-Sobki—topics I have been writing about and presenting on at conferences. Literary scholars, I hope, will appreciate this emphasis and hopefully people looking at the book from a social-science or security perspective will give the final chapter a chance as well. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

NG: I have been trying to engage with the situation in Libya, building on the background from my book with Jeff Halverson but focusing on new media. Like in Syria, we get the impression the fighting is unfolding in real time with a superabundance of digital recording masking the conflict. Libya is something of an information blackhole right now, in the sense that the conflict is thrusting together all these different proxy-communications operations—not just the global networks directing information towards the Arabic-speaking audience—be it RT ArabicAl-ArabiyaBBC ArabicAl-Jazeera or Al-Alam—but we have also got Italian and French lawmakers, of course divided on the issue, trying to frame their positions for their own domestic audiences. It is a huge challenge but it is fascinating and rather urgent.

J: Why Edinburgh UP?

NG: Nicola Ramsey, the editor at Edinburgh University Press, approached me about doing a book. I am thrilled that I did. She did not blink once. I am grateful to Edinburgh for taking it on and for doing it quickly!


Excerpt from the book

From Chapter I: Information Warfare 2.0: A Methodological Critique

The Department of Deconstructionism

In the US, the idea that media – and social media in particular – may serve as a ‘subjectless generator of structures’, had been churning through the greater universe of the National Security Enterprise for over a decade. Programmes like the Sociocultural Content in Language and the Metaphor project of the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or the Narrative Networks programme disseminated through the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, were predicated on the notion that experts might ‘systematically analyze narratives and their psychological and neurobiological impact’ with little to no foreknowledge of the context in which they are created or the environment towards which they are projected. The task of defining ‘substrates and mechanisms related to culturally relevant cognitions and behaviors’ was believed achievable, in part because the greater defence intelligence community had whole heartedly absorbed a theoretical perspective on the production of language and meaning that academics in the remote field of literary studies had been passionately debating for a century. ‘The death of the author’, as Roland Barthes famously decried, had created the opening for an analytical wing of that ancient enterprise in which studious readers with an eye for style could produce a text-centred approach to reading that promised to decode the intricacies of any written work with little to no regard for the context in which it was created or the life of the individual who created it.

For the defence-intelligence industry the text-centred approach of narratology allowed for the prospect of an intriguing new product in the war of ideas, namely: an automated system of discursive analysis capable of sweeping the vast horizon of online chatter while instantly converting its finding into an actionable counter response in the form of audio-visual missives, leaflets, imagery, and talking points all uniquely designed to ‘directly affect perceptions, emotions, behaviors, and tendencies for affiliation’ within a target population. 

In the immediate years following 9/11, narratology surfaced primarily within certain rarified circles of the National Security Enterprise; beltway boardrooms where a combination of outside ‘experts’ and low-ranking officials began crafting the language for what would become a minor arms race among communications specialists, IT experts and the occasional political scientist jockeying for a piece of the pie in the increasingly lucrative war of ideas. By the time of the Arab Spring the notion of narrative as ‘an event without any subject’ had become engrained in the basic fabric of the greater US intelligence apparatus and nowhere more so than in the realm of counter- terrorism. In the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL), analysts routinely made reference to ‘the narrative of ISIL’ or even the ‘the ISIL meme’. ‘The ISIL meme builds upon the spread and acceptance in many extremist leaning Muslim circles of the narrative that Islamic lands, people, and the religion itself is under attack from Western powers’, wrote one contributor for a large-scale, federally funded research study of the Islamic State’s communication strategies. 

Likewise, the narrative claims that despotic regimes in the Middle East are the fault of Western powers that thus should be attacked. Chechens and al Qaeda terrorists before the emergence of ISIL also argued that when their enemies used weapons of mass destruction, they too were justified in using such. And in the case of Palestinian and Chechen groups, women were encouraged to join the battle and an ideological basis was created based on fatwas that allowed the women to leave their families to join a terrorist group without asking permission of their male relatives. ISIL has coopted all of this into its meme.

Assembled from an almost incompressible bricolage of keywords, flashpoints and CVE (countering violent extremism) jargon, scores of self-identified analysts like this one, often working exclusively in English, capitalised on what the authors of the 9/11 Commission Report decried as the prevailing ‘newsroom’ culture among US intelligence contractors, who, by the 1990s, ‘no longer felt they could afford such a patient, strategic approach to long- term accumulation of intellectual capital’. The social-scientific or ‘university culture’ of old was part of a bygone era by the time of the Arab Spring. In its stead appeared a kind of pseudo-analytical regime steeped in the language of narratology, however unconscious its authors appeared of such legacy. 

Independent of history and human action, it is the ‘meme’ or ‘narrative’ that spins its own meaning in such analyses; the author a Dionysian-like god ‘making his promised presence all the more palpable to the sons and daughters of the West by means of his poignant absence’. As Habermas famously observed of Derrida’s poststructuralism, the underlying irony in the ostensible analysis of such ‘archewriting’ is that its predication on the occlusion of an author, or even ‘human interest’ in the general sense, prevails at the expense of precisely what it seeks to uncover. ‘The labor of deconstruction lets the refuse heap of interpretations, which it wants to clear away in order to get at the buried foundations, mount ever higher.’ In labelling or approximating the meaning of memes or narratives, the analyst is always at risk of precipitating their very purchase. Often times, as in the passage above, they do so through an obscurantist, sourceless discourse that portends in its own deconstruction, a fully-formed and ideologically vested perspective miraculously unbound from history.   

The Department of Structuralism 

The tendency among counter-narrative specialists to imagine narrative as being divested of a narrator is all the more ironic because it was precisely that same illusion that their counterparts in the world of public diplomacy sought to fabricate.

In his 2008 speech for the New America Foundation, James K. Glassman points to ‘a short book’ by Monroe E. Price, the head of the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research in London, in which the author describes the work of the ‘French deconstructivist philospher Jacques Derrida’ and his ‘tome’ Of Hospitality. In fact a short collection of lectures from the late 90s, Derrida’s book, as Glassman notes, has ‘nothing at all to do with strategic communications’. But still, he asserts, the work holds fundamental lessons for the future of US influence operations. Derrida’s book can help explain ‘a major reason for animosity toward the United States: the view by others that we don’t respect their opinions, that we do not actively listen and understand’, Glassman says. His philosophy, ‘in Price’s reading’, shifts the understanding of ‘hosting’ from one of control or ownership, to one of ‘welcoming’. ‘I like this paradigm: from the host as owner to the host as welcome’, he asserts. It is ‘a good description of Public Diplomacy 2.0’. 

By ‘hosting’ a network of communications operatives, or bloggers, many with little to no vested interest in US policy or any material connection to the United States beyond a few workshops or grant allocations, the US could wage the war of ideas in much the same way that the social media giants in Silicon Valley had built their empires. Like Facebook or YouTube, Public Diplomacy 2.0 aimed to provide a ‘platform for cooperation, mediation, and reception – a mode of being informed as well as informing’. The strategy marked an evolution in the State Department’s approach to public diplomacy. As Lina Khatib, William Dutton and Michael Thelwall observed, Glassman’s predecessors oversaw what many perceived as an overly ‘one-way’ strategy in the government’s approach to the war of ideas. Contemporary iterations of Cold War vehicles like Al-Hurra TV or Radio Sawa functioned in the same space of ‘white propaganda’ as American infantrymen distributing leaflets in Afghanistan. While more covert efforts eventually gained traction in Iraq and Afghanistan, public diplomacy – including the work of the State Department’s Digital Outreach Team – remained driven by a ‘key strategic choice’ to ‘genuinely identify their posts’. Across the greater intelligence community it could be said the US approach to strategic communications was defined largely by a reluctant set of ‘societal attitudes’ stretching back to the experience of World War I and revelations that the British had been quietly stocking apparent involvement in the war through a covert influence operation run through the Wellington House in London and Reuters news agency. In the words of Colonel Dennis M. Murphy and Lieutenant Colonel James F. White of the Information in Warfare Group at the United States Army War College: ‘countering American angst over the effective use of propaganda’ had become as great a challenge for the US government in the war of ideas as was the rhetoric of the ‘enemy’ itself. To avoid the ire of politicians and the populace, Murphy’s and White’s recommendation in 2007 was the now familiar refrain: ‘leading from the rear in the information war still gets the message told while avoiding any direct confrontation with democratic ideals’.

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.