Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (New Texts Out Now)

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Mar 3, 2020 Iraq
Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (New Texts Out Now)

Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (New Texts Out Now)

By : Ronak K. Kapadia

Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019, Series: Art History Publication Initiative).*

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

Ronak K. Kapadia (RK): Insurgent Aesthetics is about the interface between contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic visual art and aesthetics and US global warfare in the Greater Middle East. At a time when the global catastrophes of fascism, neoliberal austerity, carceral governance, and endless warfare continue to proliferate and engender gendered, racialized worlds of untold anguish for those rendered suspect within this imperial world order, I wanted to explore what creative strategies contemporary artists have employed in service of insurgent struggles to end forever wars and imagine otherwise. 

My book is animated by a supreme dissatisfaction with the dominant discourses of twenty-first century national security and the booming cottage industry of “terrorism studies” that has so impoverished our political imaginations in the wake of unending wartime violence. Indeed, there is so much overlapping dread and despair today that it often feels like these affective conditions have crowded out or evaporated any semblance of joy, renewal, resistance, beauty, or alternatives. 

I sought to write a book that could intervene into this dystopian here and now by spotlighting the radical experiments, sensuous knowledges, and world-making visions of contemporary minoritarian artists and cultural workers responding to the state of forever war. Turning to the more expansive world-making knowledge practices of contemporary artists—what I call insurgent aesthetics—inaugurates new ways of understanding the politics of security and freedom from the perspective of those most dispossessed by US war-making and their diasporic kin. Armed further with a critical appreciation of the queer utopian function of art, Insurgent Aesthetics reveals how diasporic expressive cultures have made available new ways of knowing, sensing, and feeling that were once thought to be unintelligible or unimaginable. An analysis of insurgent aesthetics offers a politics of refreshment—an opening to think antiracist, anti-imperialist queer feminist politics anew.

As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in transnational American studies, I also wanted to write a book about contemporary US empire in the Greater Middle East that could address both the multiple scales and transformations of late modern wars, while equally imagining outside, beyond, and below its stranglehold and forms of imperial dominion, when global warfare finally misses its mark. So much of the popular and scholarly criticism of US militarism attunes so closely to the dominant strategies and technologies of national security that such work often has the unintended effect of making the state’s frameworks and institutions seem monolithic and omniscient, even as that work seeks to critique war and empire. My book plots another, more arresting approach, by tracing how this global world order is, in fact, already fleeting, fragile, and always failing. As I describe throughout, felicitous cracks have appeared in the surface of the US forever war’s architecture that are being exploited by forms of fugitivity, refusal, and rebellion and that can be gleaned further in the critical works of art under investigation in my book.  
... these braided histories of violence and their material afterlives are imprinted onto the DNA of the forever war ...

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

RK: Insurgent Aesthetics theorizes the queer world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the ongoing context of US war and empire in the Greater Middle East, with an explicit focus on the post-Cold War expansion of US security governance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine. The book analyzes how global militarized security practices have affected immigrants and refugees in the United States, and how transnational visual artists, in turn, have exposed and contested the violence of US planetary warfare through their solo and collaborative artmaking. 

The book specifically traces how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists in the United States and Europe have grappled in their works with the US national security state’s use of gendered racial violence—including targeted killings (via drones), imperial confinement (through military detention), and overt settler colonial infrastructures (via the client state of Israel and its occupation of Palestine). 

While this book focuses on the historical present, it offers a queer poetics of relationality to understand violent settler colonial histories of settlement, land theft, Native genocide, African chattel slavery, and Asian exploitation as wholly vital to not only what Lisa Lowe vividly names the “intimacies of four continents,” but also the genealogy of the contemporary forever war. As Insurgent Aesthetics depicts, these braided histories of violence and their material afterlives are imprinted onto the DNA of the forever war and in the very practices of state violence that the artists in my book interrogate so evocatively in their creative works.

The book illuminates how the forever war is not only a historical period describing a series of geopolitical and military conflicts, but also an ongoing archival project, structure of feeling, and production of knowledge for interpreting and acting on the geopolitical alignments of the United States in the broader “post”–Cold War era. The “forever” of “forever war” thus calls up a fantasy sense of temporal perpetuity in wartime’s violence that likewise mimics the uninterrupted and limitless spree of US global war-making across the long twentieth century. By “insurgency,” I thus summon the long history of subterranean and fugitive consciousness of insurgent struggle, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore refers to as “infrastructures of feeling” against the forces of empire, gendered racism, and capital. This fugitive consciousness of insurgent struggle is key to making visible, so as to undermine, the forever war. In the process, the book makes three principal arguments. 

First, by linking its investigation to a long history of US war, empire, and counterinsurgency, the book argues that new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, surveillance, and lawfare have created a distinctive post-September 11 infrastructure of racialized state violence both within and beyond US borders.

Second, the book makes the case that contemporary art is a site of social critique that disrupts conventional myths and ideas about the United States and its national security apparatus. My formal analyses of visual and performance art examine how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists living in the heart of empire have made palpable the unseen and forgotten dimensions of secrecy and terror that define the US security state. 

Third, the book argues that the forever war is an assault on the human sensorium for citizens, subjects, survivors, and refugees of US empire. Its study of contemporary artworks illustrates the centrality of the body and the human sensorium to both war-making and subjugated knowledge about the global war on terror. By foregrounding a queer feminist decolonial critique of neoliberal security and warfare, the book depicts what is absented and ghosted by US technologies of abstraction and state knowledge. These artists force a reckoning with the intimate, redacted, and ghostly dimensions of forever wars—what I call the sensorial life of empire. 

In short, Insurgent Aesthetics investigates how contemporary artists challenge violent histories of US militarism and create alternative ways of knowing, feeling, and sensing beyond permanent warfare. As the product of transnational queer feminist cultural studies, the book ultimately contends that critical analysis of insurgent art and culture can excavate subjugated forms of knowledge about the United States and its forever wars, a vital resource for policy, activism, and social transformation.

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

RK: Insurgent Aesthetics is the culmination of over a decade of interdisciplinary research and writing on the politics of national security and the ongoing US wars on terror through the realm of art and culture. Going forward, I am pursuing broader creative outlets for the dissemination of this research, including a number of curatorial and art activist collaborations. One of my core claims in the book is that the creative forms of activism and cultural production that emerge in response to contemporary state projects of security, warfare, and confinement enable new practices and publics.

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

RK: My hope is that the book will resonate in multiple overlapping intellectual and political spaces, including scholars who work in academic fields of critical ethnic and Arab/Asian/American studies, queer and feminist studies, art and visual culture, as well as critics in security/lawfare/militarism studies, area studies of South Asia and the Middle East, geography, sociology, and so on. 

Outside of academia, I hope the book might serve as a resource and inspiration for contemporary artists and interdisciplinary cultural practitioners of all stripes, including archivists, curators, lawyers, and activists working to dismantle the domestic and global dimensions of US carceral and imperial power. Moreover, I would like the book to connect with queer feminist anti-imperialists searching for kernels of political possibility in the transnational archives of multimedia art-making assembled here. 

Throughout, I hope the book helps to accentuate the centrality of queer feminist criticism to historical and contemporary studies of US race, war, and empire, while further articulating the value of contemporary minoritarian art and aesthetics to radical freedom dreaming.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

RK: While Insurgent Aesthetics traces critical responses to the state of emergency produced by fears of national security and the United States’ aggressive policing and surveillance apparatus, my second book extends these questions on aesthetics and warfare to consider the state of emergence among a new generation of social justice activists and queer and trans migrant artists of color. Provisionally titled Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons: Reimagining Collective Survival and Healing Justice in the Wilds of Imperial Decline, this new book studies the expressive cultures of contemporary social justice movements and visual strategies of resistance against the militarization of urban police violence and the domestic war on terror across North America. 

I am researching how queer and trans Black, Indigenous, People of Color (QTBIPOC) communities have created new models of transformative/healing justice praxis and radical speculation across transnational sites of militarized security and urban warfare. The project is inspired by the concept of “care work” in race-radical and Indigenous feminisms, Black and Palestinian liberation struggles, and disability justice movements, which have long tracked the differential dispensation of care, healing, and survival in communities grappling with legacies of slavery, genocide, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. In the process, I am exploring what culturally grounded systems of care, support, and wellness within QTBIPOC communities can teach us more broadly about embodied vulnerabilities and the intimacies of racialized and gendered bodies, especially at a time of immense ecological peril and political-economic-cultural transformation in the projected afterlives of US imperialism. So, in a nutshell, this new book is about tracing how people plan to breathe more life into contemporary freedom struggles amidst the wilds of twenty-first century imperial decline.

 

Excerpt from the book 

From the introduction: “Sensuous Affiliations: Security, Terror, and the Queer Calculus of the Forever War”

Insurgent Aesthetics is about the creativity and fugitive beauty that emanate from the shadows of terrible violence incited by forever war. Of freedom dreams flecked by inscriptions of wartime’s death and dispossession. The forever war is an assault on the human sensorium for citizens, subjects, survivors, and refugees of US empire alike. A time of ever more state security and imperial violence, the historical present necessitates more sensuous ways of knowing and feeling that challenge the militarized imperatives of the state and exceed the visual register alone. The global circulation of images of violence and social suffering has also intensified in our public culture over the past three decades. As a privileged regime of power, the field of vision is central to the manufacture and global supremacy of US war-making regimes and to the violent regulation of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies under the conditions of state security and surveillance. Given the US state’s will toward quantified abstraction in counting, without ever being accountable to, those killed, diseased, displaced, traumatized, and/or maimed in its armed conflicts, how might we divine other, more sensuous and affective ways of knowing this forever war and its inhuman violences? This book asserts that we must demand a stranger calculus—what I term a queer calculus—that unsettles prevailing interpretations of the forever war, makes sensuous what has been ghosted by US technologies of abstraction, and endows the designs for seemingly impossible futures amid infinite aggression. A queer calculus of the forever war advances an account of both dominant knowledge apparatuses and data logics of the US security state as well as alternative logics, affects, emotions, and affiliations of diasporic subjects living and laboring in the heart of empire. One such embodied queer calculus can be found in the corpus of aesthetic forms created by contemporary diasporic artists from South Asia and the Greater Middle East. These imaginative works of art reassemble vision with the disqualified knowledges, histories, geographies, and memories preserved by the “lower” senses of empire’s gendered, racialized Others to fashion an insurgency against empire’s built sensorium. In so doing, these insurgent aesthetics craft a queer calculus of US empire that makes intimate what is rendered distant, renders tactile what is made invisible, and unifies what is divided, thereby conjuring forms of embodied critique that can envision a collective world within and beyond the spaces of US empire’s perverse logics of global carcerality, security, and war. 

This book engages a wide range of critical interdisciplinary paradigms to reveal the radical experiments, aesthetic strategies, and freedom dreams of contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic artists. I argue that these works comprise a transnational constellation of visual art and aesthetics that together have animated new ways to think, feel, sense, and map the world amid US global state violence and its forever wars across the so-called Muslim world. Specifically, the book surveys the broader post–Cold War expansion of US militarism in the Greater Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine) and the domestic regimes of surveillance and repression in the US and other militarized sites mapped onto a transnational jihadist network. It contends that new and flexible forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, surveillance, and lawfare have built a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of gendered, racialized state violence both within and beyond US borders, which in turn marks the ongoing present as a distinct age within the longue durée of US settler colonial society. I explore this complex terrain through a contrapuntal queer feminist analysis of contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic visual cultures and their criticalintersections with the contemporary logics and tactics of global warfare. Although many scholars have studied the impact of liberal empires and late modern warfare in the Greater Middle East, including the militarized and racialized vision of US imperialism at its core, insufficient attention has been paid to how the state’s dominant necropolitical calculus of neoliberal security and warfare has been thwarted and reimagined. By contrast, this book foregrounds the conceptual works of contemporary artists from South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas, whose insurgent aesthetic acts refashion ascendant ways of knowing and feeling the forever war.

My chief premise in this book is that if we want to apprehend (so as to ultimately arrest) contemporary transnational security politics and carceral practices, especially the prevailing biopolitical regimes of surveillance, imprisonment, and killing perfected at the domestic and international fronts of the forever war, then we need an alternate approach to the maps of strategic thinkers and security analysts who have been telling us how we should look, think, and feel about the world and its violences. By privileging a wide range of diasporic cultural forms—namely, visual and sound installation, performance, painting, photography, new media, and video—as a generative site for critiquing American war and empire, this book illuminates what I term insurgent aesthetics, an alternative articulation of minoritarian knowledge produced by those populations and their diasporic kin most devastated by the effects of the homeland security state and its forever wars. This book illustrates how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic artists in the US and Europe, including Mahwish Chishty, Wafaa Bilal, Naeem Mohaiemen/Visible Collective, Rajkamal Kahlon, Index of the Disappeared, Mariam Ghani, and Larissa Sansour, have grappled in their work with the neoliberal state of exception and the national security state’s use of gendered racial violence. Insurgent Aesthetics documents the impact of present-day militarized security practices and historical legacies of imperial violence on diasporic, (im)migrant, and refugee communities in the US who have been besieged both by domestic wars on terror, crime, drugs, and immigration as well as military and foreign policies directed at their homelands. These artists, in turn, have produced sensuous affiliations and political imaginaries that critique the simultaneous proliferation of gendered racism, neoliberal capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and Islamophobia in the post-9/11 period. These concepts represent intersectional systems of power and violence that fuel the ideological engines that legitimate the homeland security state’s use of global prisons, confinement technologies, overt killing, and permanent warfare as inevitable features of a political economy that seeks to “solve” our multifarious contemporary crises. In this context, what role can expressive culture and aesthetics play in struggles over hegemony of the contemporary neoliberal carceral, security, and warfare state? This book answers this question by centering the expansive world-making knowledge practices of diasporic visual and multimedia artists who hail from societies besieged by war but live and labor in the heart of empire. In short, the book investigates how South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporic artists challenge violent histories of US militarism, sustain critical opposition to the global war machine through the realms of art and culture, and create alternative systems of knowing, feeling, and living with and beyond forever warfare.

[…]

In the midst of enduring bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq; population displacements and drone attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Niger, Syria, and Yemen; the drumbeat of war against Iran and North Korea; the deepening occupation of Palestine; the normalization of intensified disciplinary tactics against racialized immigrant and nonimmigrant peoples of color in the US; and the complex unfolding of imaginative geographies of liberation and freedom in the US, the Greater Middle East, and around the world today, a queer feminist fugitive relation to these violent archives advances urgently needed genealogies of the forever war and its affective afterlives. The prevailing logics of state security in discourses of terrorism, militarism, and war have impoverished our political imaginations. Insurgent Aesthetics reveals how diasporic art and expressive culture can make available new ways of knowing, sensing, and feeling that were once thought to be unintelligible or unimaginable. An analysis of insurgent aesthetics offers a moment of refreshment—an opportunity to think antiracist, anti-imperialist queer feminist politics anew. It lets us move beyond the state’s supreme calculus of security and carcerality to propose urgently needed alternatives to US empire. A queer calculus of the forever war designs sensuous affiliations and freedom dreams as expansive as the Pentagon’s fever dreams of everlasting warfare but without the violence of their vision.

* For 30% off the Duke University Press cover price of Insurgent Aesthetics, enter coupon code E19KAPAD at checkout here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/insurgent-aesthetics
Oct 16, 2016 Lebanon
Mandy Turner By :
Mandy Turner

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

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

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

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

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

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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.