José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri, “Of Bakeries and Checkpoints: Stately Affects in Amman and Baghdad” (New Texts Out Now)

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Apr 27, 2020 Region
José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri, “Of Bakeries and Checkpoints: Stately Affects in Amman and Baghdad” (New Texts Out Now)

José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri, “Of Bakeries and Checkpoints: Stately Affects in Amman and Baghdad” (New Texts Out Now)

By : José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri

José Ciro Martínez and Omar Sirri, “Of Bakeries and Checkpoints: Stately Affects in Amman and Baghdad,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Online First (Apr 2020): 1-18. 

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

José Ciro Martínez (JCM): It started in a basement in Fairfax, Virginia. It was hot, and I was sweating. Omar and I were screaming over Arabic pop, techno beats, and thumping base. Even in such a setting, it turns out, you can still have animated discussions about performativity, the state effect, and the afterlives of Tim Mitchell’s famous article. We should have been dancing like everyone else. But Omar’s fieldwork was so compelling, his accounts of everyday life in Baghdad absorbing. Ethnography brought us together. That, and a very generous group of scholars who organize the Political Economy Summer Institute (PESI 2018) where we first met. Our collaboration grew over a shared love of certain books and a mutual discontent with what political science, at least in its hegemonic North American form, has become. But more importantly this effort reflects a desire to think about very challenging bouts of fieldwork together. I like to think that we began with our interlocutors and friends in Amman and Baghdad. We started with the ordinary. The article came next. 

Omar Sirri (OS): I have the same vivid memories, especially of the glares we got from other partygoers for being so stuffy. But what I recall most about that moment is the sense of possibility—for knowledge production, ethnographic reflection, inventive thinking. I had just completed a long stretch of fieldwork including time spent at Baghdad’s checkpoints. I was hardly looking for a writing collaboration. But that conversation reminded me at a key moment that what we do with our research matters. I am not interested in pigeonholing “my data” into increasingly meaningless frameworks that remove texture and richness from what we learn, especially ethnographically. Doing so does a disservice to our participants and allies in the field, and to our own labor. So, the potential for a collaboration with the guy who studies the politics of bread in Jordan was so invigorating, uplifting, nourishing. The dancing would have to wait.
Perhaps the state thrives through continued affective resonances, we thought, ones that usually hide in plain sight.

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

OS: The article investigates entanglements between infrastructure, affect, and the state effect. What would it look like, we wondered, if we took seriously the infrastructural nature of bakeries and checkpoints while also putting them side-by-side? What do residents sense and feel as they live with and move through these two sites and spaces? And, how are such infrastructural affects implicated in the production of the state? The piece also makes a more implicit intervention in the ever-burgeoning literature on cities in the MENA region. Space constraints prevented us from digging into most of that work. We instead chose to give as much room as possible to our ethnographies, letting those interested in cities find what is of empirical, conceptual, and political value to them through the fieldwork.

JCM: I would add that the piece reflects on the political efficacy of bakeries and checkpoints by thinking through their affective imbrications. It became clear that we were both interested in the modes of sociability, corporeal sensibilities, and embodied routines that surround these two sites, and how these relate to the state effect. We shared a frustration with literature on the state that focuses on discourse, imaginaries, and language—or, representation. Much of that work is fantastic and has influenced ours. But we concluded that the body, affect, and sensation were often overlooked, not quite given their due. Perhaps the state thrives through continued affective resonances, we thought, ones that usually hide in plain sight. We think our piece helps illuminate them. 

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

JCM & OS: It does and it does not. Connections and differences abound, but the piece marks the first time we have put bakeries and checkpoints in conversation. 

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

JCM: At the time we met, we were both captivated by a set of emerging debates in anthropology and geography, namely around affect and infrastructure. The scholarship we cite in the piece, as well as many others we did not have the space to include, has pushed us to think about bakeries and checkpoints in incredibly productive ways. I hope that students and scholars interested in these debates find the article thought provoking. I would like to think that our colleagues in comparative politics also find the piece worthy of reflection, though the lack of dependent and independent variables may hinder that possibility. Many have explored Amman, fewer Baghdad. Here, we strived to offer a different and compelling set of encounters and observations for those interested in these two cities. Impact, I am not so sure. If readers find the piece useful to think and teach with, well that would be fulfilling in the extreme.

OS: I agree with all of that. But my ideal reader, if that is what the question is asking, is someone who appreciates creativity in knowledge production. This piece is special to me because we dive into material and conceptual entanglements that ethnography helps uncover. We are often told as “young scholars” to aim for coherence, simplicity, and directness in our work. That is probably sound career advice. But adherence to it often stifles what I think can be so freeing and powerful about thought-provoking academic contributions: creativity. We do not see very much creativity in political science, a discipline I might be far less forgiving towards than José Ciro—especially as someone who is completing a North American PhD program, or as my friend Kate once derided, “the sausage maker out of which you are supposed to come out looking somewhat like a sausage.” People who relish creative interventions—both for what they liberate us from and teach us—are who I hope settle into this piece. You know, the people who hate sausage not because it is gross, not even because it is meat, but because it all looks the same and is usually all we are ever fed. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

OS: José Ciro and I hope this is the first of two or three collaborative pieces on bakeries and checkpoints. We were both surprised that this first piece ended up focusing on stately affects. Our initial idea was to consider the role of “state-makers,” or the people at bakeries and checkpoints who carry out their work, their craft, purportedly in the name of the state. But the various conversations and iterative outlines took us to this piece first. So next up we hope to look at the work of bakers in Amman and soldiers in Baghdad, and how their everyday practices help bring about the state effect. 

JCM: I am perplexed but most of all amazed at the places conversation with Omar takes me. We can somehow start with a dispute over Stephen Curry’s defense, or the appropriate amount of soumaq for a fattoush, and end up at the metabolic as a useful analytic for thinking about cities. So, who knows? But as Omar noted, we have discussed putting our time with soldiers and bakers in conversation. I have spent the last few years thinking about the craft of the bread-maker and see lots of resonances with what Omar tells me about certain dexterities employed at checkpoints (while recognizing the contrasts and points of divergence, which only feeds this generative collaboration). I am also interested in the burgeoning literature on political topologies in geography, and have contemplated with Omar about the “where” of the state, not as a fixed, hierarchically-scaled entity, but as an ever-shifting assemblage. Yet perhaps like the crew of smokers Khairy Shalaby so deftly portrays in The Hashish Waiter, writing is no longer the main reason we get together, and is instead just a good excuse, “a little rose-water poured on the friendship to moisten its roots and freshen its leaves.”

J: What drew you to bakeries and checkpoints? 

JCM: The smells, mainly. In 2010 I was studying language in Damascus and did a homestay near Bab Sharqi. To my delight, I quickly learned that the father of the family was a mana’ish maker, dabbling occasionally in bread. I avidly offered an extra pair of hands. Khubz ad-dawla was omnipresent (and still is). The political allusions seemed obvious. But back then, it was just about improving my Arabic and baking bread. 

OS: Dismay. It might best capture what Baghdad’s checkpoints evoke, operating as a catch-all for the variegated affects they engender. Fear and uncertainty, to be sure, but also exasperation, anger, and disappointment about what checkpoints do and what their ubiquity represents. How and why does such penetrating-yet-seemingly-ineffective security infrastructure exist against a backdrop of persistently devastating and future-destroying violence and precarity? The questions are baffling, the answers I think critical to how we understand that thing we call the state.


Excerpt from the article

Scenes and sites: The bakery and the checkpoint 

The bakery. Amman, November 2015

Abu Zeina is always tired but usually upbeat. One night we meet for tea after he finishes his twelve-hour shift at an upmarket café in the Swefieh district of West Amman. A father of three daughters, Abu Zeina rarely sees his children, departing for his early morning shift at a sandwich shop before they awake and returning home from the café after they go to bed. He often wished he could spend more time with them, relating how awful he felt for handing the children off to his parents for most of the afternoon, as his wife also works two jobs. But he takes solace in fulfilling what he describes as his two main responsibilities: “To make money and bring bread (‘Aml maṣārī wa jīb khubz).”

After briefly catching up, we hop in a cab east towards downtown, from where we each take a shared taxi (servīs) to our respective neighbourhoods. That night, Abu Zeina asks the cab driver to stop at al-Shaltawi bakery. I follow him in. It is around midnight and the oven is working at full tilt, the heat inside a welcome respite from what is a chilly autumn evening. A few customers collect sweet biscuits (ka‘k) that are usually dipped in tea, while others wallow outside over a cigarette. But most are in line for warm pita bread (khubz ‘arabī). Subsidised heavily by the Jordanian government, this bread is the cornerstone of many working-class diets and, for families like Abu Zeina’s, is crucial to getting by. 

Al-Shaltawi is perfectly located on a small side street just off one of the thoroughfares that lead into Amman’s historic city centre. Aided by convenient parking, customers can make hurried purchases without holding up traffic. Most times I passed this bakery it had a line of customers out the door. “Why do so many people stop here?” I ask Abu Zeina. “Because the bread is always fresh,” he answers. “Most bakeries at this hour are closed, this one is perfect for those of us who live in East Amman but work late on the other side of the city.” Struck by the uptick in his mood, I ask Abu Zeina to expound on his attachments to al-Shaltawi: “Some people buy bread to make a quick snack, most purchase it to take home to their families. Everyone knows they can afford it because it’s cheap. At such a late hour, the smells, the sounds, the entire bakery brings joy.” “Why joy?” I ask. Abu Zeina offers a wry smile. His reply speaks to both the importance of the bakery as infrastructure and its role in generating affective attachments to the state: “Because every day and everywhere the state lives off of the citizen. Here at the bakery, we [citizens] get to live off of the state.”[1]  

The checkpoint. Baghdad, February 2018

On a crisp February night, Daood and his friends were out in the Jazeera district in north Baghdad. There were maybe 9 or 10 of them in all, spread across four cars. Returning home from a café along the Tigris, they hit a police checkpoint. Daood was behind the wheel of his newish Volkswagen sedan, happily distracted by his two carmates. He had not clocked that the short line of cars ahead of him at the checkpoint had already advanced; he accelerated quickly to catch up. Moving too fast for his liking, the police officer hollered “taftīsh,” and with a wave of his hand directed Daood to the secondary car search. “Why in such a hurry?” the officer came over to ask Daood. “I’m not in a hurry,” Daood tersely replied. He opened his trunk and engine hood for the K-9 unit as the police officer checked his car registration and ID. “I asked the officer if this was all ‘routine procedure,’” Daood told me. Offended by the question, the officer escalated the confrontation: “Call the commander! This guy is breaking the law!”

Taken to a security caravan at the side of the checkpoint, Daood was met by two plain-clothed officers. “I explained how I didn’t do anything wrong. Then I heard the commander outside call for a police van to take me away. I wasn’t scared though, I hadn’t done anything.” Sitting with us as Daood told this story was his friend Nabil, who scoffed at his friend’s after-the-fact confidence. He had been in Daood’s passenger seat that night at the checkpoint. Nabil knew ending up in the back of a police van would have been disastrous for Daood. The potential consequences were bleak, from heavy fines to time in prison. Daood continued: “20 minutes later, a different commander came and asked me who was to blame, me or the officer. I was careful when I answered. I said that he was just doing his job, and I was in a hurry.” Daood hoped his cautious retreat would allow everyone to save face. An intelligence officer also stationed at the checkpoint then entered the caravan. “He walked me out and insisted I settle this quickly, and that if I don’t do so before the police van arrives, I’ll leave in it.” Daood was anxious. He came upon the original officer who stopped him; they again argued. Watching from the side-lines, the first commander who had been called more than an hour before grew irritated: “Enough! If there’s nothing, then let him go.”[2] The intelligence officer hurried Daood away: “I grabbed my papers and took off.”

Fear at Baghdad’s checkpoints operates through coercion and uncertainty. A sense that anything can happen while passing through them means, for most residents, that checkpoints exist “only to hurt the people” (bas yuadhī an-nās). At the same time, arbitrary checkpoints generate a desire for better, more reliable security infrastructures. Checkpoints give rise to different emotions and sensations – fear and anxiety, uncertainty and desire – that are critical to the construction of the state. “If the police officer had just done his job, it would have been fine,” Daood insisted. “I just wish police officers at checkpoints were more educated. I wish they had better manners. Without manners, you have catastrophe.”[3]

Reconsidering the state effect

These vignettes, from our respective fieldwork in Amman and Baghdad, suggest that the state is present at the bakery and the checkpoint. But what is the nature of this presence? We explore how routine interactions at these rarely-examined sites engender the state effect. In doing so, we emphasise their infrastructural and affective properties. Building on scholarship in geography and anthropology, this article brings together different case studies in neighbouring countries, Jordan and Iraq, to explore how the state is produced in the interstices of everyday life. We unpack not the practices of state officials or the techno-political interventions of an amorphous bureaucracy, but the varied emotions, enduring attachments and desires of citizens.

[…] 

Putting such different places into conversation with each other may seem strange at first glance. But we see value in our “disjunctive comparison”—contrasting these two “unlike” sites against each other. Bakeries in Amman offer sustenance, nourishment and welfare for those who pass through them. Checkpoints in Baghdad, however, are first and foremost spaces of violence and coercion. These sites lay bare opposing faces of the state and illustrate modes of engagement citizens have with political authority in two very different cities and political contexts. Fieldwork conducted separately over a period of more than fifteen months revealed to each of us the varied ways that the state is felt, experienced and discussed in Amman and Baghdad. When brought together, these different sites and affects contribute to how we understand the state effect in a manner we believe would not have been as evident in the study of either city or infrastructure on their own. It became clear in conversation that bakeries and checkpoints exert a “force” not easily captured by the materials that compose them or the logics of rule they seek to entrench. Far more is going on.


[1] ‘Ashan kul yawm wa fī kul makān ad-dawla t‘ayīsh ‘ala-l-muwaṭin. Hon fil makhbaz ihna n‘ayīsh ala-d-dawla.

[2] Kāfī ‘ad! Idha māko shī khalī yaroḥ!

[3] Pseudonyms have been used for all interlocutors in this article. 
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.

[…]

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.