Fatima Bhutto, The Runaways: A Novel (New Texts Out Now)

Fatima Bhutto, The Runaways: A Novel (New Texts Out Now)

Fatima Bhutto, The Runaways: A Novel (New Texts Out Now)

By : Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto, The Runaways: A Novel (Verso Books, 2020).

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

Fatima Bhutto (FB): There is a reflex in the Western world that has led to a singular narrative on what radicalism means and why it happens; it is clear now, two decades into the “war on terror,” that it is utterly wrong. The West does not understand radicalism—either by design or default—but this lack of understanding is making things worse. It is anger, isolation, alienation, and pain that drives young people to take up arms against the world. It is not religion. For twenty years, the prevailing narrative was that there was something innate in Muslims that leads them to radicalism and this narrative was never checked, never questioned, never held to the light to be examined. It was just accepted. They invented this thing called a “moderate Muslim”—the term itself is ridiculous—who might be trotted out now and again to confirm that yes, except for this small moderate slice, there was something wrong with the whole. But this narrative never examined its wars, its occupations, its failure to absorb its own countrymen and women, its failure to build inclusive societies at home. I was a college student in New York during September 11; I was doing my master’s in London when 7/7 happened; and I had grown up seeing my country and people like myself demonized. I was wounded by all of this. The Runaways was written out of those wounds.

It is about an isolated generation, coming of age in a time of raging global inequality.

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

FB: The novel is ostensibly about radicalism, but The Runaways is also a book about migration and the weaponization of both the internet and of loneliness. It is about an isolated generation, coming of age in a time of raging global inequality. I do not think one goes into writing a novel by saying, I am going to explore this theme right now and I am going to do it in these three ways. I went into it thinking about young lives caught in the horror of this moment and I had the idea of wanting to write about two young men, thrown together on a march who cannot stand each other. 

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

FB: The book connects to my previous work in, an examination of private lives set against the backdrop of turmoil and turbulence. My first novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was the story of three brothers in Pakistan’s tribal areas set over the course of one day. It was the story of insurgency and what the shadow of constant threat does to young lives. The Runaways is similar in the sense that it is also curious about young—even younger—lives, but it does depart in that it also looks at class, at divergent communities and geographies. It was a much harder book to write. 

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

FB: I never think of who will read my work when I am writing in order not to limit or distract myself, but I always hope that my work will reach people in their lonely moments. That is when books have meant the most to me. As for the impact, Islamophobia is so rampant and so accepted today. I am not hopeful enough to think that reading one book is enough to dent anyone’s intolerance, but if it disturbed a comfortable reader, I would be happy. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

FB: I am in the marination stage at the moment. I have had two books, The Runaways and New Kings of the World (a non-fiction book on globalization and popular culture) come out soon after each other in the last two years, and so at the moment I am reading and thinking about what is next. I have held writing workshops in Lahore, Cairo, and on Zoom, and I have enjoyed working with young writers. 

J: Was Layla’s name taken from the story of Layla and Majnun? 

FB: Yes, it was—I never get asked this!


Excerpt from the book

What is it? Pa asked, thinking of himself. Is it a girl? Are you lonely? 

Safiya Begum remained a distant, morose figure in the house on Britannia Road, long after her death. Sulaiman kept a photo of her as a stern-looking bride on the mantelpiece, a heavy dupatta weighing down the crown of her head, but not large or heavy enough to obscure her forbidding gaze and her thin lips, locked in a worried frown. Every other week or so Pa sat down in their small living room and covered a side table with old newspapers and polished the frame, marked with a rubber stamp from the Lucknow studio on the back, with an old rag that left the smell of metal on his fingers for hours afterwards. 

This was your mother, he would say out loud, speaking to his son, whose feet were propped up carelessly on the newspapered table, his arms crossed behind his head, watching the Premier League on TV. 

Sunny had no memory of Safiya Begum, no sense of motherly love, no feeling for what it was like to have had a mother.

Underneath Pa’s shoeboxes in his narrow cupboard, filled

with crisp, old airmail letters, Sunny had found a stack of

self-help books: Love after Loss: Kick- Start Your Emotional Life in

10 StepsAlone and UnafraidThe Widow’s Guide to Dating and Sex.

And sex?

A further search resulted in a pile of men’s magazines, including GQ, of all things, underlined and dog-eared for future reference, buried at the back of the cupboard.

How to Dress like a Quintessential English Gentleman: The A 

to Z of Savile Row was one of the pages Pa had marked. Sunny could just see his father, smoothing down the page as he studied it, so it wouldn’t crease. He had even written in the margins, copying the instructions on how to tie the perfect ascot. Who was ever going to invite Sulaiman Jamil anywhere he’d have to wear an ascot? Sunny didn’t even want to think about it.

He pushed the magazines back, replaced the boxes and closed the door.

Why do we always ape the West? Sunny wrote on his Facebook

wall that night, thinking of the words of the Pakistani playboy-cricketer-turned-politician, Imran Khan.

Why we strong Muslim men always gotta go around in jeans and suits and ties like we don’t got a PROUD culture of our own? Why read Shakespeare when we have our own holy book–worth a thousand pages of English classics? Why we follow their laws, their democracy, their ideas when we have the hadiths, the Shariah, the purest guidance to a virtuous, Islamic life?

But even then, even echoing the opinions of a likeminded, world-famous soul, Sunny was alone, like his pa, speaking into a void.

Sulaiman Jamil first cleaned the glass over Safiya Begum’s face with a tissue, wetting it with the tip of his tongue, then running his hands over his wife’s cheeks, the colour of burnt toffee.

But Sulaiman Jamil never found a second love.

The indignities of loneliness were too many to catalogue and count. Though Sulaiman Jamil had joined senior singles’ Latin-dance classes, diverse voices of colour book clubs and yoga (‘ancient de-stressing exercise!’), he had so far failed to meet anyone special.

But Pa had no idea how easy it was for Sunny to get girls in sad, small Portsmouth. Ever since he was eleven or twelve, since his first erection, Sunny got girls all the time. There was no shortage of them: white girls who wanted to piss off their parents by sleeping with Indian, Muslim, brown, boxing Sunny. Foreign girls, reckless and easy.

The headscarf girls were the wildest. Put a hijab on a sister, Micky said, and see what kind of antics she got up to then. And it was true: the Maryams and the Aishas and Kareenas stalked Sunny at the clubs something relentless–pressing their tits up against him and asking if he had any weed, if he wanted to drive them home, if he knew somewhere quiet they could go to and hang out, their acrylic nails running up the inside of his thigh. Sunny couldn’t shake the Desis even if he tried.

Since he had started growing a beard, though, the God Squad were falling over themselves to get with him. Didn’t matter that Sunny didn’t have but a basic debit card, no car, no flex, no flash job at a London bank; that lot didn’t care about that, once they assumed there was a righteous, God-fearing brother at hand. The brown girls didn’t tart it up on Facebook or Instagram. They posted pictures of religious sayings raining down on sunflower fields, cat memes and portraits of their nail art. The Desis didn’t advertise, they got right to business.

Romina, a plump little Bangladeshi, her hair tucked so tight under her hijab that it pulled her eyes back, making her look a little Mongoloid, took Sunny to the cinema and sat on his lap, grinding against him right there, where everyone could see. Reshma got off on messing around

in public, too, always in the park. Afterwards, she used to make Sunny take her to Nandos, her breath smelling of peri-peri, her oily fingers clasped tight around his own. 

By the time Sunny turned nineteen he had had enough fooling around. He didn’t want any of those girls, brown or white. He was done with all that.

He started to spend more and more time online, sitting at the desk in his room that Pa had carried home from a charity shop, smelling of pine freshener and old women’s powdery perfume, his blinds drawn and Frank Ocean streaming out of his phone, watching the world through Facebook and Twitter.

Sunny spent hours on Instagram, scrolling through strangers’ lives, looking at photo after photo, until his eyes ached from the dull light of Photoshopped colours. He shopped for cheap designer gear on eBay, looking for brands of sweaters and kicks that his favourite rappers wore. But it was on YouTube one night that Sunny came across a video of Muhammad Ali. Sitting on a stage in front of thousands of people, the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay spoke of his Muslim faith. ‘All the angels in the Christian religion are white,’ Ali said of his Baptist past. ‘Why come we never get to go to heaven? Why come Mexicans never get to go to heaven?’

Ali, in his elegant blue blazer and black turtleneck, spoke of being turned away from white churches, but finding love everywhere in Islam. ‘You say as salam alaikum you got a home, you got a brother anywhere in the world.’

He was never good enough, the boxer said, but in Islam he was always striving to change, to be better.

From there Sunny discovered Malcolm X, another strong man persecuted and put down, finding the light of solidarity only in Islam. And it was then that Sunny began to devote himself full-time to looking at the heritage of his people, educating himself on the struggles of Islam and the centuries of battles fought over people’s souls.

Fiqh, Sunny posted on his Facebook page one day:

What does it mean in the modern world? Yo, fiqh is the key. You know any other people who have so much study, so much pro-fun-dity in their world? Deep knowledge, deep deep comprehension. This is the illumination of Islam, it seeks answers to all questions and guides its followers exactly towards the right path.

Sunny spent hours googling Arabic translations, reading blog posts about jurisprudence, collating and collecting fables and histories. And then he shared his learning, waiting hopefully for someone to appreciate all his proud knowledge and analysis.

But no one responded to Sunny’s posts.

One day, a stranger liked his offering on gambling. There it was, a thumbs-up. The first validation of his investigations. But when Sunny logged back into his page later that afternoon, the like was gone. What had he done? Why had someone bothered to go back, find his post and

un-like it?

What lessons can we learn from the kingdom of jahiliya? Plenty! Look around you, brothers. Our lives are thick with jahiliya–or ‘ignorance of God’s divine guidance’ in Arabic–and we shelter our lives with lies and falsities instead of looking that ignorance head-on and defeating it. This was the desperate state of our forefathers before Islam, but we are still shrouded in its wicked darkness.

Sunny linked his Facebook to his Twitter account, thinking he would receive greater traction in a universe built on trading information, but everything Sunny tweeted landed soundlessly, as if he had not written anything at all.

He waited patiently, sitting at his old lady’s desk, his knees bent up against the wood until his skin went red and his legs cramped, listening to Channel Orange on repeat, feeling personally, acutely, like a diamond in a rocky, rocky world. It felt like all his life Sunny had been waiting until the moment when someone would see him. When someone would know him–would meet him at the intersection of his confusion and emptiness–and, in seeing him, would lift him from his troubled self.

At the same time, at the exact, concurrent second, sitting at his desk alone, Sunny bumped against the disorder of his room. Reaching down to look for the fallen bottle-cap of his Diet Coke, he hit his head on the legs of the old lady’s desk, still smelling faintly of lavender perfume. Feeling the carbonated, chemical water of the Coke bloat his stomach against his jeans, Sunny thought: I have too much. I hate it all. I want nothing. A minimum of things, a skeletal frame of belongings.

And then, as he lifted his head and saw the scratches all along the frame of the desk, carved out of the wood by a hand not his own, and raised himself up on his sneakers, scuffed and old, Sunny looked at his portable speakers, busted so that only one of the cones played any music at all, and the second thought collided with the first: I wish I had more.

But the recognition, the reckoning, the being seen that Sunny so desperately wanted, never came.

He spent more time out of the house, evading his father’s heavy mood and lectures on world capitalism and Asian Tigers yet to claim their space among the pantheon of the great. If only Sunny knew, if only he would try harder to fit in, to assimilate, his pa promised he would take his place among Britain’s rising Asians. This is why they had come here, to Britain, to be a part of a rising tide. Sulaiman Jamil knew history was on his side and he hounded his son with his unflagging hope in global capitalism’s ability to absorb all men, no matter how peripheral.

At first, Pa was happy thinking Sunny had finally gone and ingratiated himself in some internship or was bettering his interview and management skills on a training course, but Sunny had started leaving his classes early and going straight to the gym, a small box on Dickinson Road, open twenty-four hours, the kind of place you went to train, to destroy your body so you could build it up again, to be alone in the company of others who were also hiding, transforming, beating their flesh for their sins.

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.