Sara Fregonese, War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Sara Fregonese, War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Sara Fregonese, War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

By : Sara Fregonese

Sara Fregonese, War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon (Bloomsbury, 2019).

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

Sara Fregonese (SF): This book is the result of my doctoral research (2004-2008), to which I then added a layer of historical detail about the administrative changes in 1840s Mount Lebanon and their impact on today’s sectarian politics. I also integrated a chapter on more recent sustained urban clashes in 2008 that partly encompasses my postdoctoral research around sovereignty and non-state armed groups (2009-2012) and their relation with the idea and practice of the State.

What made me write the book was, firstly, a disciplinary frustration with the lack of attention (in western scholarship at least) given to the representations and narrations of non-state actors and sub-national spaces of the civil war in Lebanon. We see a lot of grand scale geopolitical analysis around the 1975-1990 events, but less enquiry linking the kind of geopolitical reasoning from international relations and political science, with spatial accounts of what was actually happening at the urban level during the conflict. 

Secondly, I was pushed by the apparent discrepancy in the archives between the contextual richness and fine-grained detail of diplomatic and intelligence accounts from the ground, and what instead was distilled into a rather simplistic official diplomatic discourse of non-intervention in the early phases of the civil war in Lebanon. The declassified UK diplomatic archives, for example, offer detailed and almost daily urban accounts of what was happening in Beirut: how the city was slowly but surely being partitioned; and where, by whom, and through what local spatial and demographic maneuvers and political dynamics. Instead, what we see at the level of official statecraft in several of the Western states at the time, is a different scale of priorities. Here, you have first and foremost a concern to keep the Middle East away from a wide-scale regional war between states. There is very little or no genuine engagement with what was occurring at the sub-national and let alone urban level. This lack of international engagement—also triggered by (orientalist) perceptions of Beirut as a chaotic “quagmire” in the wake of the US Vietnam experience—contributed strongly, I argue in the book, in allowing Beirut to be partitioned. The partition of Beirut and its long-term effects are as much a result of local militias as of the discursive constructions of official international diplomacy at the time.  

... the book aims at understanding political sectarianism as a territorial project that was never disconnected from the sociopolitical one.

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

SF: War and the City offers an overview of urban geopolitics and the gaps that this scholarship still has. This has revealed itself as a crucial approach to understand the value of urban accounts of civil war, but it also allowed me to trace connections with the wider scale at which geopolitics operate. It also addresses the notion of urbicide (literally the killing of the city) as a way of understanding the conflict by paying attention not only to its political actors, but also to the role of urban space, and to how Lebanese architecture and specific portions of Beirut’s urban built fabric were violently targeted.

In this book, the topic of the colonial mandate and its relation with political sectarianism is very important to me. The book has started extending Ussama Makdisi’s work about the representational regimes and taxonomies that legitimated and institutionalized sectarianism in the Ottoman levant, into the less studied realm of spatial representation and cartography. In doing so, the book aims at understanding political sectarianism as a territorial project that was never disconnected from the sociopolitical one. 

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

SF: War and the City does not include—but is connected—to my further work on Beirut’s historical hotel district before the war and the notion of discrepant cosmopolitanism, or more recent short reflections on the protests. It also starts to engage with Lebanon’s colonial legacy in a spatial and cartographic way. The book’s conclusions make a case for adopting more forensic and elemental approaches (which focus on physical elements, substances, and materials) to analyze the impact of sectarianism on society and especially the extraction, accumulation, and (mis)management of resources as one of its prominent features. Painfully and unfathomably, the ammonium nitrate explosion in the Port of Beirut on 4 August and the evidence on its causes so far, point once more to the deadly entanglements between the sectarian system and its mis-accumulation of resources (in this case, an explosive element) that make the Lebanese population extremely vulnerable.

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

SF: In terms of academic audiences, this book is primarily for students and teaching staff in geography, political geography, or geopolitics, but it will hopefully also be of interest to the disciplines of urban studies, history, and area studies.  

This book is for the general public in Lebanon, but it is admittedly an expensive object. The paperback is thankfully being released in spring 2021 for a third of the price, so I hope it will soon be more accessible. This is essentially a book about the civil war—a part of the country’s past that has resulted in amnesty rather than transitional justice and is still off-limits in many educational curricula. The ideal impact would be contributing to a debate about the country’s recent past and all its contested aspects. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

SF: Excitingly, a new project has very recently come to fruition (more soon!), bringing different research and professional collaborations. It has to do with the everyday, experiential and atmospheric aspects of counter terrorism in European cities. This involves a tangential topic and different locations from my main body of work, but learns from some of the theories and contexts I have engaged with previously. 

However, I am retaining a research link with Lebanon. Currently, I am organizing and analyzing several archive records I collected in London, Beirut, Baakleen, and Istanbul for a research on British cartography and boundary-making in late Ottoman Mount Lebanon.

J: How is it to write about Lebanon as a non-Lebanese? 

SF: This is a constant question I get, the ultimate anthropological interrogation, which for me is gradually turning into an existential conundrum: am I in a position to speak and write about Lebanon? I have been studying in and about Lebanon since 2000, formed much of my base geographical knowledge of Beirut in 2002 by walking and driving around pretty much every neighborhood with Lebanese architects (without whom I simply could not have formed such knowledge), and in 2005 and 2010, Beirut was my only home. But my homes—and of course alternatives—were and are always Italy and the UK. So, what is—ethically and intellectually—my role within the present conjuncture for the country, which is reeling from immense trauma, and amidst ongoing public challenge to its political system, unprecedented economic crisis, and a global pandemic? Is this my story to tell? Is my expertise actually needed at this particular moment?

There are then the usual obstacles: I majored in Arabic in my university degree, but the language barrier is still big after all these years; not being in Lebanon but continuously following developments in a detailed ways is also challenging; and, of course, you have the pitfalls of applying European taxonomies and assumptions to what might be untranslatable contexts. However, the insider/outsider debate has long been present in social research, and especially when it comes to doing fieldwork. I always find cultural studies and James Clifford’s words useful: “there is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretation. Some strategy of localization is inevitable if significantly different ways of life are to be represented. But “local” in whose terms? […] Who determines where (and when) a community draws its lines, names its insiders and outsiders?” (“Travelling Cultures” in Cultural Studies, edited by L Grossberg, C Nelson, and P A Treichler (Routledge, 1992), p. 97). I find that this resonates especially in the case of Lebanon, where diasporic, multi-lingual, and transnational identities have shaped the country historically and still so strongly do, in the best of ways. 

So, perhaps more than one’s nationality, it is where one speaks from that matters. And it is the job of the researcher to constantly reflect on the politics of their position, while also acknowledging that the boundary of what is local and what is not is also fluid and diffuse. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from the introduction)*

In his book Beirut the late historian Samir Kassir (2010) poignantly noted how Beirut is not an ‘original city’ (440), a passive victim of conflict coming from nowhere. He argues that much of the political and (para) military mobilization towards the civil war was obtained by ‘transposing the convulsive upheavals of regional geopolitics to the urban level’ (Kassir 2010, 440). This book focuses on that transposing of regional issues onto the urban ground. It traces the connections that link large-scale geopolitical discourses about Lebanon with the micro-geographies of violence in and against urban sites during a defining urban moment of the conflict: the war of 1975–1976, known widely as the Two Years’ War (al-harb as-sanatayn). The following chapters offer an in-depth account of the relations between geopolitics, armed conflict and Beirut’s urban space, and of how Lebanon’s sovereignty has been implicated in and reshaped by these relations. The book also traces the deeper historical and territorial connections between the urban impact of the Two Years’ War and Lebanon’s violent colonial past, questioning the very nature of its current sovereignty in light of contested histories of violence. The questions around which the book revolves are: firstly, how do large scale, formal geopolitics and the microgeographies of conflict interact and intersect in the representation and the practice of war in Lebanon? Secondly, how was the urban built environment of Beirut involved in the processes of production and mobilization of those representations and practices? Thirdly, what are the legacies of the histories and territories of Lebanon’s Ottoman and colonial past on its urban geopolitics of conflict? Fourthly, what does an urban perspective on conflict tell us about the nature of sovereignty in Lebanon?

Scope of the book

[…] Lebanon scholars have also produced several sophisticated understandings of the Lebanese conflict, and especially of the nonstate armed actors that enacted de facto sovereignty in the Lebanese capital during the war. They have investigated their birth and the development of their mechanisms of violence (Corm 2005; F. El-Khazen 2004; Hanf 2015), their role as providers of social services replacing the state (Harik 1994),and as political actors crossing sectarian divisions in order to realize wider political projects (Rowayheb 2006). Other authors have focused on the relation between militia territoriality and visual mechanisms of propaganda (Chakhtoura 2005; Maasri 2008), and the power structure and organization of specific militias and the production of specific spaces (Kemp 1983). The value of these studies resides in their breadth, as some consider the whole duration of the war; or in their focus on the features of one single militia or on one specific aspect of the militia activity (such as public services). However, this previous work often does not, or only partially, consider the built environment as part and parcel of the production of discourses of war, sovereignty and identity. The scope to this book is less wide, but explores more deeply the relationship between war and urban built environment during the crucial early phases  of the civil war. As I started my PhD, I intended to examine how regional geopolitics intersected with and manifested themselves in the urban politics of a post-conflict urban environment like that of Beirut. Instead, as the research moved on and as a lively debate emerged in urban geopolitics in 2004 and 2005, I chose to focus my attention on the initial phase of the conflict between 13 April 1975 and 21 October 1976. I apply instead interpretive depth to understand how geopolitical meaning is renegotiated during conflict, and especially during close-quartet urban warfare with light or relatively light weapons, where urban streets and buildings compose both the fabric that shapes the rationalities of war, and the materiality through which meanings about sovereignty, territory and nation state were renegotiated and re-inscribed. The Two Years’ War became my field of enquiry into the urban geopolitics of wartime Lebanon. 

[…] One of the reasons for choosing to concentrate on the Two Years’ War concerns the different ways in which space was produced through violence in the pre- and post-1978 phases of the war. Various scholars (Corm 2005; Kassir 2003) agree about a change in the strategic politics, geographical span, and geopolitical weight of the Lebanese conflict after March 1978, when the Israeli army launched Operation Litani. They propose that ‘beginning in mid-1978, the nature and scope of the war changed’ (Farid El-Khazen 2000, 5): the entry of the Israeli armies on Lebanese soil (and, in 1976 of the Arab Deterrence Force led by Syria); the use of heavier weapons, air power and siege (in 1982); the creation of the international peacekeeping force; and finally the rise of suicide terrorism in the 1980s have very often been considered as dynamics that shifted the Lebanese conflict onto a different scale. This shift included the internationalization of the conflict, the solidification of the militias’ structure and organization (El-Khazen 2000) and of their affiliations to foreign powers (Corm 2005), as well as the increasing use of heavy artillery and the use of air power.

[…] Aerial power impacted materially onto Beirut’s urban fabric differently from the material imprint of the previous phase, mainly because of the vast destruction of extended air attacks and heavy artillery, which substituted or were superimposed on the irregular and partial ruination of close-quarter and relatively lightly armed guerrilla fighting (Moystad 1998) of the previous phase. Most importantly, the rounds (Jawlat) of fighting that punctuated the Two Years’ War were crucial in establishing the frontlines and, ultimately, the partition of the city into two sectors (East and West) until the end of the conflict.

 

*Footnotes removed

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.