Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (New Texts Out Now)

Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (New Texts Out Now)

Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nazanin Shahrokni

Nazanin Shahrokni, Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).

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

Nazanin Shahrokni (NS): Women in Place constitutes the intertwinement of the personal, the political, and the professional for me. 

I begin the book by describing a scene from 1995, which I experienced personally: the opening ceremony of the Students’ Sports Olympiad, which took place in Isfahan, Iran, one of the first times when male and female students were allowed in the very same stadium together, albeit in separate sections. This was a formative experience for me, because living these events brought home an apparent “paradox” that permeates my book. Back then, in the 1990s when timid steps towards an opening with regards to the “place” of women in Iran were taking place, interestingly, the very same female officials who had invested in opening up doors for us, young women, were also the ones who were monitoring and restricting this new experience of “freedom.” Such officials disciplined any attempt to cross the boundaries of what they considered congruent with “Islamic propriety.” We could participate in the Olympiad as sportswomen, but we were constantly reminded that this participation was conditional, precarious, and any deviation from established expectations in terms of our behavior was going to have consequences—expulsion from the games or disqualification. Beyond the ambivalence of these officials, in our daily lives we also encountered other paradoxes, exposing the struggles between different sectors of the state and their distinct policies. In parks, for example, we were renting out bikes from the municipality, only to cycle under signs that reminded us that cycling was prohibited for women. On a personal level, Women in Place stems from this paradoxical existence, this state of living in ambiguity and my personal and intellectual need to process it, to make sense of it.

But the book also represents for me a political endeavor. It reflects my dismay when confronting tropes of discussing the Iranian woman, in both journalistic and scholarly accounts, in the United States and elsewhere, where women and their agency are either absent and constantly erased, or are acknowledged within the narrow framework of heroic efforts and militancy. A whole array of life experiences is lost and missing from discourses. The lives Iranian women have lived are much more complex than the ones prescribed for them by the Islamic Republic and perceived by foreign observers; their reality has been reduced to a monochrome and monotone existence. I wanted to challenge this trend by animating their lives.

Finally, on a professional level, studies of the Iranian state, with the exception of a few, have mainly focused on its repressive capacity and on its attempt to disable undesired effects. I have always believed that when we underestimate the complexity of mechanisms of power, we do so at our own peril. I wanted to explore other facets of state power in Iran that are not, at least overtly, repressive, other facets that aim at enabling desired effects. Instances—and there are many of these—when the state manages to transform disgruntlement to acceptance of, or even participation in its projects, when power is consolidated not through force but through consent, are also important. Women in Place attempts to capture the multifacetedness of the state, the competition among factions and fractions within its institutions, and the opportunity structures that these produce for various groups of women to mobilize, or to negotiate and challenge state projects.

And what does the transformation of gender-segregated spaces show us about the changing modalities of state power in Iran?

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

NS: Women in Place is premised on a critical ethnography that provides snippets of women’s lives in Tehran. The book takes us on a historical tour of the post-revolutionary city by examining three illustrative sites of gender segregation: on city buses; inside the Mothers’ Paradise, the first of several women-only parks in the city; and outside the closed doors of Freedom Sports Stadium, where women are banned from attending men’s sports matches. It asks questions such as, what is the story of gender segregation policies in post-revolutionary Iran? How do various administrations justify their creation and expansion? Who uses gender-segregated spaces, and what meanings do they assign to them? And what does the transformation of gender-segregated spaces show us about the changing modalities of state power in Iran? 

Through these case studies, the book charts the ways women navigate through the multitude of restrictions, opportunities, and the continually evolving segregation that the regime affords them. However, it also looks at how experts and politicians develop policy and how the state establishes itself and retains its role as the ultimate arbiter of gender boundaries by regulating women’s presence in public spaces and by mobilizing and redefining gender segregation. Here, I engage with and contribute to studies of postrevolutionary states and societies. I use gender segregation policies as a window into the transformations of, and contradictions within the Iranian state, as well as the changes in Iranian society over the past four decades. 

I demonstrate that, over several decades, attempts to Islamize public spaces through solidifying gender difference and drawing physical and visible gender boundaries, has been a complex process driven at different moments by different combinations of ideological imperatives, the quest for legitimation, and practical exigencies. As such, what we call Islamization has had no clear sense of direction, other than an undefined commitment to constructing Islamic spaces through segregation. Drawing on the critical literature on city making and space making, I argue that constructing the Islamic city had no blueprint; rather, it was the product of trial and error and was often wedded to different governance imperatives and political and economic calculations. 

Finally, my book constitutes a contribution to feminist geography. By putting Iran on the radar, it seeks to nuance the discussions on gender segregation, decouple them from Islam, and integrate them to broader technologies of power which redefine both masculinities and femininities and their relationship with place, as well as Islam and the “Islamic.” Women in Place prompts the reader to critically reflect and decouple physical segregation from social exclusion, to look at the multiplicities of ways in which women “populate” and reterritorialize gender segregated spaces.

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

NS: This is my first book. It builds pretty much on my decade-long work with Zanan Magazine in Iran, where I observed, documented, and narrated shifts in the place of women in public and domestic space and formulated a host of questions that found their way into Women in Place. It also relates to my master’s work at Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran, and the interest I developed in the ways that the election of women city councilors transforms the power dynamics both at home and in the councils. I have always been interested in the urban governance/gender nexus. But for my book I decided to focus on how policies are made, implemented, lived, and transformed. I wanted to explore what becomes of these gender segregated spaces, how they are given meaning and purpose by the state, society and those who live in them and use them. After all, spaces are not always what policy makers intended them to be; one needs to also situate these spaces and the works of urban planners and councilors in the broader context of national and international politics. I should stress here that Women in Place adopts an approach that challenges methodological nationalism. As I argue, the dynamics the book examines are of course pertaining to Iranian society and state, yet they cannot be fully or adequately grasped without examining processes and actors outside Iran’s boundaries. 

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

NS: As the product of academic research, this book is addressed to academics—those interested in Iran in general, but also those who work on gender policies and urban politics, and of course researchers and teachers whose work touches on gender segregation. But my aspiration from the outset was for the book to talk to a broader readership—journalists and other opinion leaders, and also the broader Middle East, whose “knowledge” of Iran and the position of women there rests on facile and comfortably accepted assumptions that make policy makers and the public susceptible to dubious political agendas. The argument of the book is deliberately deployed through stories derived from ethnographic research. I chose stories as a medium, because I am hoping that the non-academic, general public, as well, will find the book both amusing and, more importantly, illuminating.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NS: I am currently working on a multi-country project on gender and mobility in the city, bringing global discourses of sexual harassment and their local renditions and contextualization in dialogue. This choice to move “away” from Iran was prompted by the realization that I want my work to challenge ways of seeing the latter as exceptional and to break the walls of regional studies by looking at “women only” spaces in other times and national settings. Having said that, when it comes to Iran, I will remain fascinated by the opening and closure of spaces, by what, in the book, I call flexible sexism. That is when the exigencies of domestic and international political and economic circumstances require the state not to rigidly police gender boundaries, when the interests of the state align closely with women’s needs and interests. I am working on a few articles that examine, through various case studies, what this flexible sexism engenders, but also what it endangers.

 

Excerpt from the book

Boundaries in Motion: Sisters, Citizens, and Consumers Get on the Bus (p. 34)

A bus is a mobile space, an ideology in motion. It moves from one neighborhood to the other, day after day, week after week, year after year. It is the same bus, but never the same space. Three decades ago, during the 1980s, the bus’s interior was reshaped by a metal bar that divided it into two separate sections, signifying an Islamic public order. At that time women were conceived of merely as potential passengers, and not even ones deserving of equal space on the bus. They were relegated to the smaller section at the bus’s back, while men took the more spacious front. Then, during the 2000s, the buses no longer represented a male space with token seats for women in the back. Women were allotted an equal, although still separate, bus space. On regular buses they still sat at the back; on BRT buses, however, they rode in front. For a short period of time they were also given the chance to steer the big wheel and drive the bus in and around the city. Today, the bus is the same bus, still divided, but what it signifies has changed; women’s public presence, once considered an interruption of or an exception to public order, has become an integrated part of it, one requiring recognition and accommodation.

How do we grasp the shifting contours of this space, the shifting reality of the metal bar that once signified an unequal distribution of bus space? How and why did the gender organization of the bus space—and the city it traverses—change over time? To answer these questions, we must look at the processes through which the project of bus segregation has been implemented. Far from being simply a practice of exclusion easily intelligible as an expression of the static patriarchy of the Islamic state, gender-segregated busing has changed with shifts in the sociopolitical context.

[…] (p. 44-45)

Quantitative developments brought with them qualitative transformations. As women rode the buses in increasing numbers and made their way around the city, a new notion of femininity emerged, one that was no longer associated with domesticity and that demanded recognition in the city. That small section at the back of the bus had made women’s rides religiously pure and physically safe, encouraging them to lay claim to it as a space of their own. The (segregated) bus space shifted from being a feminine space to a “feminist” space; as women developed a sense of entitlement to their (separate) section on the bus, the metal bar came to embody the unjust distribution of bus space, prompting them to demand a larger share of the bus space and, perhaps more important, equal access to it.

“From the back seat in Iran,” wrote Elaine Sciolino for the New York Times on April 23, 1992, “murmurs of unrest could be heard.” The complaints expressed in letters to the editor of Zan-e Rooz were no longer about the unwarranted and illegitimate physical contact with “brothers,” but about men crossing the boundaries and taking over women’s seats. Women passengers were no longer primarily concerned with men treating them as passive targets of daily harassment but with their entitlement to a space that was at first denied to them and later only conditionally theirs. 

[…] Happy and Healthy in Mothers’ Paradise: Women-Only Parks and the Expansion of the State (p. 60)

Mr. Mostafavi, a senior official at Tehran Municipality, explained:

When we decided to open women-only parks, we were thinking of housewives stuck in small apartments all day, putting up with their children, cooking and cleaning. This could make women get depressed, anxious, and impatient. So when the poor husband returns from work, she has no patience and would easily pick on him or start a quarrel.

The motivation for opening women-only parks, as Mr. Mostafavi’s statements indicate, was to create “angels of the home” (McDowell 1999, 75–80), under whose wings men could rest in peace. Nevertheless, some of the discussions generated inside and about the park extended to the private spaces of homes, transforming the power dynamics within them and thus disrupting the “peace.” Azam, a fifty nine-year-old housewife, explained to me that several of her neighbors had circulated a petition opposing the designation of “the best park in the neighborhood” exclusively to women:

That night our dinner turned into something like the presidential debates you see on TV. We were discussing the petition. My husband was upset because he used to go to this park in the mornings. My two sons, twenty and twenty-eight, took their father’s side. I told them: “Would you like to have a depressed crippled mother at home? Or would you rather I go out, get some fresh air, walk a bit, inhale some oxygen and live longer?” I told them you have the whole city to yourself. Leave this park for me. 

Echoing Virginia Woolf, who argued in 1929 that for a woman’s creativity and freedom to flourish, she should have “a room of her own,” this Iranian Woolf demanded not a room, but a park of one’s own, or her share of the city.

[…] (p. 62)

Whereas after the revolution the state viewed women’s outdoor exercise as a moral problem, today, not only does it coordinate women’s group exercises in mixed parks, but it also provides women with a green space of their own in the form of women-only parks. In order to better make sense of the nature of and reasons for this change, one needs to pay attention to a host of factors that are often ignored in the analysis of the complex and continually evolving relationship between women, state, and society in Iran. Tehran’s rapid urbanization has had a significant impact on the change of focus and emphasis of state policies and priorities, as has the state’s increasing concern about its continued legitimacy in the eyes of a disaffected citizenry. Other significant factors that should not be overlooked are the ongoing spread of a technocratic discourse on health and the increasingly important role of the municipality as a unit of governance and a locus for mobilization and articulation of demands and grievances. Rather than interpret the reopening of space for women as the state’s capitulation to civil society, in this chapter I examine how the park’s success reflects a structural deepening of the state at the municipal and submunicipal levels, as well as a maturing of the state’s productive capacity to enable desired behaviors and practices among its citizens by redrawing the gender boundary.

Re-placing Women, Remaking the State: Gender, Islam, and the Politics of Place Making (p. 114)

With reference to gender segregation, the narratives in this book show that it has been transformed from a means of imposing an Islamic lifestyle to a means of enabling a lifestyle that can be deemed Islamic. Through the narratives we see how gender segregation was once used as a moralizing tool, only to be reframed more recently as a quality-of-life-enhancing measure. It is in this light that, I suggest, one should see and make sense of what I refer to as an inclusive regime of gender segregation: the various initiatives to provide women with more comfortable and safe rides on the city buses, create exclusive, women-friendly exercise spaces in the city’s parks, or secure women’s sections inside the sports stadiums.

By the same token, the various initiatives undertaken by the state and local government have acquired the quality and rationality of services (which retain an Islamic dimension or an association with Islam). So in a way, reading the travails of gender segregation through the narratives unfolding in this book can provide clues to how to read Islam and the Islamic in Iran and beyond: as mediated through the imperatives of governance and statehood. The Islamic character of the state (and its local, urban manifestations), aside from its dependence on processes of experimentation and invention, has had to reconcile diverse imperatives, such as technocratic exigencies, pragmatic considerations regarding the viability of the state, and international influences and conditionalities, and to accommodate and adopt novel forms of governance, most notably the neoliberal model and the role of the market in it.

[…] (p. 123)

Women occupy an untenable space governed by religious, market, and state imperatives and framed by competing discourses. These imperatives and discourses are disabling and enabling, and women live in this in-between-ness, in spaces where their bodies are simultaneously constricted (because, for instance, their movements are limited within certain spaces) and expanded (because, for example, women-only spaces are subjected to lesser degrees of surveillance). They have little choice but to adjust their movements to these imperatives but can also mobilize the latter to their benefit and attempt to influence the drawing of the contours of their movements. The case studies offer several examples of how women have lived in the “margins” while at the same time mobilizing their very marginality and reterritorializing it, transforming it from a handicap to a resource.

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.