Nicola Pratt, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

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Apr 27, 2021 Egypt
Nicola Pratt, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Nicola Pratt, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nicola Pratt

Nicola Pratt, Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon (University of California Press, 2020).

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

Nicola Pratt (NP): I began thinking about this book in 2012. I became frustrated with how Western media, policy makers, NGOs, and think tanks discussed women’s involvement in the popular uprisings and mass protests that erupted across the Arab world from 2010. There was a tendency to view women’s participation in protests as new and extraordinary, ignoring a long history of women’s activism.

Moreover, many assessments of the outcomes of the uprisings turned on the question of whether the uprisings were “good” or not for women. Increasingly, there came to be an emphasis on how women’s rights were under threat by newly empowered Islamist political actors—as though women had enjoyed equal rights under the previous nominally-secular authoritarian regimes. Such attitudes reflected deep-rooted Western frameworks for understanding the Middle East, which consider women’s agency and women’s rights within so-called Arab-Muslim culture as an exception.
Through women’s personal narratives, the book draws attention to the gendered dimensions of geopolitics and the geopolitical dimensions of gender.

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

NP: In writing this book, I sought to historicize women’s activism and to challenge binary thinking that associates women’s participation and women’s rights with Western/secular culture and, conversely, views “Arab-Muslim culture” as the cause of women’s oppression. However, I have not merely inverted this binary by demonstrating that women’s rights and women’s participation are indeed part of Arab-Muslim culture. Rather, I have tried to dismantle this binary by demonstrating the more complex ways in which women’s participation and women’s rights are entangled with geopolitical power over time. Specifically, I demonstrate how dominant gender norms have been historically produced in relation to colonialism and neocolonialism, how these gender norms have both enabled and constrained women’s activism and women’s rights, and how women’s activism and women’s rights have served to reproduce and to disrupt dominant geopolitical power, depending upon the historical context.

The book is based on over one hundred interviews with women of different generations in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, speaking about their lives and their activism. They were conducted between 2013 and 2014. Where permissions were given, these interviews are now deposited in the SOAS Digital Collections.

The book uncovers stories that remain marginalized, if not totally absent, in the majority of scholarly literature on the international politics of the Middle East and North Africa. However, it does not treat personal narratives merely as objective historical sources that may present previously hidden or marginalized histories. Drawing on the work of feminist historians, such as Louisa Passerini (1979) and Molly Andrews (2007), I have approached narratives as texts that can only be understood in relation to the wider sociopolitical and geopolitical context. Specifically, I contextualize women’s narratives in relation to postcolonial state projects of national sovereignty and modernization and their gendered underpinnings, which have their roots in experiences of colonial domination and resistance to colonial discourses that deployed gender as a civilizational marker.

Through women’s personal narratives, the book draws attention to the gendered dimensions of geopolitics and the geopolitical dimensions of gender. Building on critical geopolitics, feminist geopolitics, and postcolonial studies, I use the term “geopolitics” to problematize the spatialized dimensions of power, the role of power in constructing space, and the ways in which space and power are gendered. The book highlights the ways in which space and power shape the experiences of women activists and, in turn, how women are geopolitical actors, reproducing and/or reconfiguring space and power through their embodied activism.

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

NP: The book builds on my longstanding interest in “politics from below,” as well as my previous research, conducted with Nadje Al-Ali (Brown University), on the impact of the US-led occupation of Iraq on women activists and gender politics.

However, this book represented a significant departure for me in terms of its historical and geographical scope, covering three country cases over a period of more than seven decades. Consequently, it was the most ambitious project of my career so far.

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

NP: I would like the book to provide a counterpoint to gender-blind and ahistorical analyses of geopolitics in the Middle East and North Africa and to contribute to further decolonizing the field of international relations by providing an exploration of the ways in which the legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism shape the politics of gender and sexuality, with consequences for women’s activism and its effects. I hope that scholars of Middle East gender studies/women’s studies will be interested in my contribution to theorizing women’s activism in relation to hegemonic power beyond binaries of resistance/compliance. I also hope that more colleagues in the field of Middle East politics and international relations will be inspired to adopt feminist approaches and to consider women’s experiences as vital to understanding how power in the region is produced across time and space, and how it is resisted and transformed.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NP: I am currently finishing a book on politics and popular culture in the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, with Dalia Mostafa, Dina Rezk, and Sara Salem. This is a major output of our joint research project on “Contested Narratives of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution,” which also resulted in a multimedia, digital archive on the subject.

I have also recently begun a new writing project with Nadje Al-Ali, which aims to provide a new framework for studying gender and sexuality in the Middle East and its diaspora.

Finally, I have begun researching the gendered impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in the Middle East and North Africa. I published some preliminary ideas in a blogpost.

J: You have made the interviews that you conducted for this book available in a digital archive hosted by SOAS Digital Collections. Why did you think it was important to do this and do you have advice for other researchers in this regard?

NP: I was motivated to do this for a few reasons. First, I wanted to contribute to expanding oral history archives for the Middle East and North Africa. Oral histories, in general, are important historical sources that enable a diversification of voices to be heard, particularly those who are ignored in conventional historical and political research. Second, I wanted to create a corpus of interviews that could be built upon by other researchers, thereby overcoming one of the problems faced by women activists in the MENA region of being “over-researched” and having to repeat the same or similar information to multiple researchers. The importance of creating such archives is brought into focus in light of current barriers to international travel, as a result of coronavirus, and the difficulties of conducting research in Egypt as a result of political repression. 

My advice to anyone thinking about depositing their interview materials in a digital archive is to think about this as soon as you begin to plan your research project. There are technical, financial, and ethical issues to consider. Whilst you can now record audio on your phone, this will not be of sufficient quality for depositing in an archive. Therefore, you need to invest in a digital voice recorder that can record mp3. It is essential to have sufficient space to store audio files, as they are relatively bulky, and to make sure this space is secure. You also need a secure space to back-up your audio files.

You need to budget for transcription and translation, if you want the archive to be accessible to non-Arabic speakers. You will also need a lot of time to prepare the metadata for the audio files and transcripts. My department has a student research assistantship scheme, so I was able to benefit from that to complete this part of the work. I was also fortunate that SOAS Digital Collections agreed to host the archive and, therefore, I did not need to produce my own digital platform. In addition, a huge amount of work was conducted by the Special Collections Archivist at SOAS to prepare the audio files and metadata for depositing.

Finally, you must obtain written consent from all your interviewees. In light of the rapidly deteriorating political situation in Egypt after I finished conducting my research (in 2014), I went back to all my interviewees in summer 2020 (before the archive was made public) to ask whether anyone wished to withdraw consent. I also took a unilateral decision to remove interviews with Muslim Brotherhood members. Importantly, SOAS Digital Collections has a take-down policy that allows interviewees to request the removal of their data at any time.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 4-8)

Women’s Activism as Embodied Geopolitics

As Cynthia Enloe has famously argued, “the international is personal” and “the personal is international” (Enloe 2014: 351). Although feminist approaches have highlighted the gendered and embodied dimensions of geopolitics and international relations, the ways in which geopolitics shapes women’s activism and what these reveal about international politics remain relatively understudied. Meanwhile, a substantial literature has documented women’s organizations and movements in the Middle East and North Africa, their goals, strategies, philosophies/ideologies, and activities, but has tended to neglect the geopolitical consequences of women’s activism. Moreover, there has been a tendency to view women’s activism in terms of its resistance or opposition to dominant power at different scales and the forms of violence with which it is associated. I argue that women activists are illuminating subjects of research because their experiences necessarily straddle the private and the public; the personal and the political; and the local, the national, and even the international. This is particularly the case for many of the women whom I interviewed for this book. They have participated in struggles against colonialism, imperialism, war, and dictatorship; dealt with the aftermath of violence, conflict, and displacement; and simultaneously negotiated the politics of gender and sexuality in their homes, workplaces, communities, and beyond. Therefore, I argue that their embodied experiences and agency provide a window into the ways in which power relations at multiple scales intersect and play out, illuminating the complex and often contradictory ways in which gender is entangled in the construction and normalization of different geopolitical scales and wider relations of power. However, I do not conceptualize women’s activism as necessarily resistance to or separate from geopolitical power; rather, I understand it as a crucial part of the circuits of gendered power that circulate at multiple scales, from the personal to the international—that is, as a form of embodied geopolitics.

This section theorizes women’s activism as embodied geopolitics by elaborating how geopolitics shapes women’s activism and how women’s activism shapes geopolitics. In this regard, I emphasize the multiscalar and gendered nature of geopolitics and, hence, the geopolitical implications of activism that transforms or seeks to transform gender relations and norms. Here, I understand gender as discursively constructed and as embodied by living beings. In addition, I underline the need to dismantle the binary of resistance/compliance in understanding the relationship between women’s activism and dominant geopolitical structures. 

How does geopolitics shape women’s activism? Women’s activism occurs within geopolitical spaces and structures that provide opportunities, challenges, and limitations for women activists. For the most part, women’s activism is located within the political boundaries of the state and is shaped by the respective state’s policies and laws as well as significant national events, such as, wars, disasters, and economic crises. Women’s activism may also be targeted at entities other than the nation state, such as the United Nations or the European Union. Rather than viewing the nation state and other geographic scales as pregiven, feminist scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which these geopolitical constructs are dependent upon the production of gendered boundaries that distinguish the domestic from the foreign, the inside from the outside, order from chaos, us from them, and public from private (Dowler & Sharp 2001; Enloe 2014; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Peterson 1992b; Pettman 1996; Tickner 1992; Youngs 1996; Yuval-Davis 1997). These gendered boundaries are reproduced through a variety of state policies and laws, not only foreign policies but also laws governing marriage, divorce, and nationality, with differential implications for women’s mobility (Yuval-Davis 1997). Moreover, such laws and policies serve to shape particular norms of femininity and masculinity that are essential to the reproduction of states and nations as well as practices of militarization and diplomacy (Enloe 2014, 1993, 2000, 2007; Parpart and Zalewski 2008; Peterson and Runyan 2010; Rai 2002). These gender norms, in turn, regulate women’s behavior, including their activism.

Given the significance of gender to the operation of geopolitical power and the construction of dominant geopolitical categories, it follows that embodied geopolitics not only includes those activities targeting conventional sites of geopolitics, such as governments and international organizations, or ‘big geopolitical’ themes, such as, war, foreign policy, or revolution, but also activism that transforms or seeks to transform gender norms and gender relations, including state laws and policies that regulate them. In this respect, the book documents activists’ efforts to reform legislation and policies that enshrine gender discrimination as well as considering how their advocacy is “framed” (Benford and Snow 2000) in relation to dominant geopolitical constructs and power. This assessment is dependent upon an understanding of the specific geopolitical context of the MENA, as will be discussed in the next section.

The book also understands activism that targets conventional sites of geopolitics as also potentially transformative of gender relations and norms, even if this is not its stated aim. Activism entails embodied performances of gender norms that have implications for the organization and normalization of geopolitical power. As already noted, dominant geopolitical structures and processes depend upon the successful production of particular notions of femininities and masculinities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of the performativity of gender (1999: xxiv), gender is conceptualized as “always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (Butler 1999: 33). Just as ordinary men and women are constituted through hegemonic discourses of gender, so is hegemonic gender reproduced by ordinary women and men repeatedly performing the “correct” gender—through “the stylization of the body . . . bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds” (Butler 1999: 179). By contrast, refusal by women and men to enact hegemonic gender exposes gender as “a politically tenuous construction” (Butler 1999: 179), which, in turn, threatens the successful reproduction of the geopolitical order that is dependent upon it. Hence, women’s activism that “interrupts normative orders and activates competing ones through imagination, symbolism, and enactment” (Hasso and Salime 2016b: 4) should be considered in terms of a “corporeality of dissent” (Hafez 2019: 134).

In conceptualizing the relationship between women’s activism and geopolitics, it is essential that women’s activism should not be reduced to acts of resistance and transgression. Kimberly Hutchings (2013) warns against efforts to insist upon the existence of a “revolutionary subject” as a prerequisite for a feminist politics, arguing instead for a feminism that accepts pluralism. Meanwhile, women may also reinscribe power relations and uphold hegemonic gender norms (Abu-Lughod 1990; Kandiyoti 1988; Mahmood 2005). Moreover, given that women’s activism may have effects at multiple geopolitical scales, from the personal to the international, it is impossible to understand it through a binary prism of resistance or compliance. Women’s activism may resist and comply with dominant power structures at different geopolitical scales simultaneously. For example, women’s use of motherhood and maternal politics to protest human rights abuses (among others, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina) and militarism (among others, the Greenham Common base women) constitute the performance of their gender identity in accord with dominant notions of femininity. Yet, simultaneously, these women subvert this gender identity by transposing it from the private sphere to an overtly political space that challenges the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence. This resignification may further expand the space for women’s activism, creating incremental changes in gender norms rather than radical ruptures. Similarly, as this book reveals, much women’s activism has taken the form of welfare and charitable work, which has been performative of dominant gender norms of female respectability as well as class privilege. Yet, in particular historical and geopolitical contexts, such as during the period of colonial rule and the geopolitical upheavals following the 1967 war, this work was resignified as part of political movements challenging the geopolitical order. While women’s participation in such activities might be viewed as reproducing a gendered and classed public sphere, the resignification of their social activism as political/nationalist may simultaneously function to reconceptualize the political (Richter-Devroe 2012), with implications for geopolitical order.

This book demonstrates the need to go beyond conceptualizing women’s activism as either resistance to orreproduction of the dominant geopolitical order, including the gender norms and gendered hierarchies that underpin it. It is necessary to be attentive to time and space at multiple scales in order to understand the geopolitical effects of women’s agency. Women’s activism may at once disrupt and reproduce the dominant (gendered) geopolitical order through their embodied performances of gender as well as the modes and discursive framing of the objectives of their activism. However, in order to assess the disruptive and reproductive effects of women’s activism, it is necessary to understand the relationship between geopolitics and gender in the specific context of the MENA region, as the next section examines further.
Oct 16, 2016 Lebanon
Mandy Turner By :
Mandy Turner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J: What other projects are you working on now?

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

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.