Evren Savcı, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (New Texts Out Now)

Evren Savcı, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (New Texts Out Now)

Evren Savcı, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (New Texts Out Now)

By : Evren Savcı

Evren Savcı, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (Duke University Press, 2021).

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

Evren Savcı (ES): I think my initial desire was for there to be a book, any book on queer politics in Turkey. I was also not satisfied with the ways in which queer activism in the Middle East was addressed by existing literature, which portrayed activists as pawns of Western imperialism. Neither did I find the frameworks of Islamophobia and homonationalism adequate for the Turkish context where the AKP (Justice and Development Party) had been mobilizing neoliberalism and Islam simultaneously for its governance—a regime I refer to as neoliberal Islam. I wanted to capture the complex relationship between the political economy and religion in a way that did not rely on and perpetuate the binaries of liberal/illiberal, religious/secular, economic/cultural, and modern/traditional. And I wanted to show how central sexual and queer politics was to this regime—to its operations and therefore to understanding it.

... the vocabulary queer activists employed very much shaped the kinds of politics they practiced ...

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

ES: The book captures queer and feminist politics that unfolded during the AKP regime in Turkey, with a particular emphasis on the period between 2008 and 2016. I would say that Queer in Translation, perhaps a bit ambitiously, addresses political economy, contemporary religion, sexuality and sexual politics, and language and epistemology all at once. Language and translation come into play because the book’s methodology relies on ethnographically tracing the travel of the contemporary vocabulary of gender and sexual episteme and politics to Turkey: terms such as gender identity, sexual orientation, hate crimes, outness, and LGBT rights. I was curious to do this both because from the beginning it was clear to me that the vocabulary queer activists employed very much shaped the kinds of politics they practiced, and also because I was not satisfied with the ways in which language was assumed to represent culture and thus authenticity when it came to the “non-Western” sexual formations. In other words, especially the travel of terms that mark modern sexual identities, such as gay or lesbian, have been excessively discussed as effects of cultural imperialism or global capitalism. In response, a number of scholars then have studied the “pre-gay” and therefore presumably authentic categories of gender and sexual nonconformity. In the book I critique this presumed language=culture=local=decolonial equation. I also find that focusing on sexual subjectivity is a bit of a trap, and it is near impossible not to get into the “authentic versus colonial” debates. I chose to center the political economy and its entanglements with religion as markers of modernity in Turkey instead of discussing sexual subjectivity as a marker of modernity. The vocabulary I trace is indeed new, but it does not allow a discussion of whether certain subjects are authentic or not—a discussion I find tired and unproductive.

The tracing of this vocabulary’s translation to the Turkish context helps me show that such travel never happens in a homogenous and hegemonic way. When I say this, I am not so much interested in establishing the existence of individual agency against structural determinism by showing, for instance, that people reconfigure these words in playful ways. Rather, I am interested in showing that structures themselves are inevitably fragile and unstable. Meanings are always fractured and multiple and addresses sometimes arrive in the most unexpected ways and sometimes they do not arrive at all. I have found translation studies extremely helpful in this regard, because scholars who work in this field both understand translation as producing social disjunctures and problematize the naturalness of national languages and authenticity of alleged “mother tongues.”

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

ES: Since Queer in Translation is my first book, it is very much in line with my previous articles based on this research. Some of my publications are not covered in the book, but they all come from the same research.

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

ES: I really hope that the book will speak to scholars of queer studies who have been thinking about neoliberalism, scholars of neoliberalism at large, and also to anyone interested in queer and feminist activism in the Middle East. I think scholars interested in recent debates on religion and secularity will also find that Queer in Translation adds to that conversation. I hope that the book will be translated to Turkish soon and that queer and trans activists and other friends in Turkey will be able to read it. Distribution issues and the price point of English-language publications makes this pretty difficult at the moment. 

The intellectual impact I would like Queer in Translation to have is two-fold: For one, I really would like the discussion on queerness and modern sexual subjectivities in the so-called “non-West” to finally shift away from being stuck in the binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, local/global. I take issue with these most explicitly in the Conclusion of the book, where I suggest that taking Foucault’s proposal that sexual subjectivity is the marker of modernity to heart has led queer studies to leave aside other markers of modernity in the “non-West” and has overburdened gender and sexual minorities who identify with modern vocabularies of subjectivity. This excess burden on queer and trans minorities is not only epistemic but also political, since colonial modernity has been an important target of queer critique. Positioning queers as important analysts and critics of neoliberal capitalism, who nevertheless do not stand outside of these structures, helps me get out of these binds. 

Secondly, I really would like queer studies to turn a bit more transnational—not simply in extending its geographic coverage but also in shifting its understanding of “cultural difference.” I try to transnationalize the question of language, which is widely taken to be constitutive of the “real” in the field. However, this language has always been presumed to be English, and language as a category has been treated ahistorically. I bring insights from translation studies to bear on queer studies’ homolingual address and hope that this will change the ways in which we think about language in the field. Finally, I also would like the book to have a political impact of having documented a particularly dark and authoritarian time in Turkey and having laid out the important political work sexual and gender minorities have been doing in resisting and pushing to transform this regime.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

ES: I am starting my second book project, which is interested in the establishment of a “civilized sexual morality” in the early Turkish Republic with monogamy at its center. While homosexuality or various forms of gender nonconformity have never been criminalized or legally regulated in Turkey, polygamy, relative marriages, and Islamic matrimony have been openly targeted either legally, or by medical and cultural/civilizational discourses. This is mostly because they were understood to belong to a backward, Islamic, and imperial era, unfit for a modern, secular, and national Republic that sought to belong to “contemporary civilizations.” I am interested in the production of these “formal,” sexual Others of the Turkish Republic. However, I suspect that the project will not be limited to Turkey’s history and today, because I am also largely interested in monogamy’s centrality to the private family and therefore to capitalist modernity. There is a seemingly radical separation today between “backward polygamists,” often understood to be traditional and religious and “progressive polyamorists” who modern (and often secular). Nevertheless, the contemporary polyamory discourse, or polyamory as a twenty-first-century strategic unity, is often devoid of any signs of understanding that polyamory as an individual lifestyle choice very much perpetuates the monogamous logic of private family and capitalist distribution of resources. The only “resource” that is ever referenced is time, which I also find very interesting. So, we will see where all this leads me.

I am also working on a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly with Rana Jaleel on “Queer of Color Transits and the Imaginaries of Racial Capitalism,” where we ask: What do the transnational travels of queer of color critique look like and what kind of reconfigurations of racial capitalism are necessitated and enacted by such travel? I am very excited to think alongside great scholars about the potential of “queer of color” and racial capitalism as frameworks when they leave the US context.

J: What did you learn from writing your first book?

ES: That it takes a long time to think and rethink the project after a dissertation—no matter how done you think your project is, it is not (at all) for quite some time—and that the only thing to do is to embrace the timeline of the book (which might not overlap with your fantasy timeline) and enjoy the surprises along the way. I also learned the importance of thinking with others whenever I can—at conferences, workshops, writing or reading groups. The ability to think collectively is one of the real beauties of our job.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Introduction, pp. 1-5)

During the 2000s Turkey experienced both the rise of robust and varied LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans) movements across the country as well as the rise to power of the so-called moderate Islamist party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP; Justice and Development Party). While many liberal democracies might view these developments as contradictory forms of social change, a sizable portion of Turkey’s Left-leaning liberals initially welcomed both as signs of the increasing cultural liberalization of a nation with a patriarchal, heteronormative, militarist, and strictly secular history — a history that had rendered unimaginable both strong LGBT movements and robust parliamentary representation for the Muslim voter base. Also strikingly new in the Turkey of the early 2000s: The AKP clearly departed from previous Islamist parties with its pro-West, pro-globalization, and pro – big business stance. Soon after being elected to office in 2002, the party went to work trying to fulfill the Copenhagen criteria for membership in the European Union, in the process being especially attentive to ethnic and religious rights. It was in this climate, and under the AKP regime, that the annual LGBT pride march, the first of which took place in 2001, grew significantly. Queer activists had been forming formal and informal associations since the early 1990s, and that visibility and organizing activity increased in the 2000s as the nation’s “sexual others” became loud and clear in their demands for social justice.

In late June 2015, however, thirteen years after the AKP’s rise to power, police attacked people gathering for the LGBT pride march, using tear gas and water cannons to prevent crowds from gathering in Taksim Square or entering the adjacent İstiklal Street. The following year, both the trans and LGBT marches and related press releases were banned for alleged security reasons, and those who tried to gather, chant slogans, or even clap and whistle were again met with police violence and detentions. While such police repression of dissent was no longer considered out of the ordinary after the infamous Gezi Park riots of 2013, where tens of thousands protesting the proposed redevelopment of the public park into a shopping mall were attacked for days with water cannons, tear gas, and plastic bullets, the police had nevertheless not interfered with the pride march of 2013 or 2014.7 By 2015, however, the exception made for pride seemed to be over, and LGBT marches were now considered to be security concerns alongside other protests and demonstrations.

How does one make sense of these stark shifts, from exciting democratization to the authoritarian crushing of any and all dissent, all within less than a decade? Queer in Translation argues that the answers to this question lie in the marriage between neoliberalism and Islam as devised by the AKP regime. The party has not only embraced a neoliberal order, which has resulted in increasing levels of precarity as well as securitization, but also conjured a particular regime of morality that cannot be reduced to the logic of neoliberalism or to that of Islam alone. This regime of morality is precisely what makes sexual politics and discussions about sexual minorities in Turkey a fruitful place from which to draw the contours of what I call, following other scholars of Turkey, neoliberal Islam. LGBT politics in particular emerges as a site where the effects of the existing regime of morality, as well as resistance to it, crystallize. In the following chapters I discuss the various ways in which neoliberal Islam at times foreclosed and, at other times, produced dialogues about justice in Turkey, and how at times it made solidarities unimaginable and, at others, produced a set of conditions that made them unavoidable. Yet the key intellectual contribution of Queer in Translation is not establishing the truth or detailing the mechanisms of neoliberal Islam. Rather, I am interested in the productive paradox that neoliberal Islam posits to queer studies as the field has taken significantly different critical and epistemological positions vis-à-vis the disparate aspects of this political-economic-religious order: On the one hand, queer studies has been deeply critical of neoliberalism and its taming effects on sexual dissent. On the other, Islam in queer studies is often analyzed as the target of Western imperialism, and discussions about Islam are located in contexts of Muslim-minority populations, Muslim immigrants, Islamophobia deployed in homonationalist justifications of the US war on terror, or the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine. This tendency results in most discussions of neoliberalism being confined to US and Western European contexts and in situating Islam, whenever it is addressed, as the subjugated other of Western modernity. These diametrically opposed treatments of neoliberalism and Islam in queer studies are symptomatic of a key epistemic problem in the field — that of reading nonnormatively gendered and sexualized subjects elsewhere through the paradigm of anthropological difference. This results in positioning queers in the non-West either as authentic local subjects or as modernized, globalized, and therefore inauthentic. Sexual liberation movements that organize in the so-called Third World under any variation of the moniker LGBT have been rendered particularly suspect in queer studies, as the sexual identities they embrace and the liberation politics they practice are often imagined to shore up Western imperial claims about non-Western cultures as backward, nondemocratic, and homophobic. This is especially true of the Muslim world, since recent imperial wars waged against the Middle East have been justified among conservative and liberal queer organizations alike with arguments about state homophobia and violence in these societies. The significance of queer critique aimed at the deployment of liberal LGBT rights to justify imperial wars and Islamophobia notwithstanding, the authentic/colonial binary that underlies this scholarship has made it difficult to theorize the complexities of both what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

I offer a way out of the epistemological bind that neoliberal Islam poses to queer studies through two interrelated arguments. First, I make a historical/geopolitical one: A historically situated ethnographic study of the contemporary Turkish Republic offers a way out of this queer bind by helping contextualize Islam as a lived reality grounded in political economy and government rule. Second, I make a methodological proposition of translation as a way to counter and move past the binaries of colonial/authentic, modern/traditional, and global/local, building on my emphasis on grounded fieldwork. Turkey throws a particular wrench in the ongoing reproduction of the colonized East/colonial West divide as the descendant of an empire as well as thanks to its current imperial aspirations as exemplified in its military invasion of Syria. With its history of repressive secularism and its present of repressive Sunni Islamism, the republic interrupts the representation of Islam as the victim other of the imperial West. Neoliberal Islam in particular intervenes in the divides of traditional/modern, cultural/economic, and public/private but also in authentic/colonial and East/West — binaries that I suggest continue to haunt sexualities and queer studies scholarships in geographies that are considered to lie outside the West. Further, the positioning of Muslims as victims of colonial modernity and of Islam as the current alternative to Western liberal cultural and political economies continues to reproduce Islam not only as homogenous but also as radical alterity to Western modernity. This has not only intellectual but also political implications that we need to confront: The framework of Islam as a victim of Western imperialism is not only a reproduction of the timeless image of Islam as culture, but it also corresponds to the rhetoric used, for instance, by the Islamic State in its imperial war against non-Muslims as well as non-Sunni Muslims, most prominently in Iraq and Syria. While the main goal of this book is to illustrate the complexities of sexual politics under neoliberal Islam, it also recounts stories that, perhaps inevitably, will demonstrate the multiplicity of Islam among those who live it and speak on its behalf, despite the Turkish government’s increasing efforts to homogenize and monopolize its meaning.

The methodological solution I offer to this epistemological problem is that of translation. I trace the travel and translation of modern political languages around gendered and sexual minorities, such as “gender identity,” “sexual orientation,” “hate crimes,” “homophobia,” and “LGBT rights,” within the context of contemporary Turkey and analyze how they enter public political discussions in order to understand the contours and the effects of neoliberal Islam as well as its internal contradictions and unexpected outcomes that make room for resistance. Critical translation studies is helpful in moving away from the colonial/authentic binary because the field deeply historicizes and denaturalizes the link between language and culture and opens up a way to rethink what seems to be the perpetual unspoken equation of language = culture = difference = decolonial. My goal here is not to vacate discussions of linguistic travel out of power but to insist that we understand both language and power historically and in ways that do justice to differences that can get subsumed under the sign of postcolonial and decolonial localities, which are increasingly burdened by decolonial expectations of the Global South. In so doing, I hope to further the queer studies project of analyzing regimes of normativity and respectability in light of imperialism and the global political economy on two fronts: First, by grounding religion, and in my case (Sunni) Islam, in its political economic context, I aim to unburden it from its assigned role as an alternative to political modernity and the imperial West in discussions of sexual orders. And second, by introducing translation studies to queer studies, I hope to interrupt the unspoken English norm in a field where language and discourse have been central to understanding the workings of normativity and power and also to rethink the implications of queer theory’s homolingual address for our theories about universality and particularity.

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.