Elora Shehabuddin, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (New Texts Out Now)

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Nov 19, 2021 Region
Elora Shehabuddin, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (New Texts Out Now)

Elora Shehabuddin, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (New Texts Out Now)

By : Elora Shehabuddin

Elora Shehabuddin, Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021).

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

Elora Shehabuddin (ES): I first started thinking about this project over a decade ago when, like many friends and colleagues, I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the nature of the dominant discourse about Muslim women. I am thinking specifically of certain bestselling Muslim (or ex-Muslim) writers whose calls for reform in Muslim communities were intertwined with US power and support for the US government’s domestic and foreign policies. At the same time, while many academic colleagues responded brilliantly and promptly to the deluge of a certain kind of popular books on “oppressed Muslim women,” I sensed there was room and a need for a longer historical approach, one that showed how Western ideas about Muslim women—and Muslim ideas about Western women—had undergone various shifts over the centuries.
...feminist movements in the Anglo-American West and in Muslim South Asia have developed in tandem rather than in isolation...

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

ES: In Sisters in the Mirror, I argue that feminist movements in the Anglo-American West and in Muslim South Asia have developed in tandem rather than in isolation—and indeed helped to construct one another. I try to show how Western ideas about Muslim women have long shaped the history of Western feminism and how these same ideas, combined with Western political and economic power and Muslims’ ideas about Western men and women, have also influenced feminist ideas and activism in Muslim societies. This book, then, traces the entangled histories of representations of Muslim and Western women since the sixteenth century and the intertwined histories of movements for women’s rights in the West and the Muslim world since the late eighteenth century. I end the book in the early twenty-first century, which has seen increased Western political, social, economic, and military presence in the lands where Muslims have historically lived, but also a growing Muslim presence in Europe and North America that blurs the very distinction between so-called “Muslim” and “Western” contexts. (Of course, I use such terms as “West,” “Western,” and “Muslim” for convenience and not because I see the West and the Muslim world as distinct, unchanging, monolithic entities engaged in a pre-ordained civilizational clash. Nor do I wish to suggest that the Muslim world is more religious than the West.) 

Taking a historical perspective has allowed me to historicize the emergence of ideas about gender equality in both the West and the Muslim world and to track changes over time in these ideas in relation to larger changes in relations between these different contexts. Recounting this history from the vantage point of South Asia has allowed me to provide an important complement to much academic and popular writing on Islam and Muslims that is overwhelmingly focused on the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey. The story of Muslims in South Asia is significant not only for their demographic weight but also for the region’s particular experience of Islamization, its long history of interaction with colonial and non-colonial European powers, its religious diversity, and its strategic location in current Western security and development concerns. Within South Asia, I focused on the Muslims in Bengal, across its incarnations as East/ern Bengal in the British colonial period, East Pakistan (1947–71), and finally Bangladesh (since 1971).

I traced this long and entangled history primarily through accounts of encounters between Bengali and English and, later, American men and women. By starting the story before the period of formal British colonialism in South Asia, I was able to pay attention to an era marked by power relations between the British and South Asian Muslims that was very different to what would emerge in the late eighteenth century. By bringing these different contexts—Britain, Bengal, and, after the mid-20th century, the United States—into one transnational analytical frame, my goal was to show how and why ideas and efforts to improve women’s lives in even these geographically distant parts of the world have long been interconnected and interdependent.

Throughout the book, I interweave stories of conflict—of orientalism, condescension, colonialism, and racism—with stories of encounters that led writers from Britain, Bengal, and the United States to pause and reconsider norms in their own society, especially cherished ideas about women’s roles and rights, much as one might discover imperfections when studying oneself in a mirror.

To bring these different histories together, I have had to bring together theoretical approaches, methodologies, and research that have generally not been put in dialogue across boundaries of disciplines, historical periods, and area studies. I drew heavily on the theoretical frameworks of early modern, colonial, postcolonial, and transnational feminist studies, especially critical analyses of gender, empire, and travel, and the rich histories, ethnographies, and literary studies of and across South and West Asia, Europe, and the United States. In an effort to produce a smoother text, however, I chose to identify these works in the numerous endnotes and extensive bibliography rather than in the main text. 

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

ES: While I have long been interested in Muslim women’s political mobilization, especially in South Asia, in Sisters in the Mirror I broaden the scope across time and space to examine both the deeper history of reform and activism for and by South Asian Muslim women and the expansive international connections forged by these reformers and activists. Methodologically speaking too, while my past work had relied on ethnographic work among Bangladeshi impoverished rural women with little formal education, this book’s historical and transnational lens led me to rely largely on sources produced by educated elite women in all three contexts (Bengal, Britain, and the United States). Finally, in some of my other work, I have focused on women in faith-based movements, but most of the characters in this book, whatever their personal commitment to Islam or any other religious tradition, engage in activism inspired by more secular frameworks. By juxtaposing activists of similar elite backgrounds in these different contexts, I hope to complicate the religious and pious Otherness that is often attached to Muslim women—to the exclusion of power, history, politics, and economics, and to such an extent that their “Muslimness” overshadows all other aspects of their lives.

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

ES: I hope that fellow scholars in Middle East studies (broadly defined), Islamic studies, South Asian studies, and women’s and gender studies will engage with this extended, entangled gendered history of efforts to improve women’s lives in Muslim South Asia and the Anglo-American West. In addition, I have tried to write the book—the language, structure, tone, and chronological sequence—in a way that I hope makes it appealing to any reader open to thinking beyond popular binaries of Islam versus the West, and beyond culturalist explanations for the different histories of feminism in different parts of the world. 

I hope the stories of struggle for women’s rights across the pages of this book will make clear that no society has a monopoly on ideas about gender equality, or justice and fairness more generally, or on violence and aggression; that struggles to improve women’s lives have not been easy anywhere; that our histories and futures are connected and interdependent; and that an awareness of this long and entangled history should lead us beyond both self-congratulation and despair. It is through struggles rooted in solidarity, understanding, and shared knowledge that we can strive most effectively for a more just world.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

ES: As I was completing Sisters in the Mirror, I realized the urgent need for a feminist history of what is today Bangladesh that would go beyond the usual nationalist and development narratives that prevail in much of the scholarship on that country. My new book project traces the history of women’s activism in East Pakistan/Bangladesh and examines the nature of local, national, and transnational activism for women’s rights; how activists have negotiated their identities—as Bengali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Third World, secular, religious, and Muslim—at different moments; and how transnational interactions and international interventions have shaped their priorities.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 8, pp. 252-257)

The Plight of Muslim Women as “A Stick with Which to Beat Islam”

[Taslima] Nasreen’s New York Times op-ed had been arranged by Meredith Tax, a New York–based writer and veteran of the US women’s movement. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1942, Tax had moved east to attend college at Brandeis and then on to London on fellowships. The distance from home helped sharpen her perspective on the United States, as she later recalled, “The thing about being in a foreign country is you see your country from afar and so you see everything that everybody else is saying about it.” In London she participated in antiwar protests in front of the US embassy before she decided, “It was clear that if you wanted to build your life around being anti-imperialist and fighting the war in Vietnam, the U.S. was the place to do it, not England, at least if you were American.” Upon her return Tax became increasingly involved in the US women’s movement and, in 1967, cofounded Bread and Roses, the first socialist women’s organization in the country. Outraged by the low number of women speakers at the 1986 Congress of International PEN, the international literary and human rights organization, Tax and a group of women including Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, and Betty Friedan began a push for a women’s committee. The PEN Women Writers’ Committee was finally approved five years later.

The first case that Tax, as the new committee’s chair, took up was that of five Croatian women writers, who had been harassed in the Zagreb press for writing about the wartime rapes and corruption in the former Yugoslavia. Disagreements with PEN led Tax and others to start an independent organization, Women’s World Organization for Rights, Literature, and Development (Women’s WORLD), that would focus on “gender-based censorship.” In the midst of these activities, in late September 1993 the London PEN office forwarded to Tax a brief wire story about a Bangladeshi woman writer who had received death threats and asked her if she wanted “to do anything about it.” Tax later acknowledged that the timing could not have been better. A case like Nasreen’s would give her new organization precisely the kind of attention it needed to establish itself. She sought the help of feminists in Bangladesh to contact Nasreen, and within three days she reached Hameeda Hossain, veteran of the Mexico City and Nairobi conferences and a founder of DAWN and the legal-aid organization Ain-o-Salish Kendro, who responded with Nasreen’s fax number.

Although Nasreen’s writing had been controversial—but also admired—within Bangladesh in the late 1980s, a major literary award in West Bengal in 1992 and then her 1993 novel Lojja (Shame) brought her a new regional level of notoriety. Lojja told the story of anti-Hindu violence by Muslims in Bangladesh following the Babri Masjid demolition in India. While the Bangladesh authorities banned the novel because they were concerned it would inflame Hindu-Muslim tensions, the Hindu nationalist Bharata Janata Party (BJP) in India distributed very cheap pirated copies to draw attention to the situation of the minority Hindu population in Bangladesh. Not surprisingly, the BJP’s endorsement only further infuriated both the Bangladesh government and Bangladeshi Islamists. Then, in May 1994, just as the furor began to die down, Nasreen gave an interview—and an equally controversial rejoinder—in the BJP-owned Calcutta newspaper the Statesman. The paper quoted her as saying that the Quran was written by a human being and required a total revision. In her rejoinder just two days later, she clarified that all religious texts lacked contemporary relevance and said it was time to turn instead to humanism. New death threats ensued, and the government charged her under the colonial-era Penal Code with having offended religious sentiments, forcing her into hiding.

Nasreen’s global fame came as a surprise to critics and supporters alike, in Bangladesh as in the West. As Tax later put it, very little of her work had been translated into any of the “power languages.” Nasreen had never traveled beyond India when the crisis erupted nor, as she told Mary Anne Weaver of the New Yorker, even met a non-Bengali until 1993. Looking back on the intense drama of those years, Tax remembered how “the reporters I talked to seemed to want to use the story as a stick with which to beat Islam; I would talk about the rising tide of all kinds of religious extremism, Christian, Jewish and Muslim; but none of that ever got into a story. The Western press tended to portray [Nasreen] solely as a victim and symbol of the oppression of Muslim women, downplaying her courage and ignoring the work of the Bangladeshi women’s movement.” Tax’s later statements notwithstanding, the new popular concern with Muslim women’s oppression made it easier for her to help Nasreen in those early years. 

In the summer of 1994, Nasreen went into hiding in Bangladesh to avoid arrest for offending religious sensibilities. Hameeda Hossain’s husband, Kamal Hossain, who had chaired the country’s Constitution Drafting Committee in 1972, and their daughter, Sara Hossain, both highly respected lawyers, led the legal team defending Nasreen against the government’s charges. Nasreen managed to send out faxes to her European and US supporters, pleading for help, and this launched a massive letter-writing campaign, similar to that undertaken for Rushdie following Khomeini’s fatwa. Gabi Gleichmann, the head of Swedish PEN, who headed the campaign, later conceded he might have “overestimated the threat and in a way we destroyed her life.” Susan Sontag, Milan Kundera, John Irving, Norman Mailer, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Günter Grass were among the several thousand writers who wrote to Bangladesh’s prime minister, Khaleda Zia, asking her to help Nasreen in the spring of 1994. So eager were they to save this writer from the threat of fundamentalist Islam that they did not pause to think that Bangladeshi law might protect her if allowed to run its course. Instead, the overall effect of the letters was to portray Bangladesh as dominated by extremist Islamic ideology and Nasreen a solitary soldier in the fight against that ideology. This obscured the presence in Bangladesh of a vibrant secular movement, a legal system (even if sometimes imperfect), and a strong women’s movement. In mid-July Salman Rushdie’s open letter to Nasreen appeared in several newspapers, including the New York Times. Tax and other women activists were furious that Rushdie had been brought in: “Well, this was the last thing in the world that Taslima needed. I mean she had enough trouble without being associated with Salman Rushdie.” The efforts of Nasreen’s legal team and Bangladeshi activists, combined with international pressure, compelled the government to allow Nasreen to leave the country in early August 1994 to attend a conference in Sweden. She would not return for several years.

Before Taslima Nasreen several writers in Bangladesh had received fatwas and death threats from Islamists, among them Sufia Kamal and Jahanara Imam, but they had continued their usual writing, activities, and activism undeterred. They did not reach out to Western media or human rights organizations, nor did their stories capture the Western imagination. Nasreen’s case, however, evolved very differently because of her particular decisions and actions in that historical moment and geopolitical context.  

…

Khushi Kabir, a staunch feminist who had been involved in grassroots work in rural Bangladesh since the early difficult days right after the war of independence, tried to make sense of the ambivalence toward Nasreen among members of the women’s movement: “Taslima went for the jugular, and we’re not ready for that. There’s simply too much at stake. You have to learn how to deal with the situation—how to handle the bearded ones. And this is something that Taslima never understood.” Many worried that by inciting the rage of the Islamists, she was making things worse for the majority of women in the country, who were impoverished and lived in rural areas. Millions of women were struggling to overcome local objections from their families, neighbors, and often religious leaders to join NGOs whose funding came largely from Western governments and foundations. Feminists worried that Islamists enraged over Nasreen would turn their wrath to these NGOs, as many already had, and thereby threaten their work in the countryside. Kabir herself had started in 1972 with BRAC (originally short for Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, but now known simply as BRAC), today the largest NGO in the world, but, as she became concerned that BRAC was increasingly focused on delivering services to the poor rather than tackling the bigger questions of exploitation and corruption, she moved to the NGO Nijera Kori (We Do It Ourselves), which facilitates men and women’s autonomous political organizing at the grassroots level. 

…

At the same time it is indisputable that Nasreen’s early writings—in particular, her weekly columns for Bengali readers in a Bangladeshi newspaper—struck a chord among readers. Her frank and detailed discussions of sexual harassment in public spaces was a revelation for many women who had themselves suffered these assaults. Bangladeshi writer Shabnam Nadiya later recalled that she had read the great Western feminists like De Beauvoir, Friedan, and Millett, and even Begum Rokeya [Hossain], with great interest, but she had “consumed, judged and digested [them] at some intellectual level, connected to but not truly part of what it meant [to be a] woman . . . in Dhaka, on the bus, in rickshaws, in school, at home every day.” Then she had encountered Nasreen’s book Nirbachito Kolum (Selected columns) in the late 1980s and realized, “Taslima was the real thing...for me and countless others of my generation. We might not have agreed with everything she said, but that she said those things at all was, for then, enough.” 
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.