Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė, Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography (New Texts Out Now)

Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė, Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography (New Texts Out Now)

Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė, Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography (New Texts Out Now)

By : Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė

Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė, Sayyid Qutb: An Intellectual Biography (Syracuse University Press, 2021).

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

Giedrė Šabasevičiūtė (GS): When I arrived in Cairo to research this book, I was struck by the centrality of the reference to Sayyid Qutb in contemporary intellectual battles. It was the beginning of 2011, and the January 25 revolution opened some space for the renegotiation of the historical status of key national figures. On the one hand, there was a renewed interest in Qutb’s Islamist heritage, which surreptitiously aimed to remind the public of his alleged terrorist past and to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood in power. The famous novelist ‘Ala al-Aswani discussed Qutb in his intellectual salon; the journalist Ibrahim Issa constantly returned to Qutb in his talk show; and the press republished cartoons and poems produced in the midst of the anti-Qutb campaign in the 1960s. But on the other hand, there was also an interest to “liberate” Qutb from the Islamist archive; in 2011, the state-run publishing house, General Egyptian Book Organization, republished for the first time Qutb’s 1946 novel Thorns (Ashwak), and Ahram Publishing House issued, in 2014, complete works of Qutb’s poetry. The backlash with which such initiatives were received suggested a particular status of Qutb in Egyptian history as an excommunicated intellectual who continually haunts the Egyptian present. I became interested in understanding why the evocation of Qutb’s name elicits such strong reactions in Egypt, and why there has been such a stubborn refusal to recognize his literary past.

The writing of this book was therefore motivated by two principal goals. Firstly, I wanted to reintegrate Qutb into Egypt’s intellectual history and to understand the conditions in which he was stripped of his intellectual status and erased from Egypt’s literary history. And secondly, I wished to revise the common division of Egypt’s intellectual history into its secularist and Islamist versions, by showing that these divisions were not so clear-cut in colonial and early postcolonial periods.

Qutb’s transition was a rupture, but rather than between literature and Islamism as it is often assumed, it was between colonial and postcolonial regimes in Egypt.

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

GS: The book weaves together three main interrelated stories. First of all, it features a story of Qutb’s transition from literary criticism to Islamist activism, which revises the common trope that it constituted a primarily ideological conversion from secularism to Islamism. Instead of viewing this shift as an ideological rupture, the book demonstrates a continuity between Qutb’s aesthetic and political projects. Both his literary production and his Islamist political project were animated by the metaphysical quest to sublimate the humankind spiritually, either through poetry or religious activism. The book therefore addresses a wide range of Qutb’s literary production, such as poems, prose, and literary criticism, which is often overlooked in scholarship dedicated to him. To be sure, Qutb’s transition was a rupture, but rather than between literature and Islamism as it is often assumed, it was between colonial and postcolonial regimes in Egypt.

This is the second story that the book follows. It argues that in order to understand Qutb’s life we need to look closely at the years stretching from World War II to the consolidation of Nasser’s rule. The period between roughly 1946 and 1954 produced radical subjectivities, new ways of doing politics and arts, and unprecedented ways to relate the selfhood to the state. The legitimist conception of politics established during the interwar period, which relied on elections, diplomacy, and party politics collapsed and gave rise to radical politics. At the same time, Romantic models of literature were replaced by the requirement of literary commitment, and the rise of powerful Arab states deeply transformed political subjectivities. The revolutionary turmoil in which Egyptians found themselves following World War II allows us to understand Qutb’s Islamist commitment not as an individual fate due to his personal frustrations or the unexpected surge of his repressed conservatism—as the common story has it—but as a collective destiny that largely shaped the politics and arts of the following decade. For this to be seen, we need to adopt an inclusive view to the postwar period that goes beyond its division in leftist, Islamist, and literary histories.

Finally, the book was also an attempt to write a worldly history of literature of the first half of the twentieth century. It follows Qutb together with the shifting intellectual circles to which he belonged, such as the group of Romantic poets of Dar al-‘Ulum, Apollo Poet Society, the Misr Publishing House, the journal The New Thought, the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on. In the book, readers will discover Qutb as a sociable and active intellectual who frequented the most vibrant places in Egypt’s cultural life.

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

GS: My book on Sayyid Qutb is my first research project, which started as a master’s thesis and then evolved into a PhD dissertation. Both were pursued in École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. 

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

GS: The book will appeal to anyone interested in Egypt’s intellectual history of the interwar and early postcolonial periods. Its focus is interdisciplinary; it stands at the crossroads of biography and sociohistory and connects different strands of intellectual history, such as literary history and left-wing and Islamist activism. I hope this book will shed light on the interconnectedness of objects of research that have traditionally been explored in a separate fashion, and will encourage the scholars of literature, left-wing activism, and Islamism to sit down and talk. I also wish that this book will allow us to diversify the studies of literature by expanding the focus beyond analysis of texts and into the social practices that accompany their production. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

GS: My current research project investigates literary practices and imagination in connection with gender and social class in contemporary Cairo. It follows my previous work on Sayyid Qutb in its understanding of literature as an “elsewhere,” a space of parallel forms of existence that is experienced as a relief from ordinary life, defined by routine, limitations, and rigid social roles. My current work departs from my research on Qutb in terms of methodology; instead of doing archival work, I now work with ethnographic methods.

J: What was the biggest challenge in writing this book?

GS: The biggest challenge was to work on such a “hot” topic, which is moreover classified as the object of Islamist studies. I started my research on Qutb at a time when the popularity of Islamist studies was at its peak, but the ten years that it took to research and write this book constituted a long journey away from the field of Islamist studies. Although this topic is, at least in France, highly appreciated, it is heavily invested with political passions, identity discourses, and authoritative personalities. In many regards, my decision to explore Qutb’s literary life provided a kind of a shelter from the passions surrounding the topic of Islamism, and allowed me to approach it from a rather unexpected perspective of literature.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3 “Bringing the Social Back In,” pp. 118-123) 

Social Justice in Islam 

There is little doubt that Qutb’s commitment to Islamist activism represented a sea change in his intellectual career. Not only did he start to advocate for Islam as a political and social solution to Egypt’s and the world’s maladies, but he also threw himself into oppositional politics and reinvented himself as a revolutionary intellectual. But how did this commitment affect his previous stances on politics, the arts, and religion? What type of conversion did the transition signify? Was it religious conversion or political? To answer these questions, we need to take a closer look at Qutb’s first and major work on Islam and social justice: al-‘Adala al-Ijtima‘iyya fi-l-Islam.

Published by the Misr Publishing House in 1949 as part of the Publishing Committee for University Graduates series, al-‘Adala was the most successful of Qutb’s books during his lifetime. Between its publication in 1949 and his death in 1966, it went through six editions, some of which were diligently revised by the author. Examining the book from the perspective of Qutb’s earlier writings on social reform, notably published in the official publication of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Majallat al- Shu’un al-Ijtima‘iyya, Alain Roussillon suggested that the new element in al-‘Adala, when comparing its arguments to Qutb’s former positions on social change, is the means by which Qutb suggests that this change can be achieved. Instead of prioritizing science as the instrument to end entrenched underdevelopment and the British occupation, as he did in his earlier texts, with al-‘Adala Qutb begins to advocate a spiritual conversion as a prerequisite of any successful reform. According to Roussillon, the core change that al-‘Adala entails is Qutb’s transition from science to spirit as the means of modernizing society.

It is possible, however, to suggest another reading of the type of transformation that Qutb underwent with his commitment to Islamic activism. It emerges when we consider his Islamist writings not solely from the perspective of his expertise on social reform, but also from that of his literary works. As we have seen in chapter 2, a spirit broadly defined as the realm of the irrational and identified with emotion had always been, for Qutb, the means to access knowledge and elevate the human condition. Endowed with extraordinary capacities of feeling, a poet or a writer had a mission to maintain humankind’s connection to the realm of the eternal. The sharp distinction between reason and emotion on which Qutb based his understanding of existence allowed a certain compartmentalization of functions assigned to these faculties: reason was charged with the task of managing the affairs of daily life, while the emotional connection to the afterworld guaranteed spiritual well-being. As seen earlier, this compartmentalization allowed Qutb to use distinct epistemologies in different spheres of intellectual activity; he relied on positivism in his reformist writings and referred to Romantic metaphysics in his literary works. But it is precisely this compartmentalization that can prevent us from seeing that the importance of the spiritual did not suddenly appear with Qutb’s Islamist commitment, but had been the core element of his aesthetic project all along.

Rather than Qutb’s transition from scientific to spiritual tools for achieving a social change, I see it as following from his disenchantment with institutional politics and his subsequent commitment to oppositional activism. Like other efendis, Qutb had always been concerned with social reform and change; otherwise he would not have becom einvolved in party politics on the side of the Wafd. But in the period preceding World War II he had delegated this issue to institutional politics and its associated means of action—elections, negotiations, diplomacy, and top-down administration of reform. His handing over of the business of reform to institutional politics explains why Qutb wrote so little on politics prior to World War II: politics was done through elections, and not the effort to shape public opinion through incendiary public writing. The delegation of reform to legal politics allowed Qutb to develop his artistic project in isolation from the sufferings of the sensate world and in line with a broader Romantic contempt for the material dimension of human existence. Put simply, while the role of institutional politics was to take care of the population’s social needs, the mission of poetry was to cater to its spiritual growth. 

Postwar developments shook this division of labor to the core. Not only had institutional politics proved itself incapable of solving the multiple crises of the sensate world, but socially detached literature appeared to have been involved in deepening them. This situation created a fertile ground for the circulation of various versions of intellectual commitment, which Qutb passionately seized, reinventing himself in the process. In fact, Qutb himself had been asocially detached (or even an ivory-tower) poet, during the interwar period. It had been a natural position for someone with such a strongly expressed distrust of human reason and disdain for the empirical world. Following the postwar shift from the priority of knowledge to that of action, Qutb surrounded himself with restive youth, took a stand against parliamentary politics, and abandoned his inward-looking poetic creation in favor of revolutionary politics. 

This emerging intellectual order, defined by the urgency to act, was also a source of tension for Qutb. He did not feel entirely at ease with the intellectual trends that accompanied his rebellion and provided its main theoretical basis: the Left, committed literature, social realism, and other trends that Qutb considered to have emerged from the epistemological background of materialism (al-māddīyya). This tension is visible in Qutb’s hesitant and somewhat contradictory appreciation of leftist trends. In some writings, Qutb seems to appreciate in communist movements their potential to direct popular energies against capitalism, colonial dependence, and social injustice. Yet in others he criticized them for their limited ambitions in relation to the satisfaction of basic human needs such as those for food, shelter, and clothing.

Qutb’s review of Kamil’s Milim, which opened this chapter, offers perhaps the best illustration of Qutb’s ambivalent position on the Left. While Qutb praises the novel for its capacity to arouse indignation at injustice, which he believed was conducive to concrete action against the established order, he is also unsure about the novel’s artistic value. In appreciating it, Qutb is loyal to his earlier understanding of art, which he had viewed as something that transcends the spatial and temporal limits of the sensate world and its temporary struggles. Qutb’s later Islamist works, published before his imprisonment, are replete with similar—but more self-assured—intellectual engagements with the Left, with which he felt himself to be in the same camp politically, but from which he was worlds apart from a broader epistemological perspective. As a result, Qutb faced a dilemma: how could he pursue the literary vocation of humankind’s spiritual sublimation at a time when this type of literature had become a synonym for social and political conservatism? And how, at the same time, was he to harness literature to the purpose of national and social advancement without compromising its higher aims of transcendence?

Islamism provided the solution to this dilemma. As a set of symbols open to interpretation, Islam offered elements from which Qutb was able to elaborate a specific ontology, sociopolitical order, and mode of political action. Postwar developments allowed Qutb to realize that it was impossible to sublimate humans spiritually without diminishing the suffering of their physical bodies. “Empty stomachs do not know high meanings,” he explained in al-‘Adala. It draws people into mental slavery and drives them right into the communist fold, he warned in al-Ma‘araka. Qutb came to the conclusion that a complete system was needed to take care of both levels of existence, spiritual and material, by implementing social justice on earth while at the same time maintaining the spiritual bond to the afterworld. Such a reformulation came at the price of a major revision to his previous theory of human perception, predicated on the distinction between reason and emotion. The revision of the emotion/reason connection that had formed the core doctrine of his aesthetic project is visible in his fiery opposition to the understanding of Islam as located exclusively in the emotional realm (fī ma‘zil wijdānī wa ‘ālam al-ḍamīr) and therefore reduced to ritualized practices of worship (‘ibadāt). But Qutb also firmly positioned himself against the opposite extreme: the placing of Islam in the exclusive realm of rational thinking and its transformation into a science or a philosophy. What Qutb suggested instead was to fuse these two levels of perception by means of his theory of the Islamic state and to make their reciprocal action the main condition of its success.

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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.