Deniz Yonucu, Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (New Texts Out Now)

Deniz Yonucu, Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (New Texts Out Now)

Deniz Yonucu, Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (New Texts Out Now)

By : Deniz Yonucu

Deniz Yonucu, Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022).

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

Deniz Yonucu (DY): This book started as an ethnographic study of a predominantly Alevi populated working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. Over the course of years, it turned into a much bigger project on global policing practices that are informed by the colonial school of warfare and Cold War/decolonial era counterinsurgencies. What made me write this book was a kind of a burden of witnessing. When I was a high school student in the 1990s, I had working-class Alevi friends whose neighborhoods were placed under militarized spatial control—not unlike that seen in Belfast during the Troubles: military vehicles patrolling the streets, checkpoints, armed and masked policemen, and soldiers. I gave the example of Belfast, because, as I show in the book, British counterinsurgency in Belfast has been highly informative to the Turkish security state. Torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings were common in those years. When we were still in high school, some of my friends were imprisoned, others were forced to leave the country, and many came face to face with various forms of police violence. Yet, such intimidating methods were not effective in suppressing the dissent. Despite extensive repression, the 1990s—especially the first half of the 1990s—was a time of large-scale, left-wing, and anti-colonial mobilization in Turkey. Later, in the early 2000s when I first travelled to Northern Kurdistan (Southeast Turkey) both the scale of repression and the resistance against it made an impact on me. What I witnessed more than two decades ago in the Alevi working-class neighborhoods of Istanbul and in Northern Kurdistan has haunted me ever since. It is that story of the systematic police repression and the political resistance of Turkey’s Alevis and Kurds that I felt obliged to write.

Counterinsurgency acknowledges the impossibility of defeating resistance by repressive security forces alone and, thus, heavily invests in soi-disant “psychological warfare.”

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

DY: Police, Provocation and Politics provides an ethnographically grounded analysis of the tension between policing and politics. It situates Turkish counterinsurgent policing within a global context and shows how Turkish counterinsurgencies have been informed by global counterinsurgencies—most specifically by British counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Northern Ireland, French counterinsurgencies in Algeria, and US counterinsurgencies at home and abroad.

Counterinsurgency acknowledges the impossibility of defeating resistance by repressive security forces alone and, thus, heavily invests in soi-disant “psychological warfare.” This entails various affect- and emotion-generating strategies employed by state security forces and the mass media. To show how these strategies work on the ground, this book focuses on their provocative, affect- and emotion-generating, and divisive techniques, and urban dimensions. It shows how national security states provoke conflict and violence, and ideological, ethno-racialized, and religious divergences both among and within various communities with the aim of maintaining capitalist, racist, colonial, and patriarchal nation-state order. Within this frame, in addition to the literature on policing and security, the book also engages with literatures on political subjectivities, ethno-sectarian and ethno-racialized conflicts, urban marginality, and urban violence.

In understanding how left-wing and anti-colonial resistance can carry on in a country like Turkey, which has since its foundation had oppressive practices against its Indigenous populations, ensconced in its many laws and policies, the book also engages with the psychoanalytical literature on hauntings and memory. That is to say that in analyzing the conditions of possibility of long-enduring fearless resistance, it takes the agentive effects of the dead, specifically the martyred dead, into account. To understand how certain individuals and/or populations continue to act out against punitive security states despite the potentially grave consequences, I suggest we take into consideration the invigorating power of what I call inspirational hauntings—the hauntings of past resistance and rebellious and defiant subjects who seep into the present and serve as encouraging and emboldening political and ethical resources. 

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

DY: I have always been interested in the issues related to the governance of urban working classes. My earliest work focused on the criminalization of working-class youth in relation to the neoliberal restructuring of Turkey. The criminalization of the working-class youth can also be seen as a counterinsurgency project, as a project of pacification of “dangerous classes.” Later, I explored the repressive aspects of militarized spatial control, urban violence, and the “lawfare” against Turkey’s racialized Kurdish and Alevi communities. In this book, I continue to explore urban, working-class experiences as well as the attempts to control, contain, and manage working classes. But in the book, rather than focusing on counterinsurgency’s strategies for producing docile and compliant citizens, I focused on the provocative aspects of policing and counterinsurgency. I argue in the book that counterinsurgency is a permeant and preventive war on politics. And the war on politics, among other things, includes the criminalization of actual or potential rebellious populations. In a way, what I have been trying to do for more than a decade all came together in book.

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

DY: I believe in the political wisdom of the racialized, oppressed, and dispossessed groups—the wretched of the earth. I hope that my interlocutors’ political insights, analysis, and wisdom, as well as their struggles, can now be heard and seen by anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and political theorists who are interested in the issues related to politics, policing, memory, and resistance. Activists and community organizers may also be interested in this book as it sheds light on the elusive and disguised security techniques that are designed to divorce dissident groups from their constituency and to counter existing or emerging forms of alignment among actual or potential rebellious populations. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

DY: I am currently working on emerging forms of surveillance and their colonial and imperial legacies. I am particularly interested in the psychic effects of surveillance, and I ask why in an era of unprecedented development in digital surveillance technologies, conventional undercover activities are still widely employed in various parts of the world, both in the Global South and North. Together with my collogues at the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR), I seek to contribute to the development of new anthropological perspectives and debates on surveillance during this epochal shift in the history of technology. As Directions Section co-editor of Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), I also take part in PoLAR’s new editorial collective’s attempts to bring together anthropologists to discuss anthropology’s new directions in an ever-changing world and to turn anthropological gaze inwards to reflect on the ways of doing and writing anthropology.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 11-15) 

The Space and Psyche 

If the population is the main target of the counterinsurgency, its two main axes are space and the psyche. Security is a two-way sociospatial phenomenon that is at once produced and reproduced in and through sociospatial relations, processes, and practices and that itself produces, shapes, and transforms space (Glück and Low 2017). As Eyal Weizman (2012) has demonstrated in his work on the Israeli security state, counterinsurgency, instead of destroying what security agents perceive as a “hostile space,” reorganizes it in line with its counterorganization aims. At the same time and in relation to this reorganization, it aims to transform political subjectivities and practices within the targeted space. 

This book traces the transformation of Devrimova from the late 1970s when it was a sanctuary space built by and for the country’s racialized, hence most vulnerable, workers into a low-intensity conflict zone and a sectarian enclave since the mid-1990s. I illustrate how counterinsurgency and its provocative dimensions have become manifest and operate in this space with the aim of countering and reorganizing dissident activities and subjectivities.  Police forces’ hit-and-run tactics, the targeting of Alevi spaces and bodies, gang and drug dealing activates in the neighborhoods, the selective targeting of the most community-minded revolutionaries by the anti-terror laws and violent interpellations — which I define as calls to a specific subject position and a specific identification made through performative acts of state or state-backed violence—,  work to incite defensive counterviolence, exaggerate sectarian cleavages, and contain revolutionary activity and violence in the neighborhoods.

Known as a “dirty war”, counterinsurgency and its elusive security strategies rely very heavily on shadowy intelligence agents: undercover police, agents provocateurs, spies, and informants. The infiltration of such agents into dissident groups and communities and the coercion of individuals into collusion undoubtedly intervene in, shape, and inform dissident practices and subjectivities. Yet, counterinsurgency’s elusive practices and its soi-disant “psychological warfare” also entail various affect- and emotion-generating strategies employed by state security forces and the mass media. To separate dissident groups from their base of supporters, to drive a wedge between and among dissident communities and isolate them from the so-called passive majority, counterinsurgency relies on what Joseph Masco (2014, 18) calls “affective infrastructures”: historically produced, shared, and officially constituted, sanctioned, and promoted feelings that are deployed as instruments for coordinating citizens as members of a national security state. In his work on the links between the Cold War and the War on Terror in the United States, Masco argues that the official sanctioning and promotion of the effects of fear, anger, and terror by ruling elites are critical to how affective infrastructures produce and maintain a docile public. Indeed, in this book, feelings of fear, terror, rage, and insecurity play an important role. But in this book, rather than the production of docility, I am interested in the ways in which affect- and emotion-generating provocative counterorganizational strategies work to effect a broad range of counterorganizational aims: the strengthening of already existing ethnosectarian and ethnonational cleavages in Turkey, the mobilization of left-wing groups against one another, the creation of intergenerational conflict within working-class Alevi communities, the militarization of revolutionary youth, the continuation of low-intensity conflict in the neighborhoods, and, last but not least, the effective colonization of the political space through policing.

Counterinsurgency as a War on Politics

Laleh Khalili (2012, 5) argues that “counterinsurgency refuses politics, or at least transforms political conflicts and contestations, revolts and insurgencies into technical problems to be solved.” For Khalili, this refusal is caused by counterinsurgency’s “inability to recognize the politics that defines and structures revolts” (5). Yet counterinsurgency doctrines actually do acknowledge that the source of the insurgency is political. NATO’s Allied Joint Doctrine for Counterinsurgency stresses that “economic, political or social grievances . . . fuel the insurgency” (2011, para. 0354). It is not so much that counterinsurgency logics fail to recognize the political reasons motivating rebellions but that they are reluctant to make the political and structural changes necessary to eradicate their root causes, such as poverty, racism, and colonialism. Counterinsurgency instead aims to maintain social orders that are based on the oppression and exploitation of racialized and dispossessed populations—social orders that by their very nature lead inevitably to rebellions. Thus, it serves to make the inevitable evitable. In this sense, I agree with Harcourt (2018) that counterinsurgency is a “governing paradigm” (8) and a “counterrevolution without revolution” (12). We might even call it a permanent counterrevolution, a form of preventive governance that remains ever mindful of the possibility of revolt and rebellion against racism, patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism. Counterinsurgency then does not only “refuse politics,” as Khalili argues, by transforming already existing revolts and political conflicts into technical issues of security and “terror” but it also actively wages a preventive and permanent war on politics: although fragmentation of populations is a major effect of counterinsurgency, its ultimate aim is depoliticization.  As I illustrate throughout this book, generating the conditions for perpetual yet functionally manageable conflict through overt and covert intervention and the use of affect- and emotion-generating security strategies are key components of counterinsurgency’s depoliticization efforts. After all, counterinsurgency builds on the idea that even the most appealing political cause loses its legitimacy under conditions of perpetual conflict. 

My understanding of politics here is inspired by Jacques Rancière’s juxtaposition of politics as antithetical to the police. For Rancière (1999, 2001), the police are not essentially about repression and discipline; their function “refers to both the activities of the state as well as to the ordering of social relations” (Swyngedouw 2009, 606). The police thus “constitute the assemblage of institutions, actors and practices” (Khalili 2014, 93) and serve as established orders of governance that assign and distribute human bodies, tasks, spaces, roles, voices, and forms of participation in society. The act of distribution is also an act of partition. Rancière employs the term “partition” in the double sense of the word: “on the one hand, that which separates and excludes; on the other, that which allows participation” (Rancière 2001, Thesis VII). Similar to the logic of counterinsurgency, Rancière’s police are concerned both with the partitioning, the dividing up of people, voices, activities, spaces, and so on, and with defining the forms of participation/part-taking. The “essence” of the police is “the partition of the sensible,” a general law that “defines the forms of part-taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed” (Rancière 2001, Thesis VII). “The partition of the sensible” is also a “partition between what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard from the inaudible” (2001). In other words, the police are “an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible, and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise” (Rancière 1999, 28). In that sense, as Khalili (2015, 93) argues, for Rancière, policing is about “making unrecognizable (and insensible) that which lies beyond the ordinary discourses, practices and institutions in which we are embedded.” 

Rancière holds that political activity is antithetical to the police. Whereas the police define the forms of participation, politics is an intervention in the forms of participation and distribution defined, shaped, and made possible by the police. It is an intervention in the roles and definitions assigned to the people and places by the “police order.” Therefore, for Rancière “politics act on the police” (1999, 33; emphasis in original): “Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise; it makes understood as discourse what was only heard as noise” (30).

Politics works against the grain of the established order and disturbs the policed distribution of things. It intervenes in the police order; it changes or attempts to change places’ and bodies’ assigned destinations within the existing social order. It opens up new and unexpected possibilities, spaces, and roles.

To put it more concretely using a few examples from this book, whereas the police predestine the racialized working classes and the dispossessed to mere survival, politics opens up the space for them to become active agents of mass social mobilization who dare to challenge established social relations. Whereas the police strive to coerce the working classes of diverse backgrounds into a relationship of enmity, one characterized by ethnoreligious or racialized divergence, and allow their words only to be heard as “ethnic,” “racial” or “religious” noise, politics opens up a space for camaraderie that transcends divisive categories while fighting against oppressive structures. Whereas the police locate poor racialized women in domestic space as “ignorant,” invisible, and yet reproductive “victims” of patriarchy and capitalism, politics enables them to defy patriarchal public–private divisions and gendered and classed hierarchies to create their own “subaltern counterpublics” (Fraser 1990, 68). Finally, whereas the police push working-class youths of the urban margins into criminal activity, drug dealing, and drug use, politics generates a search for ways to put an end to the criminalization of those youths. In this sense, this book—by providing an ethnographically grounded analysis of the tension between policing and politics—says as much about policing as it does about politics. 

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.