Özgün E. Topak, Merouan Mekouar, and Francesco Cavatorta, eds., New Authoritarian Practices in the Middle East and North Africa (New Texts Out Now)

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Jun 27, 2022 Region
Özgün E. Topak, Merouan Mekouar, and Francesco Cavatorta, eds., New Authoritarian Practices in the Middle East and North Africa (New Texts Out Now)

Özgün E. Topak, Merouan Mekouar, and Francesco Cavatorta, eds., New Authoritarian Practices in the Middle East and North Africa (New Texts Out Now)

By : Özgün E. Topak, Merouan Mekouar, and Francesco Cavatorta

Özgün E. Topak, Merouan Mekouar, and Francesco Cavatorta (eds.), New Authoritarian Practices in the Middle East and North Africa (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). 

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

Özgün E. Topak, Merouan Mekouar, and Francesco Cavatorta (ÖT, MM & FC): Following the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2017, the three of us were shocked by the “medieval nature” of the assassination of the Saudi journalist. Here was a major country of the Middle East, awash with resources, resorting to one of the crudest forms of authoritarian repression. This tragic event made us ask ourselves the following questions: how did the “practice of authoritarianism” in the different countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region evolve with time? What are the specific “established” practices that have survived the digital turn of the twenty-first century? Which new ones have been implemented in the last twenty years, in combination with “established” ones, and especially since the critical juncture of the 2011 uprisings? Do countries of the region learn from each other or from other countries outside the MENA region? Finally, given the diversity of regime types and political trajectories in the region, what are the similarities and differences between these different countries? At the same time, we had noticed that pluralistic regimes and democracies were also implementing new practices of surveillance and even outright repression of political and social dissent, at varying degrees. We therefore wanted also to see to what extent the MENA was an exception in terms of devising and putting into practice new forms of authoritarian control.
This micro focus on practices balances the more macro-sociological explanations on authoritarian durability in the region.

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

ÖT, MM & FC: Two of us—Merouan and Francesco—come from political science, while one—Özgun—comes from an interdisciplinary social science background (with focus on sociology and criminology). Our diverse backgrounds have allowed us to address authoritarianism and its practices from different angles. The contributors of chapters are similarly from diverse backgrounds, while each having an expertise in their country-context of examination. The book engages with the literature on authoritarianism with a particular focus on “authoritarian practices.” This micro focus on practices balances the more macro-sociological explanations on authoritarian durability in the region. The book, albeit briefly, also engages with authoritarian practices beyond the MENA region, to illustrate that expansion of authoritarian practices is a global reality with serious implications for human rights and global democracy.

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

ÖT: My previous work focused on surveillance and violence encountered by migrants/refugees at the borders of the European Union, which can also be defined as “authoritarian practices.” I also have a long-standing interest in authoritarianism and surveillance in Turkey. In many ways, this book builds on my previous works. This project helped me to broaden my focus to the entire MENA region, but also to observe similarities with MENA contexts and other global contexts in the application of authoritarian practices. 

MM: My previous work focused on authoritarian collapse and norm diffusion. For this work, I was particularly interested on the transnational nature of authoritarian practices in the MENA region: do MENA countries learn and import authoritarian practices from each other? If so, which authoritarian practices are exported, and which ones remain contained in their country of origin? 

FC: I worked for quite some time on authoritarianism in the MENA, attempting to explain how authoritarian constraints impact on the behavior of social and political actors. This project with Merouan and Özgun provided me with the opportunity to go into greater detail in the actual instruments—legal and digital—that are put in place to repress and control dissent in the region. 

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

ÖT, MM & FC: One major takeaway from our book is the overlap in authoritarian practices, not only within different MENA countries (with different regime types and coercive institutions) but also increasingly between authoritarian countries and more pluralistic and democratic ones. We hope that the book will help dismantle the common trope about the MENA region’s alleged exceptionalism—especially with respect to state violence and surveillance. We hope it will show that once they are created, authoritarian practices—such as digital spying on dissident journalists, or social media intimidation campaigns—can be deployed far from their country of origin and against a new range of targets, both within and outside the MENA region.         

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

ÖT: I plan to broaden and update my research on border surveillance, detention and violence (or “authoritarian practices”) at the Europe/MENA borderlands at the expense of the human rights of refugees and migrants. 

MM: I am editing a new book with Kira Jumet (Hamilton College) on the specific risks that native scholars face while conducting research in non-democratic or illiberal countries. While native academics experience many of the challenges that their Western colleagues face while conducting research in these countries—such as surveillance, data security, access to informants, and governmental interference—they also face additional risks and distinct obstacles, ranging from the weight of family, ethnic, and religious identity to legal threats from their country of origin, to exploitation by foreign scholars and intelligence services. The book will have twenty-three contributions from native researchers conducting work in Eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the MENA region.

FC: I am working on a special issue with Hendrik Kraetzschmar (Leeds University) on cabinet coalitions in the Arab world. Although there have been several coalition cabinets in the region since the early 1990s, we know very little about their formation, durability, and fragmentation. The special issue examines such cabinets systematically and then through several case studies. The connection with this edited volume is quite clear: in many countries the authoritarian nature of the political system places constraints on the way on which cabinets are formed, which parties take part in them, and what they can actually do once sworn in government.    

J: One of the main conclusions of the book is that many of the new authoritarian practices that have been deployed in the MENA region are also used by other global authoritarian and even democratic countries outside the region. Can you talk more about this?  

ÖT, MM & FC: Our focus in the book is the MENA region, but we observe that the MENA is only one region among many other contexts in the global drive towards the normalization of authoritarian practices, even though the MENA region might be leading in some senses. For instance, the Pegasus spyware is being used by regimes such as Mexico, Hungary, and India to hack the phones of dissident and oppositional figures while mass/invasive surveillance systems are implemented by liberal-democratic regimes in the name of counter-terrorism or monitoring refugee movements. The normalization of such practices is very problematic because it leads to “whataboutism,” and creates a race to the bottom. We rather need a principled stance towards all forms of authoritarian practices.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction)

The brutal murder of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 and the events leading up to his death illustrate the combined use of traditional and new authoritarian practices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). On 2 October 2018 Khashoggi entered the Istanbul Consulate of Saudi Arabia where he was tortured, killed and his body dismembered. Research by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab (2018, 2019) and statements made by Omar Abdulaziz (Loveday and Zakaria 2018), another Saudi dissident and friend of Kashoggi, showed the key role played by Pegasus, a malicious tracking software developed by the Israelbased NSO Group, in the events leading to the murder of the Saudi journalist. The investigation Citizen Lab conducted showed that Abdulaziz’s phone was infected with the spyware, which would have allowed Saudi officials to access his private conversations with his contacts, including Khashoggi. Abdulaziz revealed that he was in regular phone contact with Khashoggi about organising social media activism to counter the influence of Saudi progovernment trolls on the internet. 

Extra-judicial killings of dissidents, alongside surveillance, imprisonment, intimidation, torture and ill-treatment of dissidents, as well as other practices to suppress dissent and control activists, opposition parties, the judiciary and the media, have long existed in the region. The chapters in this book demonstrate that, even if they may not be as spectacularly violent as in the Khashoggi killing, many MENA regimes continue to deploy tried-and-tested authoritarian practices to control society and suppress dissent. However, these historically-established practices have also been refashioned, often in innovative ways, by MENA regimes to respond to growing dissent in their societies. These refashioned authoritarian practices are often enabled by new digital surveillance tools. While the killing of Khashoggi, which combines murder and dismemberment with digital spying, is one of the most shocking examples of the mixed nature of contemporary authoritarian practices, other MENA regimes are also increasingly relying on new digitally-based authoritarian practices such as social media surveillance, the use of malicious software, the mobilisation of troll armies and dissemination of fake news on broadcast and social media. As a result, MENA regimes often use a mix of historically-established practices and new authoritarian ones in conjunction with one another to form what Topak (2019; this book 2022) calls an ‘authoritarian assemblage’. This, for instance, combines police violence against street protesters with surveillance of dissenters on social media. Repressive legislation, some of which has long existed and some of which is newly made, may also be deployed to criminalise offline and online dissent, thus complementing the other elements of the assemblage. 

The various contributions of this book show that established authoritarian practices have not disappeared. Rather, they continue haunting their societies and can be redeployed, often in combination with new practices, whenever local regimes need to use them. A case in point is the state of emergency, an age-old instrument employed in Egypt, Sudan, Turkey and Tunisia, which is used again to allow for the deployment of historically established practices (e.g. purges in state bureaucracy and civil society) but also new ones (e.g. repressive internet surveillance). In some extreme cases, emergency rule is embedded in the very fabric of social life and empowered with new digital practices. A key example from the book is Israel’s practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). MENA regimes can also articulate various excuses (some long-existing, some new), such as a coup attempt, a security threat or the Covid-19-induced health crisis, to legitimise these practices. Thus ‘old’ authoritarian practices remain part of the authoritarian toolbox of MENA regimes, to be redeployed whenever there is a need to suppress emerging threats of dissent or whenever new technological advances make them more potent. For instance, while Morocco has used sexual blackmailing in the past to intimidate activists or force political concessions from members of the opposition, new digital tools expanded the regime’s ability to access private material and use ‘revenge-porn’ (The Economist 2021) to hurt its opponents (from this book see Maghraoui 2022). Thus, the ‘new’ practices highlighted in this book are not necessarily novel. New forms of dissent (such as social media activism) are met with new practices of repression (such as social media surveillance and troll armies) but also with old-established ones (jailing, torture and murder) as well as with assemblages combining various old and new repressive tools. 

These mechanics of repression/dissent and the accompanying deployment of authoritarian assemblages can be observed clearly in the responses MENA regimes provided to the various episodes of social protest that have emerged in the region since the early 2000s. The book chapters demonstrate that MENA regimes have upgraded and intensified their use of authoritarian practices in response to these movements, including the 2009 Green Movement in Iran, the 2011 Arab Uprising and the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey. In fact, even Tunisia, the birthplace of the 2011 Arab uprisings, has seen its democratic institutions muzzled by the country’s president in July 2021. Other countries in the region either failed to consolidate their tentative democratic steps or became scenes of brutal civil wars such as occurred in Syria, Libya and Yemen. In fact, even during Tunisia’s democratic experiment between 2011 and 2021, the quality and depth of the democratic transformation was tainted by residual authoritarian practices, and persisting ‘authoritarian nostalgia’ for past practices (see Cimini 2022 in this book). The survival of authoritarian practices across the MENA region illustrates how regime type might not necessarily tell us very much about the intensity, variety and depth of the broader apparatus of repression and how social and political dissent is dealt with. 

The very term ‘authoritarian practices’ deceptively suggests that the tools and discourses of repression discussed in this book relate only to authoritarian regimes. Although the intensity and depth of such practices might indeed be stronger in authoritarian states, the contributions in this book clearly illustrate that they are present across regimes. In addition to Tunisia, it is apparent that the authoritarian assemblage has survived in Iraq, as Costantini explains in her chapter. While the Iraqi political system is pluralistic and ‘free’, dissent is still largely dealt with through the widespread use of violence usually accompanied by new practices of repression. The same is also true in Turkey, where the nominally pluralistic political system is not immune – far from it – to the use of authoritarian practices to stamp out dissent and prevent challenges against the dominant AKP and its leader. Although Morocco cannot be defined as a democratic country, it still has a pluralistic political system that, since the arrival of Mohammed VI to the throne, has attempted to present an image of progressive liberalisation and democratisation. It is true that the monarch is still the real wielder of power, but it had seemed to many that the style of governance and the use of authoritarian practices that Hassan II had employed were consigned to history. This has only partially been the case. While there have not been episodes of widespread indiscriminate violence, the Moroccan regime has adapted traditional authoritarian practices and added new ones to its survival toolkit. For its part, Israel has been central to both the employment and the export of new tools of authoritarian control. In addition to testing such instruments and practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), the Israeli authorities have increasingly used some of them at home against Israeli citizens and, crucially, exported them to a number of countries in the region, suggesting that historical rivalries might not be as important as previously thought. The non-pluralistic regimes of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran and Egypt display, of course, more intense authoritarian practices because they do not have to deal with domestic pluralism – not even a façade pluralism – and do not worry much about projecting liberal legitimacy abroad, although, in somewhat different ways ranging from the creation of a loyal civil society in Iran to the extensive use of social media surveillance in Saudi Arabia, these regimes have been able to efficiently marry older practices solidly based on the threat and use of physical force with newer practices of control usually aimed at monitoring and discrediting dissidents. Finally, states in transition or in the throes of civil war – scenarios where one would have expected fissures and flux – have also been at the forefront of both new and old authoritarian practices, even though, as in the case of Yemen and Libya, it might not be a sovereign state, or only a state actor implementing them. In these contexts where national sovereignty no longer exists, authoritarian practices are ‘simply’ put in place in specific enclaves by rival actors who try to dominate and rule the territory they control.

From the analyses that all the contributors have put forward, two points emerge clearly. The first is that, regardless of regime types, authoritarian practices are increasing and being adapted to the necessities of the regimes in place. It follows quite clearly that regime type is not really an indicator of authoritarian practices, although their intensity and depth may indeed vary according to regime type. The second point is that the Israel case indicates that authoritarian practices are not the monopoly of Muslim majority states and are therefore disconnected from the orientalist cultural explanations that see Islam as the root of all that is wrong in the MENA region. Furthermore, it should be emphasised that Western geopolitical interests in the region have fuelled authoritarian practices. These interests have led to imperialist and (neo)colonialist interventions, Western support for MENA authoritarian regimes, and the implementation of increasingly authoritarian border control practices at the Europe/MENA border areas to prevent refugees from reaching Western territories (see e.g. Gregory 2004; Brownlee 2012; Khalili 2012; Topak 2014; Yom 2016; Lemberg-Pedersen 2019).

The focus the book has placed on authoritarian practices in the MENA is warranted insofar as it contributes to the ongoing debate on authoritarian resilience in the region a decade after the uprisings. However, it should be made clear that the MENA is not an isolated case when it comes to a resurgence of authoritarian practices, both established and new. The contributions in this edited collection have demonstrated that such practices have become an increasing asset to different regime types, and it is therefore crucial to underline that this applies well beyond the MENA region and non-Muslim majority states. As a number of scholars have noted, the last years have seen the resurgence of authoritarianism globally, and the MENA is not an outlier when it comes to the use of authoritarian practices (e.g. Khalili 2012; Kumar 2012; Diamond et al. 2016, Murakami Wood 2017; Hintz and Milan 2018). Authoritarian practices, including the use of excessive force against protesters, mass and indiscriminate surveillance of online activities, torture, secret rendition, indefinite detention, extra-judicial killing, undue pressures on media outlets, and violent treatment of racial, ethnic, religious and gender minorities, women, migrants, refugees and terror suspects, are also adopted by many liberal-democratic states of the West as well as elsewhere. Ironically and tragically, Muslims are one of the major groups of sufferers from authoritarian practices both inside MENA and in Western territories.
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.