Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (New Texts Out Now)

Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (New Texts Out Now)

Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (New Texts Out Now)

By : Asef Bayat

Asef Bayat, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Harvard University Press, 2021). 

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

Asef Bayat (AB): In 2010, a year before the outbreak of the Arab uprisings, I published a book called Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East in which I discussed how ordinary people—the poor, marginalized women, or youth—could bring about change in their lives and their societies through “non-movements,” despite repressive political and economic conditions. With the spread of the Arab revolutions and the circulation of the book, many academic colleagues and journalists asked me what role, if any, such “non-movements” played in these remarkable revolutions. It was mostly this question that pushed me to begin thinking and researching how the subaltern politics in their daily lives had to do with revolutionary uprisings. The book Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring addresses this central question. But in the process of researching this book, as I was learning more about these events, I became increasingly perplexed by how novel and different these revolutions were from their twentieth-century counterparts. So, I felt an urge to articulate my understanding of these revolutions historically, comparatively, and at a macro level in a different book (Revolution without Revolutionaries, 2017) before I continued with Revolutionary Life.

I hope it makes us to rethink the question of “success” and “failure” of revolution—how do we know if revolution has failed or if it has succeeded?

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

AB: The book Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring tries to tackle three analytical issues. The first and foremost is to understand and theorize the relationship between everyday life and revolution—or the relationship between the mundane and monumental, ordinary and extraordinary, routine and rupture. These days, the study of “everyday politics,” “social movements,” and “revolutions” each have their own literature; they are often treated as separate fields, even taught as separate courses, often in different departments. Revolutionary Life tries to develop an analytical perspective to help understand the connections between these disparate fields and literatures. After all, in real life people’s struggles are not separate realms; they move from one form to another or combine different repertoires depending on the structural settings and affordances of the actors.

The second issue is the agency of the actors in relation to revolutions; it is about the subaltern subjects and their revolutionary affordances. The book tries to make sense of how different subaltern groups (for example, the urban poor, women, youth, workers, or others) conduct themselves in revolution, what role they play. Given their different affordances (their capacities, potentialities) and their constraints, how does each social group act in a revolution? How do they engage in a revolution and how does revolution affect them? I have tried to address these questions (in three different chapters on the poor, women, and youth) drawing on the empirical context of Middle Eastern societies and the kind of revolutions that they have produced.

So, going beyond looking at the state, elites, and the political, the book asks what revolution means on the ground, among the subalterns, in the social realm. I hope that this bottom-up and everyday approach offers, and this is the third issue, an opportunity to problematize the meaning of revolution—does it mean regime change, state transformation, change in subjectivities, as social transformation? It hope it also problematizes the question of the “end” or “continuity” in revolutionary trajectories (when revolution ends, or how it may continue). And finally, I hope it makes us to rethink the question of “success” and “failure” of revolution—how do we know if revolution has failed or if it has succeeded? 

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

AB: In a way this book is a follow-up to my previous work, Revolution without Revolutionaries. Whereas Revolution without Revolutionaries takes a more macrostructural, comparative, and largely political view to make sense of the Arab Spring historically, Revolutionary Life focuses on the grassroots, the everyday life, and the social realm to understand what revolution meant on the ground—in farms, factories, families, and neighborhoods, among the poor, women, youth, and other subaltern subjects. As I pointed out, looking from this bottom-up prism, one can get a wholly different understanding about the questions of outcome, failure/success, or continuity/change in revolutionary trajectories. 

In fact, these two books in addition to Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2013) altogether constitute a trilogy on different repertoires of contention in the context of the contemporary Middle East. Broadly speaking, Life as Politics focuses on the mundane politics of the everyday life among ordinary people in which “non-movement” is a central concept. Revolution without Revolutionaries is about spectacular uprisings and large-scale revolutions. And Revolutionary Life tries in a way to understand and discuss the relationship between those two repertoires of contention.

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

AB: Like the other two books, this one too is largely an academic book. But I have tried to write in a language and prose that an undergraduate student can understand and hopefully enjoy reading. As such, Revolutionary Life is primarily for students and instructors of courses on social movements, revolutions, history, comparative politics, anthropology, Middle East studies, and similar. It can also be used by interested lay readers as well as activists and experts working in NGOs, governments, and research institutions. I am hoping that this book provides a historical narrative of the way in which ordinary people in the Middle East engaged in large scale political events like revolutions. I also hope that the book clarifies and addresses certain conceptual issues relevant to popular struggles in the Middle East and beyond.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AB: Frankly, I had decided earlier that Revolutionary Life would be my last book (even though not my last publication). Those who have done it know that writing books is very taxing and consuming, as if they become the center of one’s life! They require long-term and focused commitment which can work against short-term and perhaps more important or interesting projects one may have. But I think I have one more book project in mind which I do not wish to talk about at this point. But beyond this, I have other smaller research and writing projects, which I am planning to carry out in collaboration with colleagues. One of them is related to the theme of political upheavals and human mobility. The other pertains to the implications of increasing distantiation of human relations and the erosion of the real spatial commons.

 

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

How do we tell the story of revolution? The standard narrative focuses on the state, high politics, the palace, and pashas to examine the outcome and gauge “success” or “failure” of revolutionary movements. This perspective is undeniably crucial for any understanding of revolutions, including the ones that rose up from 2010 and have collectively been called the Arab Spring. The remarkable uprisings that spread throughout the Arab world signaled the emergence of a new generation of twenty-first-century revolutions that were rich as movements but woefully poor as change. No wonder that by the middle of the decade, most observers described these revolutions as outright failures. This appraisal may ring true if we take a macrostructural, political, and state-centric perspective to look at these historical experiences. The picture, however, becomes more complex if we shift the lens to observe and examine what happened in the social realm, in the everyday life, and among the grassroots. This book is an attempt to offer a different way of thinking about revolution by focusing not simply on the elites, the state, and regime change but also on what the revolution meant to the ordinary people, to the poor, the marginalized youth, women, and other subaltern groups in their everyday life. The story of revolution, then, is not just what happened at the top; it is also the tale of what went on at the base—in farms, factories, families, and schools; in social relations governed by old hierarchies; in people’s subjectivities; and in the practices of everyday life. At the core of this inquiry is not just what the revolution did to the everyday, but equally what the everyday did to revolution. Never mind that these two domains of human experience are hardly separate even though they are invariably seen as such. This book brings together and bridges the analytical disconnect between everyday life as the realm of the ordinary, the mundane, and the routine, and revolutions as the domain of the extraordinary, the monumental, and rupture. 

The idea of this book came to me just a few weeks after the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. This was roughly a year after I had published Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East, in which I discussed how unassuming “nonmovements,” those collective actions of noncollective people, were important players in pushing for cumulative change in the countries of the Middle East under authoritarian regimes, neoliberal economies, and moral surveillance. Now, in light of the uprisings, I was confronted by a host of questions from journalists, activists, and academics about what role, if any, those “nonmovements” had played in these extraordinary revolutions. At the time, I had no clear idea. But the question was intriguing enough intellectually and politically to push me to explore further the nature and dynamics of these remarkable political uprisings. I have been engaged in this journey since March 2011, when I began my field research in revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia, continuing with a half-dozen fieldtrips during which I attended events, rallies, and street protests; visited popular neighborhoods, street markets, labor unions, research centers, and political parties; and held conversations with activists, academics, officials, as well as ordinary people in cafés, households, organizations, universities, and the streets to secure oral histories of the events. I further collected a substantial amount of archival materials including reports, tracts, surveys, local papers, video clips, and social media posts. 

As I began to analyze data and put my findings into writing, I found certain things about these revolutions puzzling, things that I felt differentiated them from their twentieth-century counterparts, such as the Nicaraguan or especially the Iranian revolution of 1979, that I had observed and studied. There were certain novelties in the Arab revolutions that were mostly absent in the previous ones. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, or Yemen, for instance, were organized more horizontally without a clear unified organization, charismatic leaders, any clear ideology, or intellectual articulation. Indeed, these new revolutions were more peaceful and pluralistic in mobilization but far less radical in terms of causing deep change than their earlier counterparts. Consequently, I felt compelled to write a book reflecting on the meaning of the Arab revolutions from a historical and comparative perspective before I completed the book that you have in your hands. That other book, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring (2017), adopted a mostly macropolitical, state-centric, and historical approach, which, although indispensable, left aside some fundamental questions. What did the revolutions mean to the average person on the ground in terms of everyday life? How did the revolutions seep into communities, schools, and the private realm? How did they affect popular consciousness, relations of hierarchy, and norms? What happened to the “social question” of poverty and inequality? How do we account theoretically for the place of subaltern groups in the revolutionary events? And, ultimately, how can we establish an analytical link between the everyday life and revolution? The current book, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring, takes the radically different lens of a microperspective in attempting to address those very questions. It focuses on the everyday of the Arab Spring, highlighting the social side of the revolutions and looking at the subjectivities, practices, and popular politics at the grassroots level. 

This has not been an easy or, for that matter, a quick book to write. It is not just that the study covers a lot of ground, the experience of two revolutions, examining the life and politics of multiple social groups including the urban poor, rural subaltern, marginalized youth, women, and others. The greater challenge lay in how to organize a massive amount of data in accessible and intimate narratives that at the same time yield meaningful analyses and necessary theorizing. I wanted the book to account for structures but also narrate everyday struggles, and to be comparative yet attentive to the integrity of each experience, analytical but also accessible, historical as well as theoretical, concise yet rich with details. Whether I have successfully met these challenges, I leave it to the readers to judge. 

This, then, is not a conventional ethnography, which would have yielded deeper insights into the dynamics of a situation, group, or habitat but would have fallen short of covering multiple groups, several sites and situations, and larger processes. The work I set out to do in this book required multiple methods of inquiry and manifold modes of data collection including qualitative, quantitative, observational, archival, and oral history. However, I have to admit that some of the deepest insights for me have come from my experience of living and working for some seventeen years in the region, Egypt in particular, prior to the uprisings. A long experience of living and working in a place can be an asset for any inquisitive observer to acquire critical knowledge about that place, for it is through the actual living, and not just observing, that delicate cultural registers, subtle codes, and intricacies of individual and social life may be detected. This background knowledge about the region has been essential for my understanding of the subsequent events and processes that unfolded during and after the uprisings. 

This volume covers the events mostly from the immediate prerevolution years through 2015 and later when Beji Caid Essebsi, a minister from Zein al-Abedine Ben Ali’s regime, was elected as president in Tunisia and when General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi already presided over Egypt. The comparative outlook between Tunisia and Egypt is used to explore how and to what extent the “success” (Tunisia) and “failure” (Egypt) of a revolution may affect the everyday life, in particular the lives of the subaltern subjects. Tunisia and Egypt are often seen in terms of difference and contrast—Tunisia, a country of 10 million people, liberal, secular with progressive women’s rights, and ruled by a police state entailed a liberal democracy; whereas Egypt with its 80 million population, conservative sensibilities, religious population, and strong civil society experienced military rule and autocracy. This book will show that despite these differences, Tunisia and Egypt experienced striking similarities when it came to the revolutionary dynamics and the predicament of the subaltern life—the poor, marginalized youth, women, and the provincial population. In both countries, the revolutions were marked by a liberal outlook, nonradical and revolutionary strategy, and a political class invariably detached from the ordinary citizens who were preoccupied primarily with social justice, self-rule, and radical change. The astonishing disenchantment with the revolution and high politics in both countries might be surprising given their different political trajectories—Tunisia toward democracy and Egypt toward autocracy. However, it may be less surprising when one considers the elites’ very similar socioeconomic vision and their attitudes toward the subaltern. The key difference lay in the fact that democracy in Tunisia by default allowed popular struggles around social justice and inclusion to continue, whereas autocracy in Egypt stifled any form of collective mobilization. Yet the revolutions in both countries left their undeniable imprints on the social fabric and fostered lasting changes in the personal and social worlds. 

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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.