Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari, eds., “Third World Historical: Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran” (New Texts Out Now)

Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari, eds., “Third World Historical: Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran” (New Texts Out Now)

Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari, eds., “Third World Historical: Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran” (New Texts Out Now)

By : Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari

Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari (eds.), “Third World Historical,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2022).

Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari, “Introduction: Third World Historical: Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2022).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile and edit this special issue? 

Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari (ECZ & AD): The first line in Elleni’s book, Ethiopia in Theory, says “This book tells a story of how to tell the story of revolution in the Third World.” In that book she was primarily concerned with finding a method for how to talk about the experience of revolution—how it remains with us as a set of memories, a bodily experience, an affective experience, and also a political experience. She was trying to capture all of that at the same time, rather than simply write a history of revolution that looks at “the political actors” or has an evolutionary perspective on “the anatomy of revolution.”

When she finished Ethiopia in Theory, she felt alone, in a kind of isolation, and she wanted to know who else was doing the work she was doing. She knew they were out there, but she needed to find them. “Third World Historical” was an attempt to find fellow travelers. When we put out the call in early 2019, for Elleni, it was literally a way of asking: “Who else is doing this kind of work?” The amount and kind of responses and feedback we received were pleasantly surprising. People took the question—of how to tell the story of revolution in the Third World—in directions she had never imagined. She came to realize she was not just interested in the question of method but also in the question of form, which is why the project took on the shape that it did, exploring and experimenting with different types of forms—from standard academic articles to dialogues with academics and artists, a forum, and experimental writings.

Arash began “Third World Historical” searching for a way to figure out how seemingly peripheral revolutions, like the 1979 revolution in Iran, could inform and shape grand ideas like the concept of revolution. It was a technical exercise at first, a kind of demonstration of mastery at the level of concepts. As a child of former revolutionaries, he was initially inspired to take up academic research by the spirit of revolutionary practice and politics, and yet to get through the academic gauntlet, he felt he had worked hard to unlearn (or at least deny) many of those feelings of attachment and commitment. Academic work seemed to also demand the work of disciplining oneself into setting those attachments, commitments, and feelings aside.

Meeting each other at Whitman College, where we developed a friendship and shared a longstanding and ongoing intellectual conversation, then reading Ethiopia in Theory, gave Arash a language and a fellow traveler that reminded him of what he had worked to forget in order to measure up to the expectations of academic scholarship as a profession. This project, then, is an inspired act of remembering the spirit, ethos, and feeling of revolution, long after a revolution has technically passed. The introduction captures a friendship and camaraderie in its making and its formal composition, just as much as it is about the feelings of friendship and camaraderie that make for revolution.

How can we imagine a project that is equally anti-colonial and anti-imperialist while also enacting a commitment to democracy?

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the issue’s introductory article address?

ECZ & AD: As the subtitle “Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran” suggests, we understand the historical relationship between Ethiopia and Iran as one of movement, not conjunction. The process of writing this article was also a movement for us. With respect to the anticolonial revolutionary projects of the 1960s and 1970s, we moved from a position of recovery to one of engagement and critical conversation. Over the course of this project, we became increasingly concerned with an intellectual posture that, in attempting to recover anticolonial histories and write against their erasure, too easily fell into a crude oppositional politics, one that seemed to condone any state project that took an anti-imperialist position in the international order.

As world historical phenomena tend to do, our intellectual and political movement corresponded with developments in present-day Ethiopia and Iran—the war in the Horn of Africa, the closure of reformist politics in Iran. We could not simply ignore these phenomena. They call for intellectual work that imagines a world beyond anti-imperialism as state sovereignty, pure and simple. Instead, we are compelled to seriously consider a vision for substantive democracy. How can we imagine a project that is equally anti-colonial and anti-imperialist while also enacting a commitment to democracy? That became our question. 

The literature that we brought to this conversation is a bit different from what contemporary scholarship normally entails because of Elleni’s training in the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, where she was steeped in a critical theory tradition that included Kant, Hegel, and Marx. “Third World Historical” is an attempt to drag attention away from the sociological literature about revolution that prevails in the United States to the spirited philosophical questions posed by a thinker like Walter Benjamin. Arash shared this critique of sociological literature, specifically as a kind of policing. Congealed categories of revolution seemed antithetical to the prospect of revolution as the political event that promised to upset congealed categories. Engaging the Marxist tradition in creative ways and in conversation with Elleni opened up possibilities for imagining resistance, dissidence, and oppositional politics in new ways. How can we think about revolution on these terms, but do so situated in histories and archives that move between places like Ethiopia and Iran? How might that movement capture the aspirations described as world historical by thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and Benjamin more fully than they might have imagined?

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

ECZ & AD: There has been a huge revival of interest in the Third World today, but much of this work can seem nostalgic and unable to engage with the ways in which Third World movements were contradictory. Even some of the iconic figures who scholars today recover, from Walter Rodney and Kwame Nkrumah to Ali Shariati and Gamal Abdel Nasser, did not leave behind straightforward legacies. There needs to be a deeper investigation. And so, while we are interested in the movement created by the idea of the Third World—that is to say, we are in agreement with the idea that something like the Third World existed, that it created agendas that did and should endure—we are not interested in simple nostalgic projects that fail to see the Third World as complicated and contradictory. The task before us, which we have tried to set forth here as a research agenda, is to think with the Third World in new and innovative ways about the challenges that face the people of the Third World right now. At the same time, we are not opposed to nostalgia. We have tried to write with nostalgia for spirit rather than for fixed figures, events, or institutions. This is why we understand the relationship between revolutionary Ethiopia and Iran as a movement, and not a conjunction. To pay attention to spirit, and to hold on to nostalgia for spirit, proposes a different approach to thinking anti-imperialism and anti-authoritarianism together. We cannot just say we are doing both, as if checking boxes on a form. We must think both together, in movement and at once. The question before us is how. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

ECZ: I am currently working on a book entitled A Jewel in the Ear: The 2020 Ethiopian Civil War and Black Political Thought. It asks how Ethiopianism—a nineteenth-century social movement that was important throughout the Black world—came to shape both Black internationalism and the creation of the Ethiopian nation-state. A Jewel in the Ear investigates the fantasy and the loathing that is the concept of Ethiopia, how they both constitute Ethiopia internally as a nation-state today. This intertwined history should trouble our thinking about the current civil war and just as well what Black internationalism means to us.

AD: I was revising my dissertation as a book when I began to work on “Third World Historical.” The experience presented a fork in the road and has since compelled me to re-imagine my book project. My dissertation explored curious affinities between Iran’s revolutionary movement and global counterrevolutionary forces aligned against the Pahlavi state. At my present, my book manuscript, titled Insurgent Witness: Iran 79 and the Question of Self-Determination, takes these affinities as a place to hold possibilities for imagining revolutionary politics in the twenty-first century.

J: If not recovery, then how does this article propose that we think about the past and the present when thinking about anticolonialism and revolution?

ECZ & AD: Elleni was living in the Lamu archipelago at the time of writing this article, specifically on Mande Island. The energy of living there shaped her thinking and it became a bedrock of what we argue. As we write in the introduction: 

“Our claim to dissolve distinctions between past and present…does not stop at dissolving present theoretical reflections in the empirical truth of archivally documented past practices. It is equally a refraction from said archives onto present theoretical imaginaries in a bid to express the equally factual truth of intuition. The people on the ground, so to speak, are not just doing. They are also thinking. We cannot appreciate the facts of their existence unless we think in conversation with them. Our thinking must be in movement with their movement, a ceaseless reconsideration of conceptual categories from “1789” onward.”

Mande Island Channel, Lamu Archipelago. Taken by Elleni Zeleke

 

Excerpt from the article (from pp. 422-423)

“Third World Historical” began with a simple comparison between the editors' respective research on revolutionary Ethiopia and Iran. We noted that both of these countries experienced popular revolutions in the 1970s; neither were formally colonized, and yet they both experienced the force of European colonization in foundational and transformative ways. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ethiopian and Iranian student activists in North America and Europe consorted, developing tactics, strategies, and visions that shaped revolutionary change in their home countries. What could we learn about the concepts used to interpret revolutions, anti-colonialism, and method from this comparison? Further still, what could the comparison teach us about theory as political practice? Unsatisfied with abstract proclamations about theory across the global South, we sought out to make it and observe it in action.

“Third World Historical” was an academic conference that never was. We first convened in 2018, when we wrote a call for papers about the Ethiopian and Iranian revolutions in the history of political thought. The call formulated a series of questions. In truth, it articulated our intuitions at the time, some of which have endured, while others changed apace with the transformations that reconfigured the world over the past three years. Before a civil war altered the political calculus in Ethiopia, before an authoritarian turn in response to “maximum pressure” sanctions closed the door on reform in Iran, and before a global pandemic put to halt any pretense to business as usual, we intended to meet with contributors on the Columbia University campus. What we ended up with—an ongoing dialogue scattered across the globe, conducted in myriad online formats—changed our thinking. This collection is a repository of methodological innovations and conceptual insights produced by the scholars, artists, and activists who indulged our invitations, who answered our questions by pushing us to formulate better ones. It contains resonances of this thing we call Third World Historical. 

Our use of the phrase world historical—deemed passé in most circles—proposed a bridge across different sites of national history. Our project was not to trace similarities or networks, a task more than adequately fulfilled by the many global histories written in recent decades, nor to find efforts to document alternative visions of the world from the global South. Our questions were of a different order in which practice and theory were inextricable. Were the Ethiopian and Iranian revolutions, we wondered, world historical?

 

Available on Open Access here.

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.