Malak Labib, “Consultants, Technocrats, and “Model Workers”: The Rise of Scientific Management in Egypt (1945–1968)” (New Texts Out Now)

Malak Labib, “Consultants, Technocrats, and “Model Workers”: The Rise of Scientific Management in Egypt (1945–1968)” (New Texts Out Now)

Malak Labib, “Consultants, Technocrats, and “Model Workers”: The Rise of Scientific Management in Egypt (1945–1968)” (New Texts Out Now)

By : Malak Labib

Malak Labib, “Consultants, Technocrats and “Model Workers”: The Rise of Scientific Management in Egypt (1945–1968),” Arab Studies Journal, Vol. XXX, No. 2, Fall 2022.

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

Malak Labib (ML): This article is part of a broader project I am conducting on the history of development planning in Egypt. There is a rich body of literature that focuses on the origins of planning, on development aid, and on five-year plans in Egypt. I was interested in exploring this history from a different perspective—that of state-owned enterprises. How were these enterprises managed? How did they operate, in practice, in the era of central planning and Arab socialism? These issues are difficult to explore given the restrictions in accessing public companies’ archives and more generally state archives of the post-1952 period in Egypt. As I started reading press materials and published sources issued by various planning agencies, I realized that the debates around factory management and labor productivity during that period were a key component of state development policies. I was most intrigued by the stress on labor productivity, especially in the 1960s, a period marked by the rise of a large, sprawling public sector and by the regime’s adoption of a socialist rhetoric. What attracted my attention, in other words, was the presence in the sources of a US-inspired managerial language, in such a context. That was the starting point of the research that led to this article.

I show how the 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of a network of Egyptian technocrats and US/western consultants, promoting new models of work organization in the industrial sector.

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

ML: The article focuses on the rise of managerial expertise and practice in postwar and postrevolutionary Egypt. It examines the international circulation and local appropriation of managerial techniques inspired by Fordism. Egypt, like other “third world” countries pursuing ambitious development programs, was a key site for the development of this expertise. I show how the 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of a network of Egyptian technocrats and US/western consultants, promoting new models of work organization in the industrial sector. In doing so, these actors played a central role in shaping the expanding public sector during Egypt’s “socialist experiment” in the 1960s. The article also traces the ways in which managerial techniques—like incentive mechanisms, for instance—were implemented and contested on the shop floor. By exploring the early origins of capitalist managerial thinking and practice in Egypt, my article shows how the Nasser regime foreshadowed the open-door policies (Infitah) of the following decade.

 J: What sources did you use for this article and how did you obtain them? 

ML: I began this research in Cairo, where I collected a number of published primary sources, including newspapers and magazines, economic studies, and studies in industrial psychology, as well as publications issued by workers in state-owned enterprises. While I did not have access to official archives, these sources provided insights into the views of various actors on the ground.

My research also took me to Geneva, to the archives of the International Labor Organization (ILO), where I found a large number of files documenting the role played by the organization—and other actors such as the Ford Foundation—in the field of productivity and management.

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

ML: This is the first academic article I publish on development planning. My dissertation—which I am currently turning into a book—focused on the history of public debt and statistics in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt. 

However, my interest in the history of development is not new. In 2009, I conducted an oral history project for the Economic and Business History Research Centre (American University in Cairo), interviewing Egyptian economists and policymakers who worked in state planning agencies in the 1950s and 1960s. The interviews provided insight into the various and sometimes conflicting views held by the officials who worked in these bodies, and in that sense, they went against the common idea of a monolithic state economic sector. This is a question that I address in my current article and that has been discussed by scholars such as Robert Tignor and Julia Elyachar.

I also recently wrote a short blog article focusing on the first debates around public sector “inefficiencies” and reform in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I wrote this piece at a moment when the Egyptian government was engaged in a new wave of privatization and liquidation of public sector companies, including the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company, the largest industrial project of the Nasser era. While these steps were a continuation of the neoliberal policies pursued under Mubarak, I was interested in exploring an earlier moment in the discourse around economic reform. 

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

ML: I hope this article will be of interest to scholars working on the history of development and the global history of management, as well as to students of Nasserism. It is also my hope that the article will contribute critically to the history of state-led development in Egypt. The legacy of the 1950s and 1960s in Egypt still holds a central place in political imagination and the Nasserist regime has been hailed, by many leftist intellectuals and activists, as a model for state-led economic modernization. Engaging with this narrative is important to produce a more complex understanding of our past. It is also a way to engage critically with the present, in the context of the new wave of public sector liquidation and of the expansion of the state/army’s role in the economy.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

ML: I am currently working on an article which explores the gendered dynamics in the industrial development policies of the 1940s to 1960s. I am also collecting primary sources—archival documents, private papers, and oral histories—relating to specific industrial projects of the era of state-led development; my focus is currently on the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company. I am interested in the social, rather than the institutional business history, of these projects.

 

Excerpt from the article (from pp. 20-24)

In September 1961, only a few months after nationalization decrees brought most large- and medium-scale industries under government ownership, another presidential decree created the National Institute of Management Development (NIMD). The EO had hatched the plan in consultation with Harbison and other foreign experts in 1957. The Institute received most of its funding from the Ford Foundation. The rapid expansion of the public sector in the early 1960s gave urgency to the question of staffing state-controlled enterprises at the managerial level. In this context, the Ford Foundation— which had financed the Inter-University Study of Labor project—became directly involved in the fields of productivity and management development. Between 1961 and 1966, American consultants and Western-trained Egyptian faculty of the NIMD trained around one thousand public-sector top and middle managers in the fields of production planning and management, human relations, marketing, and behavioral skills. The Ford Foundation’s involvement in such activities was part of a broader trend. Since the 1950s, the philanthropic organization had become a key international promoter of productivity programming through seminar series, training programs, and publications. By spreading the “gospel of productivity,” it sought to orient strategically important countries and regions toward a pro-US/Western approach to development. In other words, it envisioned itself “doing for the rest of the world what the Marshall Plan had done for Europe,” as historian Robert McCaughey has argued. The ILO also expanded its field of action in the 1960s. By 1966, the Productivity Center was providing production planning, supervisory, and vocational training to around eleven thousand Egyptians annually. Its consultancy work for individual companies continued apace. 

Thus, the regime’s shift to “socialism” did not alter the forms of expertise the state relied on. The package of “socialist laws” adopted in the early 1960s theoretically positioned industrial workers as partners in management. Workers attained the right to be elected board members in their workplaces and to share a percentage of the annual profit. Labor legislation also guaranteed a minimum wage, reduced the working week to forty-two hours, and placed restrictions on overtime. Such measures had little effect on management development policies. Indeed, the NIMD and the PVTC continued to expand during the years of “socialist transformation.” Significantly, the economic press and specialized publications of the 1960s featured many discussions on the similarities and convergences between capitalist and socialist management. The NIMD research series, for instance, included articles on “The Determination of Productivity Measures in a Socialist Society” or on “Management Development in U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.,” while al-Ahram al-Iqtisadi featured articles on the science of management and on the rising figure of the technocrat. In one of these articles, management professor Fu’ad al-Sharif observed: “At the time of the October 1917 revolution, Marxists described the system of incentive wages as one of the worst techniques invented by capitalism to exploit workers. Today, ILO statistics indicate that this system covers a higher proportion of workers in Soviet industry than in US industry.” Such statements were not surprising given Sharif’s own background as someone who received his training at American institutions. He was one of the first Egyptians trained in business administration, obtaining his Ph.D. from Chicago University in 1953. Sharif later became a member of the EO and the National Planning Committee before assuming NIMD’s chairmanship in 1961. 

This expansion of US- and Western European-inspired managerial expertise may appear paradoxical in light of what we know from previous studies about the “inefficiencies” of the public sector in 1960s Egypt. The Nasser regime’s “socialist transformation,” launched with the 1961 large-scale nationalizations, involved a vast expansion of public-sector employment—especially in administrative posts—with a parallel relative decrease of worker posts. This imbalance, in turn, hurt labor productivity, which “declined after 1962 after twenty years of steady if unspectacular growth,” as Waterbury has argued. A number of authors contend that industrial efficiency was further hampered by the pyramidal, centralized structure of the public sector and the “excessive hierarchy in the economic structure,” which left managers with little autonomy. 

This view of the public sector as a tightly regulated, top-down entity largely relies on an analysis of legal documents and overlooks how state-controlled firms functioned in practice. Overlooking the shop floor lends the public sector a coherence that it did not enjoy in practice. Company directors, managers, and lower-level supervisors were not just passive executors of policies dictated from above. Various sources—including experts’ correspondence, managers’ reports, and press debates—provide insights into how actors on the shop floor appropriated, negotiated, or ignored management expertise. Some of the reports and correspondence reveal the extent to which the foreign consultants, who travelled to Egypt for short-term missions to offer management consultancy to public-sector companies, had little knowledge of local conditions prior to their missions. Officials in Cairo and Geneva regularly raised concerns about foreign experts’ “inexperience” and, in some cases, criticized consultants’ recommendations for being vague or unsuited to the local context. 

In addition, the economic press and literature of the mid-1960s offers rich accounts of how company directors and executives navigated the nascent public sector amid the implementation of the first Five-Year Plan (1960–65). These accounts provide insights into the ways in which managers framed productivity problems in their companies and the kinds of “solutions” they considered. For instance, a key issue in these accounts related to work incentives and how they were implemented on the shop floor. While work measurement and incentive techniques were key components of the various productivity improvement schemes promoted in the industrial sector, their implementation was a site of negotiation and struggle between workers and management. 

A close reading of managers’ accounts indicates that there were significant differences in wage and incentive systems among public-sector companies. The boards of directors of nationalized or newly established firms often had the final say on job evaluation and job classification. Thus, the work of rating and ranking employees was done at the company level, rather than at the level of the public-sector supervising bodies, the mu’assasat ‘amma. Wide variations existed in practice. Within the same plant, and sometimes on the same production line, different systems of pay coexisted. Some workers were entitled to incentives, while others were not. Some worked according to a piece-rate system or some other incentive mechanism, while others received a fixed salary with annual increases. There was also a wide gender wage gap, which managers justified with reference to women’s “lower productivity” and inferior qualifications. By the mid-1960s, public-sector advisors were mentioning the problems created by “incentive inequities.” In a 1968 report, ILO chief of project Erwin Poetter noted that “labor unrest may occur” if such inequities persisted.

At the factory level, incentives were highly dependent on workers’ relations with their supervisors. Supervisors emphasized workers’ behavior as a key element in their performance assessment. At the Misr Industrial Silk Company, for instance, workers were entitled to production rewards, amounting to up to fifteen percent of their basic monthly pay, based on production quantity and quality. Yet personal and behavioral elements also counted. “The normal worker who behaves well does not receive an extra reward, whereas the worker who demonstrates bad behavior should have his production reward diminished, based on his individual report,” noted ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-A‘sar, an engineer at the company. Similarly, Ahmad Zaytun, the chairman of Abu Za‘bal Chemicals Company, described how the incentive award scheme, which the company introduced in 1959, included financial rewards for workers who met some or all the criteria of the “model worker.” The “model worker” was “not absent without permission; did not visit the (factory) doctor; was not victim of, or responsible for a (work) accident; was not subject to sanctions; and engaged in sports and social activities.”

During the preparation of the second Five-Year Plan in 1966, the government issued new regulations aimed at standardizing assessment and incentive procedures across companies. Notions related to workers’ morality and behavior remained as key elements in these procedures, as illustrated by the case of the Ahliyya Paper Company. In this factory, the assessment report forms used in 1967 were divided into two sections. The first focused on “productivity and behavior” (al-kifaya wa-l-suluk), including the worker’s speed, precision, initiative, and relations with his directors and colleagues. The second part measured the worker’s health and fitness, concentration at work, attendance, and level of obedience (ita‘at al-awamir). In that sense, assessment and incentive schemes combined some form of work measurement with an evaluation of the worker’s “good behavior” and obedience, based on the supervisor’s opinion.

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.