Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti, eds., Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti, eds., Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti, eds., Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

By : Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti

Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti (eds.), Practicing Sectarianism: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2022).

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

Lara Deeb, Tsolin Nalbantian, and Nadya Sbaiti (LD, TN & NS): This volume grew out of a MESA panel Tsolin and Nadya organized in 2018, with Lara as discussant. Afterwards, the three of us continued talking about the different ways we were each engaging with sectarianism as it is practiced in everyday life—and about how we, like so many scholars of Lebanon, were hesitant to center it. We kept returning to the fact that despite our different disciplines and time periods, we were all focused on how people practice sectarianism. One of us suggested, probably in jest, that we should do an edited volume. That comment germinated into this book.

Despite our frustration with the degree to which sectarianism is an oversignified and oversaturated term in Middle East studies, we decided it was important to pull this volume together because while most scholarship on Lebanon that addresses the concept has been—rightly—dedicated to demonstrating that sectarianism is not an essential quality of the region and is historically constructed, less attention has been paid to how people make sect meaningful in daily life as a result of those historical processes. It was like a scholarly paralysis—a fear that if we acknowledge that sectarianism moves through everyday life, that people draw on it, challenge it, redefine it, navigate around it, and are shaped by it, we would contribute to its entrenchment and reinforce those tired ideas that the region is essentially sectarian. We decided it was time to confront this paralysis directly, and to insist that sectarianism is simultaneously constructed and experienced, imagined and materially impactful. We also decided to focus the volume on anthropology and history because we saw a potentially fruitful conversation to be had between these two disciplines. From there, we invited scholars doing incredible work that engaged with everyday practices of sectarianism from different time periods and sites.

The authors take sectarianism seriously as a set of practices in order to dismantle it as a hegemonic concept.

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

LD, TN & NS: This book explores the multiple creative ways that people live sectarianism, using Lebanon as a case study. All the contributors—four historians and four anthropologists—use the concept as an animating concept across a variety of sites including Lebanon and its diaspora, as well as over a range of historical periods, from the mandate to the present. They examine how people shape and experience sect and “being sectarian,” sometimes pushing back, sometimes evading the category, and sometimes deploying it strategically, all to a variety of effects and consequences. The authors take sectarianism seriously as a set of practices in order to dismantle it as a hegemonic concept. While each chapter is embedded in particular literatures, as a collection this volume intervenes in scholarship on sectarianism in multiple disciplines, both for Lebanon and globally. It also contributes to the field of Lebanese studies by modeling approaches to sectarian-in-practice and providing in-depth ethnographic and archival work on a variety of topics. 

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

LD: In one sense, this volume departs from my earlier work, An Enchanted Modern and Leisurely Islam, because those two books are focused on dynamics among Shi‘i Muslims in Lebanon—the gendered relationship between piety and modernity, and negotiations of leisure in relation to piety and geography, respectively. At the same time, sectarianism has always haunted all of my work on Lebanon; it is difficult to imagine how it would not. Practicing Sectarianism is directly related to the book I am currently writing about responses to intersectarian marriage in Lebanon, in which I show how mixed marriage pushes the boundaries of social norms around both gender and sect. My ultimate goal in this project is to take sect apart as a category, to reveal its flimsiness, and show that it is neither the only nor necessarily the most important category of social difference in Lebanon. Our edited volume was a natural extension of that project for me, not only because my individual chapter stems from my research on mixed marriage, but because it allowed me to think through these issues in conversation with Nadya and Tsolin, as well as the other contributors.

TN: This chapter is both a continuation and departure from my work. My book Armenians Beyond Diaspora: Making Lebanon Their Own (Edinburgh UP, 2020) focused on how, post-Genocide, Lebanon became a center of Armenian power, involving inter alia the Cilician See, a Lebanese Armenian sectarian institution based in Antelias/Beirut; and how Armenians helped create Lebanon. My chapter in Practicing Sectarianism demonstrates how some American Armenians used the Lebanon-based Cilician See in a struggle for power that pitted them against other American Armenians loyal to the Echmiadzin See, based in Soviet Armenia. Because this move involved a Lebanese Armenian sectarian institution, I call it intra-sectarian. Moreover, I show how sectarianism, moving through an Armenian network to the United States, in essence developed an American dimension.

NS: My chapter in this volume is an offshoot of my current book manuscript on gender and education in interwar mandate Lebanon in which I have been grappling with the specter of sectarianism that, as Lara says, “haunts” the material, but which, as my rereading of archives of this time period demonstrates, was also never inevitable. This chapter is an attempt to straddle the “and” of this scenario, and to push back on what remains—in both scholarship and a lot of Lebanese communities—to be a largely accepted narrative of Lebanon under French mandate as a sort of ground zero for what is reified as a future sectarian Lebanon. The book itself I would argue is attempting to do the same thing, so the alignment of my work and this volume was perfect. 

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

LD, TN & NS: Everyone! While “Lebanon” in one way or another threads through the work, we really hope that this volume speaks to all those interested in sectarianism, which is certainly not a “Lebanese” or “regional” issue. Around the world, people are practicing sectarianism and pushing back against it in innovative and interesting ways that we miss when limited by a single geographic focus. We also hope that scholars interested in the role methodology plays in knowledge production will find each chapter’s approach to the archival or ethnographic constructive for imagining new approaches to such research. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

LD: I am currently finishing the book I described above, about how social pressure against mixed marriage among Lebanese reveals changes in both ideas about sect as the primary category of social difference in Lebanon and gendered norms around marital choice. My next project will likely be a graphic ethnography. 

TN: I am currently co-editing another volume with Talar Chahinian and Sossie Kasbarian entitled The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury, November 2023), which explores Khachig Tölölyan’s work and its impact on various conceptualizations of the Armenian diaspora, in all its heterogeneity.

NS: My next project, on which I have already embarked, examines Arab leisure travel within the region as a way to write an interconnected history of the mashriq, from 1918-1958. So I am staying with the framework of “and,” by which I mean that while this period is so often discussed as one of fissure and disconnection, Arabs’ mobility, leisure practices, and the spaces that they engendered, help us see that this is also a critical period of the demand for continued connection and possibility. 

J:  Can you provide a brief overview of the other contributions in the volume? 

LD, TN & NS: We feel so fortunate to have been able to work with the incredible scholars who authored the individual chapters in this volume. In addition to Tsolin and Nadya, the historians include Reem Bailony and Linda Sayed. Reem’s chapter examines how notions of sect in the mahjar shaped charitable activities and remittances as key processes through which the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora exercised and negotiated power vis-à-vis the homeland, one another, and the French colonial authorities. Linda’s chapter examines how the Ja`fari shari’a courts were sites where Shi‘i individuals pushed against the limitations of sectarian and national identities embedded in the formation of modern Lebanon, and navigated family, gender, and political belonging. In addition to Lara, the anthropologists include Roxana Aras, Maya Mikdashi, and Joanne Nucho. Roxana investigates how members of the Rum Orthodox community in post-civil war Beirut authenticate their religious identity through the use of incense, and how olfactory codes mediate inter-confessional encounters. Maya draws on both archival and ethnographic material to examine a century-long court case, using it to reveal legal continuities and ruptures across multiple juridical regimes in Lebanon. Joanne’s ethnographic analysis of the Armenian community in the Beirut neighborhood of Burj Hammoud illustrates how viewing sect as a process of differentiation connected to channels of resources, social geographies, and popular representations can disrupt perceptions of class and sect as two distinct categories.

                                                

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction)

Sectarianism is a concept that simply won’t die. Scholars, pundits, and journalists turn to it again and again to describe and explain violence and political strife in the Middle East. Some of the most nuanced of these evocations——those that insist that sectarianism is neither essential nor primordial—still rest on the idea that sectarianism is an indelible constant in the region. Lebanon represents an exemplary case that both generates these assumptions and suggests paths to overcoming them. Lebanon’s seemingly inextricable link with sectarianism led us to this book via a series of conversations across disciplines and time frames, underpinned by questions about how people practice sectarianism: how they use it, live it, and maintain it in their daily lives. This recurring conversation was different and, frankly, more interesting than one structured by the perennial question “What do we do about sectarianism?” and its corollary, “What’s the alternative?” These questions have plagued scholars, researchers, and activists working in and on Lebanon and the region more broadly. Both questions fail to consider how and why sectarianism moves through the everyday lives of the region’s inhabitants. This volume aims to change the parameters of scholarship on the subject by engaging with the varied ways in which people live sectarianism daily, in meaningful albeit inconsistent ways. Practicing Sectarianism intervenes directly at this juncture by bringing together scholars from history and anthropology—two disciplines that take as a priori the idea that sectarianism is contingent and constructed—in order to explore the imaginative and contradictory ways in which people engage with sectarianism in the social realm. This volume contends that sectarianism can be more fully understood if we take it seriously as a set of practices, and models a way of doing so in scholarship.

Each scholar whose work is featured in this book uses sectarianism as an animating principle through which to investigate how it is conceived of and practiced within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas, and over a range of historical periods. By considering how productive the destabilization of sectarianism can be, this volume magnifies how actors in various times and spaces have used the concept to exhibit, imagine, or contest power. What forms of affective pull does sectarianism have on people and communities? What epistemological work does sectarianism do as a concept? How does sectarianism function as a marker of social difference? How is sectarianism mobilized as a multivalent signifier or value claim to convey disagreement or discrimination?

This book focuses on how these intertwined forms of sectarianism are lived in the everyday. By focusing on the microlevel of social interaction, the chapters that follow add texture to how people live sectarianism inconsistently: resisting it, evading it, and deploying it strategically, sometimes all at once. The everyday is most readily evident in the third form of sectarianism, that of interpersonal interactions. Yet it is also a part of sectarianism’s structural and institutional forms, as it reveals how people interact with the political-sectarian and personal status categories that affect their lives. As Suad Joseph notes, sectarianism is a process of differentiation “that operates through the everyday—through socialization, through family systems, and through various other aspects of social organization in both systematic and erratic or contradictory ways.”5 Each contribution to this book explores how different social actors consider, negotiate, and/or use sectarianism in daily interactions with a variety of effects and often unintended consequences. The authors follow how power moves through sectarian communities in practice; and in so doing, they reveal how sectarianism travels across spatial and temporal boundaries. They highlight a variety of institutions that both limit and expand sectarian belonging and practice, and they show how sectarian identity is complicated by class positioning, historical change, diaspora politics, gender and sexual identities, ideas about religiosity, personal status law, and regional location within Lebanon. By exploring everyday practice, we aim to provide a new model for scholarship—one that understands sectarianism as simultaneously constructed and experienced, as imagined yet materially impactful.

Practicing Sectarianism, refuses both ahistorical and recent starting points, as well as the notion that historical processes are so easily rendered into predictable and fixed “outcomes.” The contributors fold significant events and periodic markers into a larger continuum of Lebanese history, during which sectarianism has been practiced in varied ways. Nearly every chapter reveals paths to sectarianization: the mechanisms by which people start to see others through the lens of sect, or come to act in ways deemed sectarian. By unpacking the (re)production of sectarianism in specific times and places, the authors show how practices of sectarianism that emerge from the ground up, including in interpersonal interactions, affect and effect institutions and structures. Thus they contribute to a growing body of work that has similarly examined the agency of those who enact sectarianism in the realms of political economy and ideological hegemony, or within clientelism and political-economic networks.

Existing works provide strong explanations for how sectarianism is reinforced and reproduced at the levels of the state, civil society, and elite networks. The contributors to this volume insist that even where sectarianism is facilitated or nurtured in top-down ways, its development is never unidirectional and can never be fully understood without deep attention to the everyday. In other words, sectarianization is produced neither solely by structures nor by people on the ground, but through dialectical processes that require the entanglement of the two levels of life and analysis. Political elites in power use sectarian discourses to maintain that power, deploying sectarianism—too often successfully—as a weapon to divide people. As sectarianism in all its forms has been constructed and molded over time, it has shaped the ways people think and live, and has fostered new practices of identification and discrimination. Those practices, in turn, continue to fuel sectarianism’s institutionalized forms. Overall, these ground- up dimensions of sectarianism’s persistence have been understudied in the copious scholarship on its various consequences and manifestations. This book thus adds to this rich but incomplete conversation about why sectarianism is such a persistent part of modern identity and how it is maintained, by focusing on its quotidian, mundane, intimate aspects that are practiced every day.

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.