Alice Wilson, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (New Texts Out Now)

Alice Wilson, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (New Texts Out Now)

Alice Wilson, Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (New Texts Out Now)

By : Alice Wilson

Alice WilsonAfterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman (Stanford University Press, 2023).

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

Alice Wilson (AW): When I initially contemplated this project, I wanted to reverse a question that had underpinned my earlier research. Previously I had asked how Western Sahara’s refugees pursued revolutionary social change and state-building. In the new project I wanted to ask: what survives of revolutionary social change after defeat, despite authoritarian repression? In Dhufar, southern Oman, anti-colonial revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s pursued social transformations from gender equality to the emancipation of enslaved persons, anti-tribalism, resource redistribution, and participatory democracy. (Sahrawi revolutionaries have also shared these aspirations). But Dhufar’s revolution met with colonial counterinsurgency and military defeat. Meanwhile, Oman’s authoritarian government represses the country’s revolutionary past. In such circumstances, I wanted to ask, what survives of revolution? 

When I began to think about these questions in the Dhufari context, the 2010-11 uprisings in SWANA had not yet begun. Over the course of unfolding events in the region, as well as fieldwork and archival research, the book’s mission expanded. Dhufaris’ revolutionary and postrevolutionary trajectories became avenues for addressing questions that increasingly concern current and future generations in SWANA: how do subjects of authoritarianism experience and create revolutionary aftermaths, and what is the significance of a revolutionary past for later emancipatory projects? 

As the project advanced, the book became a way to stand on the shoulders of the scholarly giants whose work inspired the research—and, in doing so, rethink revolution and counterinsurgency, radical social change, postwar socio-political life, and rentierism and coercion in Gulf monarchies.

... what qualities facilitate revolutionary social change that endures over time, despite counterinsurgency and repression?

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

AW: The book makes the case for inquiry into revolutionary experiencestimescales, and impacts to engage with revolutions that lead to a range of outcomes, including military defeat and repression under authoritarianism. Even in such contexts, revolution has long-term consequences, as Dhufar shows. Everyday and extraordinary acts of some former militants reproduce revolutionary values. Counterinsurgency and postwar coercion, authoritarian repression, and rentierism—for the profound effects of which Dhufar often serves as an example—fall short of erasing revolutionary values and legacies.

These findings have implications for debates about revolution, counterinsurgency, rentierism, and postwar socio-political life. 

Echoing the effect of changing historical contexts that provoke new narrations of revolution, revolutionary afterlives prompt a new question: what qualities facilitate revolutionary social change that endures over time, despite counterinsurgency and repression? Skeptics have portrayed Dhufaris as unwilling recruits for revolutionary programs. But Dhufaris, like other revolutionaries, made choices about how to engage with social transformation, rather than following scripts. Such complexities in revolutionary movements do not, however, equate to participants’ disinterest or a movement’s failure. Rather, they reveal revolutionary social change to be a process of “un-neatness” or “messiness,” entailing active engagement that lays the groundwork for future lasting influence. The implications are that enduring legacies of revolution may arise not despite but rather because of the messiness of revolutionary social change and the engagement it implies.

Moreover, afterlives foreground how revolutionary agency, so significant during the revolution, continues to impact postwar times. Dhufar’s former revolutionaries played key roles in postwar social and spatial transformations. But government-sanctioned, Sultan-centric narratives of postwar modernization have marginalized the lasting significance of revolutionary agency. 

The tenacious afterlives of revolutionary engagement and agency in Dhufar advance the de-mythologization of an allegedly “model” counterinsurgency that “won hearts and minds”. It is not just that claims of “selective” violence deny the devastation inherent in counterinsurgency coercion. Indeed, amid growing reappraisals of the British-led campaign’s violence, the book stresses that the number of civilian deaths is unknown (rather than documented as low), and that coercion affecting a subsistence economy (as was the case in Dhufar) cannot be “selective.” In addition, afterlives further problematize a “hearts and minds victory,” for such assertions cannot explain how revolutionary values survive counterinsurgency military success. By exposing shortcomings of a “model” campaign and “hearts and minds victory,” afterlives call out these narratives’ underlying role in legitimizing colonial violence.

The counterinsurgency’s eventual adoption of welfare programs—which the campaign introduced as carrots to the ongoing sticks of coercion—incorporated Dhufaris into lasting patronage networks. Dhufaris have seemingly come to epitomize coopted subjects of Gulf rentierism. Yet revolutionary afterlives, such as ongoing engagement with egalitarian-leaning values, disrupt such interpretation. What emerges instead is a further dimension of Gulf citizens’ possibilities for contravening socio-political convention: subjects of cooptation can reproduce counterhegemonic values that both contrast and coexist with hierarchical patronage relations. 

By illuminating how kinship and everyday socializing reproduce revolutionary values in postwar Dhufar, afterlives of revolution suggest novel possibilities within postwar social relations. Instead of retrieving “normality”, postwar everyday life may reprise social relations that emerged during upheaval such as revolution.

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

AW: Afterlives of Revolution continues my interest in charting revolutionary transformations. My first book, Sovereignty in Exile, examined revolutionary state-building and social transformation among Western Sahara’s refugees. Sahrawis have faced the challenges of exile, occupation, and insufficient international support for decolonization, in addition to the dilemmas of how to sustain revolution. Nonetheless, since the 1970s Sahrawis have pursued revolutionary projects. Even as the terms of Sahrawis’ revolutionary social contract have changed over time, their commitment to a revolutionary moral contract has proven enduring, as my earlier book explores.

At first sight, Dhufaris have treaded an opposite trajectory, wherein counterinsurgency victory and, later, the fall of socialist Yemen, deprived militants of liberated or exilic revolutionary spaces. Despite these differences, the parallels between Western Sahara and Dhufar include a striking reemergence of the past in the present. Sahrawi refugees’ state-building recycled historical forms of political, economic, and tribal social relations in the process of building revolutionary state power. In Dhufar, revolutionary values of social egalitarianism survived in the everyday and extraordinary actions, including radical feminist acts, of former revolutionaries and family members. The contrasting cases of Western Sahara and Dhufar both foreground the expansive times, spaces, and impacts of revolutionary social change.

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

AW: The book is an effort toward decolonizing narratives of revolution and counterinsurgency among audiences in and outside Oman, and in universities and beyond. The book seeks to engage participants, commentators, policymakers, researchers, and students of all levels who are interested in revolution, liberation fronts and related struggles, radical activism, counterinsurgency, and postwar transitions. Through the lens of afterlives, the book seeks to change these readers’ ideas about revolution and counterinsurgency by showing how revolutionary agency and social change survive, despite the counterinsurgency measures and authoritarian repression that aim to erase such possibilities. 

These findings question the policy model of repression and rentierism to which Gulf monarchies turn during crises, such as Dhufar’s revolution and protests in 2011. Governments deploy repression and rentierism to unseat appetites for alternative political visions. But the afterlives of revolution show how repression and rentierism fall short of erasing the values that underpin progressive aspirations.

Dhufari experiences of revolutionary impacts that survive authoritarian repression can inform current and future inquiry into the hopesfrustrations, and experiences of change of newer generations of disappointed revolutionaries in post-2011 SWANA.

For those charting radical social change, including in contexts of repression, the book probes how kinship, everyday interactions, and unofficial commemoration reproduce revolutionary values—making possible transmission to new generations. These findings foreground the often under-recognized potential of kinship and everyday life for social transformation, rather than social reproduction. 

Dhufaris and other Omanis engage, beyond government censorship, in memory work about the revolution and the censored past. There is much further research to do about Dhufaris’ diverse experiences of tumultuous change in recent decades. The book provides resources for those in and beyond Oman who are advancing this work.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AW: On the one hand, I am continuing where Afterlives of Revolution concludes. I will further examine how the values that revolutionaries promoted—such as social inclusivity, gender egalitarianism, and opposition to enslavement—inspire and reappear in postwar platforms for progressive politics. I am interested in the reemergence of inclusive social alliances in Dhufari electoral leagues and during the 2011 protests in Salalah, and how postwar electoral candidates question inter- and intra-gender, ethnic, tribal, and racialized stratification.

On the other hand, having done fieldwork in two contexts where enslavement continued into the 1970s (northwest Africa and southern Arabia), I am planning a comparative project that foregrounds experiences of enslaved and formerly enslaved persons in the abolitionist projects of late twentieth-century Arab liberation movements.

J: What challenges arose during this research, and how did you address them? 

AW: Research about organized political violence and its legacies brings challenges that are not only conceptual and empirical, but also ethical and methodological. These concerns are especially fraught when an authoritarian government has expunged events from official histories and imposes censorship—as is the case in Oman regarding the Dhufar revolution.

Knowing that Omanis were expert in navigating these constraints, during fieldwork I let interlocutors set the terms of discussion. Writing has involved introducing “noise” to assist anonymization—splitting one person’s words across several pseudonyms, or flagging a fictive composite interlocutor who takes on several persons’ words—and focusing on interactions that are already public knowledge in Oman. Whilst every decision in writing this book was difficult, I share the cautious hope of Omanis who publish, beyond official censorship, about sensitive topics that such writing can help expand opportunities for advancing progressive visions.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Introduction, pp. 1-3)

The journey began in an ordinary way. It was a pre-monsoon hot and sticky post-siesta afternoon in 2015. I was searching for a cab to take me several kilometers from one side of Salalah to another, where I was headed to visit a Dhufari family in their home. I felt an acute self-consciousness. It was rare for an unaccompanied woman to take a cab in Salalah. Most Dhufari women, whether of urban or rural background, conformed to prevalent social expectations that when circulating in Salalah they should avoid unnecessary contact with unrelated Omani men, including cab drivers. Women from global north backgrounds typically had their own cars. Many women of global south backgrounds were low-paid domestic workers with limited opportunities, reasons, or resources to take cabs. A roadside lone female cut an awkward figure. Uncomfortably familiar with this predicament, I initially struggled to hail a cab and settle a fare.

Eventually a driver who looked in his sixties agreed to take me. I followed the family’s instructions to call them and hand the phone to the driver, so that the family could explain the directions. I got through to Musallam (a pseudonym), a male member of the household of a similar generation to the driver. Musallam began to explain the route. After a few exchanges, the driver joyfully exclaimed: “Musallam!” The two began to greet each other anew, exchanging news as if they were acquaintances who were glad to be in touch again after some time. 

When the driver eventually hung up, he handed the phone back to me saying: “Musallam wants to talk to you.” 

I called back, and Musallam told me: “He is one of our group. Maybe he will talk to you.” At this moment, the journey ceased to be ordinary. 

I began to sweat beyond the effects of the oppressive heat. Musallam had used a term meaning “group” or “gathering” in classical Arabic (jamaʿah). I most often heard Dhufaris use it to refer to their extended family or tribe. But I immediately understood that Musallam had employed the term in another sense.

Musallam and others in his close family had formerly been members of Dhufar’s liberation movement (henceforth, “the Front”). Launching its revolution in 1965, the Front fought an anti-colonial insurgency for ten years against the British-backed, Muscat-based al-Busaid dynasty of sultans. From 1968 on, and in an increasingly internationalized conflict, the movement pursued Marxist-inspired, anti-tribalist, and egalitarian-leaning programs of social change. These continued until 1992 through the Front’s mobilization and eventual exile in southern Yemen. Members gradually left the movement between the 1970s and the 1990s, taking up lives in Oman as citizens loyal to Sultan Qaboos bin Said (ruled 1970–2020). But for some of these former revolutionaries, the Front’s values of egalitarianism, social inclusivity, and anti-tribalism remained influential. 

The “group” to which Musallam referred, then, was not an extended family or tribe, but former members of the Front. The government of authoritarian absolutist Qaboos had nevertheless imposed an official silence regarding the Front and its armed and, later, political opposition. Only in private, informal circles could Dhufaris make reference to the Front without fear of consequences such as increased government surveillance or punishment. Musallam’s suggestion that “maybe” the driver would talk to me was therefore significant. Many Dhufaris were understandably reluctant to speak to a British and British-based researcher about the Front. But Musallam was telling me that the driver might be willing to help me learn more about the movement and its afterlives. 

Hence, I sweated in the cab. How could I—or should I—broach the sensitive topic of the Front with the driver, even if Musallam’s overture suggested that he judged that it was safe to do so? After speaking with Musallam, I resumed small talk with the driver. I eventually ventured that I was a researcher studying social change in Dhufar in the 1970s and after. These were terms broad enough to include euphemistic reference to the revolution and its programs that a Dhufari could easily recognize. In adopting purposefully open-ended language I sought to give interlocutors the choice about whether or not to direct conversation toward the Front. The driver proceeded to tell me, equally euphemistically, that Musallam had a “background” (khalfiyyah), as did members of Musallam’s family, male and female, whom the driver named to me. But the driver went no further, and following his cue I did not pursue the topic.

When we arrived at the house, I telephoned to say that I was outside. The driver heard me greeting Khiyar, a female senior member of the family also of a similar generation to Musallam and the driver. He asked for the phone. He and Khiyar then exchanged warm greetings, again as if between longstanding acquaintances who were glad to speak after some time. Just as gendered norms frowned upon most Dhufari women taking cabs in Salalah, similarly they generally discouraged unrelated Dhufari males and females from seeking social contact. Although such expectations applied less stringently to postmenopausal women of Khiyar’s generation, the effusive greetings between her and the driver still struck me as unusual. Had they been relatives, they would likely have had opportunities to hear each other’s news through kinship networks. This seemed not to be the case. Rather, they greeted one another as if reconnecting in the light of a shared past: the “background” in the Front at which Musallam and the driver had hinted. 

In the end, the driver’s reluctance to speak to me explicitly about the revolution had not foreclosed revelation. On the contrary, his recognition of Musallam’s voice, and his subsequent conversation with Khiyar, proved suggestive. Did the enthusiastic greetings between this man and woman echo the well-known gendered egalitarianism of Dhufar’s revolution? The interactions between Musallam, Khiyar, and the driver evoked possibilities that some former revolutionaries acknowledged social networks that linked them to one another and reproduced values of social—including gendered—egalitarianism and inclusivity. The cab journey had reached an extraordinary climax. It showed me firsthand how former militants reproduced lasting legacies of revolution.

Excerpted from Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman by Alice Wilson, published by Stanford University Press, ©2023 by Alice Wilson. All Rights Reserved.

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.