Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh, eds., COVID-19 and Risk Society Across the MENA Region: Assessing Governance, Democracy, and Inequality (New Texts Out Now)

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh, eds., COVID-19 and Risk Society Across the MENA Region: Assessing Governance, Democracy, and Inequality (New Texts Out Now)

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh, eds., COVID-19 and Risk Society Across the MENA Region: Assessing Governance, Democracy, and Inequality (New Texts Out Now)

By : Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh (eds.), COVID-19 and Risk Society Across the MENA Region: Assessing Governance, Democracy, and Inequality (I. B. Tauris, 2022).

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

Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh (LS & LS): As the pandemic bludgeoned the world in ways we all felt keenly on a personal and collective level, it occurred to us that as social scientists, COVID-19 was changing the MENA region in ways that must be accounted for. It was not enough to simply observe that the world and life as we knew it would never be the same. The paradox that in the twenty-first century humanity at large seemed at a loss to help itself for so many months needed investigating. Moreover, even when seemingly endless budgets enabled Western countries, or superpowers like China, to pour money into medical and scientific research, the MENA region remained despondently dependent and helpless. Global hierarchies seemed to frame asymmetries in suffering more blatantly than we could have imagined, as a result of the pandemic: death rates, socio-economic deprivation, economic recession, and more. Even within the MENA region, it struck us how pandemic losses afflicted countries unequally; that the Gulf states were the first to acquire the vaccine and make it available to their citizens and residents was no coincidence. But even in the Gulf, and in all MENA states, vast socio-economic disparities conditioned who bore the brunt of the pandemic and how. All this was more than an infectious disease puzzle. A prominent political and social element was part of the story.

Here we found in critical theory, specifically Ulrich Beck’s notion of “risk society,” a fitting framework that was adaptable to the MENA region. Obviously, countries such as Morocco, Syria, Egypt, or Qatar do not display the same trappings of “modernity” (for example, capitalist development, representative democracy, scientific “progress”) that Beck reveals as problematic as much as they are markers of progress. Nevertheless, the MENA postcolonial state, its structures of governance, and its developmental models all boasted some form of advancement, while keeping its publics mired in authoritarianism, inequality, and even marginalization. COVID-19 seemed to expose the fragility of state-society relations in this postcolonial authoritarian bargain that had, for a time, seemed to be unraveling in the wake of the popular Arab Spring revolutions of 2011-onward.

Hence, we wished to explore the political and developmental repercussions of the pandemic in a manner comprehensive enough to account for country, regional, and global levels. In a region as diverse yet roughly (culturally and linguistically) coherent as MENA, a comparative lens was important. We assembled a fine group of scholars (Beverley Milton-Edwards, Abdul Ghaffar Mughal, Ali Alshawi, Hela Miniaoui, Anis Khayati, Mohamed El Hachimi, Aisha Kadaoui, Mohammed Moussa, Takayuki Yokota, Basem Ezbidi, Assem Dandashly, Ravza Altuntas-Çakir, Aysegül Gökalp Kutlu, Fatmanur Delioglu, Maziyar Ghiabi, Pietro Marzo, Renata Pepicelli, and Madra Kassis). Many wrote from within MENA to explore the pandemic fallout in specific countries and vis-à-vis other regions.

How has the pandemic brought to the fore the backlash of such modernization processes that ensured neither freedom nor dignity to the region’s publics?

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

LS & LS: The book first lays out the framework of “risk society” adapted to the MENA region. How has putative modernization since colonialism, filtered through the apparatuses of authoritarianism and dependency on Western powers and the global capitalist framework, in effect “backfired” in the region? How has the pandemic brought to the fore the backlash of such modernization processes that ensured neither freedom nor dignity to the region’s publics? This is the theoretical prism through which our contributors examined the “pandemic condition” (adapting Hannah Arendt’s well-known “human condition”) in their respective country case studies.

The chapters cover the GCC, the North African countries, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Syrian refugees in Turkey, EU-MENA relations, and Arab authoritarianism more broadly. They variously examine three themes. First are modes of governance, including the new pandemic-era “biopolitics” (Foucault’s surveillance and control of populations): lockdowns, health tracker applications, mobility and travel restrictions, and so on, all in the name of public safety. Second is democracy, always a pertinent question made more so by the Arab Spring that touched the entire region in some way or other. What prospects remain for democratization in the region, when emboldened, coercive authoritarian regimes seemed eager to militarize public space, to curtail freedom of speech, to jail opponents, more than ever before? Much has by now been written about COVID-19’s detrimental impact on democracy worldwide. We wished to comparatively examine the specificities of MENA setbacks in democratization. Most dramatically, Kais Saied proclaimed his “state of exception” on 25 July 2021, activating what has probably been the most disheartening reversal of revolutionary gains in the region since 2011. He was in part encouraged by rampant protests that decried Hichem Mechichi’s (then Prime Minister) government in dealing with the pandemic, as the death rate crept up alarmingly. At the same time, civic resistance has not been stamped out, even with pandemic-style authoritarian resurgence, as some of our chapters demonstrate. Third and finally, the theme of inequality, within and between countries in the region and the rest of the world, runs through the chapters. Socio-economic systems, and the exclusions they engender, are inextricably tied up in political regimes and processes. The economic is political. COVID-19 drove that lesson home in a new way.

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

LS & LS: We both have longstanding interest in protest politics and democratization in the region. These are always, as we mention above, linked to material marginalization, underdevelopment, and transgressions against socio-economic rights in general. Larbi Sadiki has probed transformations in Arab democratic discourses in The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia UP, 2004), Arab democratization (Rethinking Arab Democratization: Elections without Democracy, OUP, 2009), the Arab Spring (Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring), and contemporary Middle East politics (Routledge Handbook of Middle East Politics). Layla Saleh’s book examined Syria’s revolution vis-à-vis US foreign policy towards the region since 2001 (US Hard Power in the Arab World: Resistance, the Syrian Uprising, and the War on Terror, Routledge, 2017). The pandemic offered new (very difficult) empirical circumstances that resonated with topics and themes we have written about in these above-mentioned and other works. Readers will recognize continuity in theoretical and normative interests (democracy, bottom-up politics, emancipation) integrated into recent social and political events that have accosted the region and the world.

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

LS & LS: We hope that students and scholars of the MENA region will read this book. Epistemologically and methodologically, what we have called “ethnographies of the pandemic” can offer insight into how to study difficult socio-economic phenomena from the ground up, centering the local and the indigenous in a reflexive fashion. Too often, research on the MENA region is limited by Orientalist frameworks and limited, first-hand engagement with the field and local knowledge. We sought to avert this pitfall in the book, and as such the chapters illustrate different ways of taking “the local” seriously, from interviews to participant observation to even “digital ethnography,” made more popular by pandemic travel limitations. 

The book should also appeal to other readers who may be curious about how the pandemic has affected societies and publics in the “Global South.” Civil society activists and some policymakers may appreciate our attention to issues of formal politics, governance, protest, and development that depart from simply cataloguing the pandemic damage, as it were. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

LS & LS: We have just finished writing an immense co-authored book: Revolution and Democracy in Tunisia, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press and should be out by the end of the year. It takes an in-depth, theoretically innovative, and rich empirical look at protest and revolution in the North African country, phenomena with which social scientists continue to grapple. We also founded and edit the Brill journal Protest, which publishes research articles, special essays, short eyewitness pieces, interviews, and reviews. Volume 3, Issue 1 will be out in late June. 

J: What are some takeaways from your book as the pandemic has subsided? 

LS & LS: The book obviously tackles a specific set of medical, social, and political circumstances, namely the COVID-19 pandemic that has to a great extent abated by mid-2023. However, the hazards of “MENA risk society” persist. Dissemination of the vaccine, busy airports, and crowded restaurants have not brought with them the freedom and dignity (slogans of the Arab Spring) that MENA publics still yearn for. With the downpour of excessively pessimistic diagnoses of the region’s politics, with proclamations of the inevitability of authoritarian rule and the failure of Arab Spring democratization, we hope that our book conveys three things. First, the conditions giving rise to the 2011 revolutions have taken a turn for the worse, not better, since the pandemic. Second, if even during the pandemic citizens spoke out and broke out of their imposed authoritarian “confinement,” so to speak, the drive to protest and revolt has not withered. The collective pursuit of emancipation, despite polarization and fragmentation, despite the doubling down of state repression, will not be snuffed out. Third, research on the MENA region, during and since the pandemic, requires a strong dose of reflexivity. It necessitates focused attention to the indigenous and respect for the local, without foregoing the compiled wisdom of (Western) social science.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1, “MENA Risk Society and the ‘Pandemic Condition,’” by Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh)

[Note: In-text citations have been removed for the purpose of this excerpt] 

Introduction

At the interlocking levels of polity, economy, and society, global changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic prompt investigation, reflection, and deliberation by academics, civic activists, and political practitioners. In the midst of widespread uncertainty and the ‘collapse’ of taken-for-granted functions of states, economies, and international institutions, it is apropos to reconsider some widely held conceptions. How do crises bring to the fore the contradictions in the discourses and practices seeking to ensure democracy, freedoms, and socio-economic rights through the national, regional, and global actors and institutions? These compelling questions are far from abstract. Lives and livelihoods, many already precarious, have been bulldozed off-track in the wake of the pandemic and policy responses aiming (or claiming) to contain it. Hence, it is fitting to reflect on how social scientists can engage in research aimed at problem solving to confront enormous challenges heightened by COVID-19. These range from inequality, human indignity, to contracting opportunities compounded by resurgent authoritarianism in many Arab settings. Prior to March 2020, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) was already in the throes of intense tumult and trenchant violent conflict, particularly since the onset of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and counter-revolutions. These have played out not only in the Arab states, but have also ricocheted to other states in the region such as Iran. The pandemic has piled on difficulties of health, sustenance, and aspirations to security and emancipation. COVID’s woes in this region may be understood through a sort of duality. The pandemic’s blows have on the one hand followed the trajectory of some global patterns. At the same time, its impact has played out in regionally specific ways. The collection of chapters in this edited volume collectively seek to untangle how COVID-19 unfolds in the MENA region. That is, the book attempts probes the contours and configurations of its ‘pandemic condition,’ with special reference to issues of socio-economic (in)equalities, (self) governance, civic engagement, and democracy. An eye to problem-solving research, the ‘reflexivity’ dimension, further enhances the empirical, country-level analyses attuned to major trends exacerbated or initiated by the virus.

…….. 

MENA ‘Regional’ Risk Society 

Investigating the logics and instances of the “COVID condition,” we invoke Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens’concept of “risk society.” This notion helps to underscore the severity of the pandemic for human development and (in)humane sharing of the burdens afflicting the region’s states and societies as a result of Covid-19. It strikes a chord as we seek to both make meaning out of the pandemic and to chart pathways for ways to understand and even mitigate COVID destruction. Risk society is characterised by “distributional conflicts over ‘bads’” (and not “goods”), in contests over “how the risks accompanying goods production… can be distributed, prevented, controlled and legitimized,” according to Beck, Giddens, and Lash. Further, Beck has offered elsewhere the notion of risk as "manufactured uncertainty" that results from human-made (not natural) problems resulting from modernization. These include environmental disasters and new illnesses, for example, that arise from technological, scientific, and industrial development. 

Beck conceives of this "second modernity" as one of reflexive (rather than linear) modernization (rather than linear) that can bring about "its own change through unwanted side effects”. Reflexive modernization can thus, in a new "Enlightenment" ideal, induce "criticism" and "self-criticism". He pays special attention to the role of industry and science. Rather than merely bringing about improvements in people's lives according to the liberal rubric of progress, they themselves contribute to or even create risks. Social science has a role to play, argues Beck: by being more "reflective" than "professional," it can move away from excessive positivism to deeply and critically consider how to address the contemporary challenges of risk society. We thus approach COVID-19 as a clear and dire manifestation of Beck’s “risk society.” This global pandemic, unpredictable in its outbreak and its rapid-fire spread, has crippled polities, economies, and societies. It has arguably resulted from the toxic combination of capitalist structures and practices on the one hand, and scientific-technological developments on the other. Advancement-turned-vulnerability is the name of the game.

Risk society and its dangers are not neatly boxed within single countries. Instead, they permeate the territorial demarcations of modern states. The COVID-19 pandemic, the focus of our study, clearly illustrates this. Thus, we also further draw on Beck’s concept of “world risk society.” Here, there is a three-fold “de-bounding of uncontrollable risks”. It is spatial (problems spilling out of nation-state boundaries); temporal (unforeseeably longer time frame); and social (accountability and culpability are indeterminate). Ecological, global financial, and global terrorist risks are all examples. We can add the pandemic to the roster. Since risk can resonate internationally and transnationally, Beck urges “cooperation” and multilateralism for problem-solving in such cases, ideally within “cosmopolitan states” whose rights- and justice-based values make them more inclined to exactly such synergism. This globalization of risk has implications not only for problem-solving in the policy realm, but also in social science. Hence, Beck shuns what he calls “methodological nationalism” that deals with nation-states as the cornerstone of social science analysis. Instead, he argues that social science must be made more “transnational” (elsewhere, “cosmopolitan”) from concept-building to theorizing to methodological implementation. Following Beck, then, we take the pandemic to be a manifestation of “world risk society.” In this volume, we go beyond the “methodological nationalism” he decries in social science, toward a “transnationalism” that remains focused on the Arab region. Going too global may come at the price of losing the specificity of local/regional context in the conceptualization and measurement of concepts and the tracing of patterns. 

Hence, our take on Beck’s global risk society zeroes in on the MENA region. Shared cultural, economic, political characteristics emanating from geographic proximity and overlapping histories necessitate region-wide examinations of politics. MENA countries also experience common patterns of risk society. This includes relatively ‘dependent’ status in world affairs, from Palestine and Kuwait to Morocco and Syria. We contend that such recipient positionality extends to the problems emanating from risk society. As Beck notes, “in the so-called periphery," policies and decisions in confronting world risk society are made elsewhere in the “center,” involving an "exogenous process" outside the former’s control. In fact, he adds, risk is unequally distributed across a world riven with inequality, its dangers sometimes 'exported' across time and space by the powerful in the direction of the less powerful. Investigating the pandemic’s pathways, as expression and exacerbation of risk in MENA’s numerous countries, impels us to adopt a regional focus: what we call “regional risk society.” At the same time, our analytic strategy further aids us as we seek to avoid abstracting Arab states and societies of their agency. Thus, we stress the comparative uniqueness of states and regions dealing with risks not of their own making. That is, the risk inducers of modernity (capitalism, industrialization, technological progress, etc.) that Beck has suggested are not of local (Arab) origin—a logic that extends to the coronavirus. Yet, the Arab states and their societies, like other developing countries, must suffer the consequences of such risk as the architects of Western modernization do, albeit through distinct experiences. 

We are aware of criticisms levelled at Beck’s risk society. For example, some theorists take Beck to task for presenting as novel risks that are not really new (or modern) in the history of human existence. ….What justifies its use here in this volume is not subscription of a view of "total risk" as perhaps contended by Beck. It is not how class per se relates to risk. Rather, it is how risk engulfs the world's peripheries relative to the industrialized states that form the center of global economic, scientific, technological and even military prowess. These peripheries in MENA, almost invariably ex-colonized states and societies, display insecurities and vulnerabilities exacted on them by adoption of development models (modernization-cum liberalization, dependence, etc.) and implements of power (Western tutelage and authoritarian rule tolerated by the West). So risk may not be "total", as conceived by Beck within new modernity. It is, however, "situated" risk with own specificities. In particular, how risk is not in any small measure, as regards political, socio-economic or social vulnerabilities and woes of the ex-colonized, a variant of that experienced by the ex-colonizers. Indebtedness to the ex-colonizers debilitates the economies of the ex-colonized. The techne of oppression, militarization and securitization that prop up delegitimized regimes and elites are made available to the ex-colonized by the ex-colonizers. Failed development models followed economic itineraries, socialist or liberal, account for a big share of the brands of risk found in MENA. That includes wars and their aftermath in the region. And so on, such that MENA risk society becomes a fitting frame through which to examine, critique, and re-imagine its “pandemic condition.” 

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.