Lucia Carminati, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906 (New Texts Out Now)

Lucia Carminati, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906 (New Texts Out Now)

Lucia Carminati, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906 (New Texts Out Now)

By : Lucia Carminati

Lucia Carminati, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906 (University of California Press, 2023). 

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

Lucia Carminati (LC): This book is a delta of sorts where different stories flow together. They all converge on the nineteenth-century history of the construction of the Suez Canal as it was witnessed mainly by migrant workers in the project’s first and northernmost worksite-turned-town, Port Said, founded in 1859.

At a time of heart-wrenching and enraging news about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean as they try to reach fortress Europe, I was puzzled to discover, thanks to my graduate school readings and mentorship, that the Middle Sea and the Middle East of the past had witnessed more frequent crossings than I had ever imagined. Further, I have always been irked by the fiction of nations—on Mediterranean shores and elsewhere—as homogenous and self-contained wholes constantly in need of distancing or purging themselves from alien bodies.

Finally, my own experience of pursuing an education abroad made me quickly realize that mine was a very privileged kind of migration. I decided that exploring the plurality of migratory paths in the past of the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern region could be a worthwhile endeavor, especially since the worksites of the Suez Canal quickly emerged from several archives as places of hierarchies, tensions, and multiple forms of inequality. 

I am grateful to all the teachers and the colleagues I have encountered on the way, because it was only through their inspiration and feedback that I was ever able to put down words on paper and to try to capture the myriad lives of those who made the Suez Canal dream into reality—often a harsh one.

Port Said’s residents were neither completely subject to controlling authorities nor fully autonomous in navigating their relations.

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

LC: Seeking Bread and Fortune highlights the import of workers’ mobility on the success of the much-celebrated Canal across the Isthmus of Suez that was inaugurated in 1869. Men, women, and children headed towards the Suez Canal worksites from the rest of Egypt, other parts of the Ottoman empire, and several countries of southern, central, and even northern Europe. They came to inhabit a profoundly unequal migrant society, wherein supposedly ethnic or racial differences and gendered notions of respectability dictated uneven access to relocation, employment, lawful behavior, and leisure. 

With the book, I hope to contribute to the “mobility turn” in the social sciences, according to which the concept of mobility or “mobilities” ought to embrace large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information, but also more local and mundane transactions, as well as instances of fixity and immobility.

Moreover, this study joins a heated debate in migration history. It examines the disparate sets of norms and practices of rule that, from the 1850s to the 1900s, different institutions such as the Suez Canal Company, the Egyptian government, foreign consulates, and, after 1882, the British-controlled Egyptian state attempted to implement. But, at the same time, it highlights the actions undertaken by migrant individuals and groups to counter the obstacles in their way. I thus contribute to the ongoing discussion on “agency” by showing that neither institutional representatives nor migrant workers appeared homogenous or acted coherently. Port Said’s residents were neither completely subject to controlling authorities nor fully autonomous in navigating their relations. Some of them appropriated the modes of action that were being imposed on them to advance their own interests often at the expense of others in comparable circumstances. 

Seeking Bread and Fortune further argues that the creation and sustenance of an apparently peripheral spot such as Port Said altered circuits of mobility within Egypt and the Mediterranean. This brand-new hub played a novel role in connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Sea and provisioning passing ships. But it also engendered a new arena of connectivity with locations farther down on the canal banks. The isthmus region continued to welcome people from the rest of Egypt and abroad, thus becoming at once self-contained and connected to sites elsewhere.

In sum, Port Said created its own orbit and timeline. Far from the dehumanized, teleological, and triumphalist histories of the Suez Canal as sheer economic investment or infrastructure that have dominated most of its historiography, this is a book about flesh-and-blood individuals. It delves into their apparently microscopic concerns and shows how these have the power to unsettle conventional narratives. 

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

LC: Seeking Bread and Fortune is my first monograph. It was born as a dissertation but eventually metamorphosized into another creature. During its gestation, I eagerly pursued inquiries in different yet inter-connected directions: mainly Suez-bound labor migration, urbanization in modern Egypt, and women and gender in nineteenth-century trans-Mediterranean mobility. The very beginning of these forays was a micro-historical study of the trial of a highly mobile group of foreign anarchists in Alexandria in 1898. But even when taking on apparently different challenges, such as discussing foreign migrant women’s role as prostitution entrepreneurs along the Suez Canal or mulling over Port Said’s apparent isolation from the rest of Egypt, I have maintained the lenses of social and cultural history and assigned pride of place to migrants and their life stories.

Seeking Bread and Fortune brings the themes of labor migration, urbanization, and women and gender together. But, unlike previous works, it maps one cycle in the life of Port Said in depth, with each chapter depicting this spot under a different light: from a swelling labor camp to a node in an isthmus-wide regimented labor regime, on to lawless borderland, and finally on to a hotbed for leisure and vice. The book progressively closes in on Port Said by first landing on the Isthmus of Suez, then moving on to its multiplying worksites, later approaching the town’s surroundings, and finally mooring in its streets and bars. While different and yet overlapping institutions attempted to control the Suez Canal region, they all substantially failed to single-handedly impose the social order they envisioned over the unruly, elusive, mobile isthmus population. 

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

LC: When juggling words, I tried to recreate the excitement, the joy, and the sorrow that I myself felt when encountering the individuals whose bits of lives I reconstruct—as much as archival fragments enable me to do. I have included many of the jokes, absurdities, oddities, and concrete details I stumbled upon in my effort to emphasize the social and the cultural dimensions of life on the worksites. For those more inclined to listen than to read, I speak about my research and writing in an Ottoman History Podcast episode hosted by Dr Suzie Ferguson.

My hope is that the book appeals to the curious way beyond the closed circle of fellow academic historians. Students of modern Egyptian history would find it interesting, but so would those who want to know more about Mediterranean history, Middle Eastern history, global history, urban history, and infrastructural history. Teachers of modern Middle East history and those teaching about nineteenth-century transformations will find that students could benefit from the tilted perspectives I offer. After reading a plethora of biographies of or celebratory works about Ferdinand de Lesseps, I am hoping readers will be positively puzzled by this book, from where the other face—or all the other faces—of the history of the Suez Canal peeks out. An expression of nineteenth-century engineering ambitions, an onerous economic venture, a diplomatic lightning rod. The Suez Canal’s undertaking was all this but went way beyond: it was a very human story of toil, separation, death, as well as thrill, adaptation, and wild fun in and out of Port Said’s bars.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LC: I have developed too much affection for the multitude of historical subjects I have worked on so far to let go of them any time soon. But I am excited to test relatively new waters. I am developing a new book project that addresses a few of the questions that Seeking Bread and Fortune opens but leaves hanging: how did nineteenth-century immigration impact Egypt’s state and society at large—beyond the Suez Canal region? How did Egypt’s borders come to be formalized as well as transgressed by border-crossers? Another line of inquiry I am working on—a curiosity I share with my colleague Dr Mohamed Gamal-Eldin—is perhaps less lofty but surely as impactful: how did Port Said’s authorities and infrastructure cope with its growing immigrant population, especially when it came to disposing of heaps of garbage and excrements?

Different projects in the making will run in yet other broad-ranging directions. I can cite just three. One is an interview on Jadaliyya itself with Yasmin El-Rifae, one of the organizers of Opantish and the author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (Verso, 2022), a blend of narrative non-fiction and memoir on the history and experience of Opantish.

I am also working on a project titled “Stampa migrante: periodicals of the Italian community of Egypt, 1892-1940 (EAP1474),” funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme and aimed at digitizing and making available a historical newspapers collection located in Cairo. Future publications will discuss the challenges and the promises of such digitization ventures and explore the history of Egypt’s multilingual press.

Finally, with Dr Ella Fratantuono of UNC Charlotte, I am editing a special issue of Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies on “Children and Youth Migrants in Middle East and North African History” that will be out in 2024. A ground-breaking collection of essays at the intersection of migration and childhood histories, it will eagerly welcome comments at the “Finding Child and Youth Migrants in Ottoman and Egyptian History” panel hosted by the 2023 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Montreal.

Thank you! 

 

Excerpt from the book (from the “Conclusion” of chapter 2, pp. 111-113)

On the canal worksites, differentiating between engineer and earthwork laborer, “European” and “Arab,” righteously employed and idly unemployed, well-behaving spouse and illegitimate paramour served as a powerful tool of control. The workers toiling on the canal worksites were pigeonholed in hierarchies built on preconceived ideas about their national and racial affiliation, assumptions about their tolerance to the desert environment, and gendered expectations. If they spent time or money in cafés and brothels, which the Company, the Egyptian government, and foreign consuls persistently threatened to shut down, they were treated as irresponsible children in need of supervision. As for migrant women, they were at best approached as vulnerable dependents rather than the self-confident and enterprising individuals they may have been, occasionally enabling the migration of brothers, husbands, or other males. At worst, migrant women were stigmatized as fundamentally immoral, constantly lured by or falling into prostitution.

Far from being solely confined to the workplace, the hierarchies described thus far were also inscribed in the urban space. Port Said was divided from its inception into a so-called European quarter and an Arab part of town and maintained unequal sewer and water infrastructure across its two halves. Because of the inflammable materials it was assembled with, the latter part of town was more prone to fire accidents, such as when a cracked clay bake oven let out flames that set on fire the fibers and planks of the hut where it was located as well as the surrounding ones; by the time the pumps were brought, the whole neighborhood was on fire. Smoking in straw-filled storerooms adjacent to stables could also become an incendiary habit. Street names in the “Arab” part of town reflected the diversified provenance of much of its immigrant population, such as Minya, Sharqiyya, Aswan, al-Daqhaliyya, and Damietta. Ismailia would also develop a “European” section that would remain separate from two distinct Arab “villages,” a Greek quarter, and a Calabrian quarter, in all four of which the overwhelming majority of residents lacked proper sanitation. Urban dwellers constantly crossed the lines that were drawn in the urban layout. People in Port Said persisted in setting up shop, peddling, consuming, or residing where they were not supposed to and challenged the Company’s efforts to prevent their mundane transgressions. Even if limited because of their spatial separation, there were still marriages between Ismailia’s Egyptian men and foreign women, which “contributed to the mixing of cultures and languages and habits in the city.” The canal towns were not just the products of blueprints devised in Cairo or Paris, but rather became theaters for performances of power and unintended urban realities.

Official reports conflated the unemployed and the would-be workers who happened to have no engagement contracts or identity papers on them with criminals. Especially those migrants doing odd jobs or toiling outside the realm of the Company eschewed the mechanisms that were supposed to regulate life on the isthmus. The measures contemplated or taken throughout the 1860s by Company management, foreign consulates, and the Egyptian government revealed their shared concerns about individuals out of work and workers out of place, whose existence raised red flags precisely because they eschewed the national, racial, and gendered hierarchies and expectations in place. Nothing much could be done about the former group, composed of the allegedly numerous “unemployed outcasts” hovering around the worksites and frequenting its entertainment venues. “No means but legal means” could be applied to them, which in substance meant they dodged Company surveillance. Instead, the Company could attempt to regulate the behavior of those on its payroll by imposing or threatening punitive measures. If workers fell sick due to venereal disease, intemperance, or voluntary brawls, they would receive no salary. If they left voluntarily, were frequently absent, performed poorly, or refused to work or to respect discipline, they would be dismissed without the fifteen days’ severance pay that would otherwise be granted upon dismissal. The same applied if it was discovered that the worker suffered from a chronic or contagious disease that had not been declared at the time of the engagement. Conversely, productivity was encouraged and prized under the often misplaced assumption that remuneration could act as a powerful stimulant to the fatigues of labor. Workers could obtain supplements in their salaries by working at night, laboring extra hours, or taking on exceptionally challenging or dangerous tasks. Some observers commented that the laziness of a few created confusion and caused delay to the works, but that most were diligently enforcing the rules and making sure their companions also contributed to the common tasks.

Company, consular, and government officials may not have cared about the stuff of workers’ everyday lives. In 1863, for example, a man called Geyler, a municipal superintendent and French consular agent in Ismailia, pronounced on the reimbursement of 18 francs that Grouaz, a trader in town, demanded from a laundrywoman, Madame Geroli, for a lost jacket. Geyler said that he and other Company officials had no time or willingness to deal with such “minimal issues.” Profoundly disagreeing with Geyler’s position, this chapter has lingered on issues that can be considered as minuscule as Grouaz’s lost clothing item and Geroli’s missed gain. Paying heed to mundane everyday life on the isthmus reveals that migrant workers could indeed be at once indolent and watchful, adopting actions that ranged from the trivial to the theatrical. Workers reacted to unpopular measures and circumvented often daunting realities in manifold ways and for disparate reasons. Men and women, single or married, abandoned the worksites, went on strike, fled the country, switched jobs, or had one drink or one bet too many. They changed occupations and residences frequently and resorted to mobility as an effective strategy whenever their circumstances changed for the worse. When opportunity arose, male and female workers conveniently utilized officials’ paternalistic notions to maximize benefits or to seek out new opportunities, even at the expense of their peers. 

 

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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.