Laila Shereen Sakr, Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (New Texts Out Now)

Laila Shereen Sakr, Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (New Texts Out Now)

Laila Shereen Sakr, Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (New Texts Out Now)

By : Laila Shereen Sakr / VJ Um Amel

Laila Shereen Sakr, Arabic Glitch: Technoculture, Data Bodies, and Archives (Stanford University Press, 2023).

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

Laila Shereen Sakr (LSS): I have always been motivated to communicate across differences. This book emerged from a pressing need to bring different groups of people into conversation about the entanglement of digital media, technology, politics, art, and culture in our contemporary lives. I have spent years exploring the logic of technologies through developing software that produces data analytics—this occurred in dialogue with one group of geeks who were interested in talking about technology. These were not necessarily the same group of activists concerned with human rights, personal sovereignty, and liberation. There was overlap, of course. But only a subset understood the shifting dynamics within the Middle Eastern context. Often, none of these interlocutors engage with my creative scholarship which falls within studies of the arts, performance, and visual culture. The point is that creative scholarship is the main method I use to reach across the palimpsest of audiences, mediums, and cultures. While I have been thinking through and researching the ideas in the book through articles for specific audiences, software applications, and art practice and production, I arrived at a point where I needed to explain my thoughts through narrative, and that is what I tried to do with Arabic Glitch.

... theory hits the ground in such a way that it firmly applies the techno-feminist slippery activation of the glitch to frame data and reconstitute their transmission flows.

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

LSS: The book explores the concept of the glitch within the context of posthuman techno-feminist theory and practice and the implications of the interplay between technology and society. Glitches in the system, like server breakdowns and sentiment analysis failures, expose the underlying infrastructure and limitations of digital tools. I characterize the glitch as a slipping, a loss of control that interrupts the system and reveals the inner workings of technology. Arabic Glitch describes an alternative origin story of twenty-first-century technological innovation and politics—one centered on the Middle East and the 2011 Arab uprisings. I conceive of data bodies as the records institutions keep on individuals—such as FICO scores, GPAs, driving records, citizenship—that have more impact on our lives than our real bodies. I use these as a way to explain the book’s three demands on our contemporary lived realities: that there be “no divide between the virtual and real”; that “one must have procedural literacy to identify and understand our own data bodies, how media systems work, and how glitches intervene”; and finally, that with that insight and literacy, we have the tools to reimagine and reconfigure systems of power.

Arabic Glitch emphasizes the stories of Arab techies, coders, and organizers who navigate the glitch's dialectic and shape new forms of cultural resistance, rebellion, and revolt. In the book, I also explore different writing techniques, including using both a first-person narrative voice and that of my data body and posthuman techno-feminist avatar, VJ Um Amel. The cyborg builds a massive digital archive and participates in the unfolding digital/RL events of 2011 in the Middle East and its various diasporas, as well as at Occupy Wall Street and Jan 6th, prognostically indicating how digital tools may be used towards democratic, if tactically agonistic and disruptive, ends. 

In the book, theory hits the ground in such a way that it firmly applies the techno-feminist slippery activation of the glitch to frame data and reconstitute their transmission flows. The manuscript is a deep dive into questioning the currencies of the procedural method, affect, embodiment, and data streams and also offers the critical potential for new protocols, networks, and coding that rethink boundaries and hierarchies. It sings and embraces pluraversalities that consider the local manifestations of hidden labor by mothers and cyborgs and powers of global glitches that disturb each of the above enclosures and lines of flight. Through Arabic Glitch, I develop an intensity of research and practice that reflect a continuing feminist and cyberfeminist attunement and expression of art as social practice and code.

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

LSS: Last year, I taught a class on Algorithms and Culture and a Feminist-Technology seminar. Both classes kept leading to discussions on the moral panic about ChatGPT, and AI more broadly, even though social media is our first contact moment with AI. When you open Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and scroll with your finger, you activate the supercomputer AI pointed at your brain to calculate and predict with increasing accuracy the perfect thing to keep your attention and keep you scrolling. The urgency is that we are already in a reckless race to deploy second-generation AI like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and so on, and we have yet to comprehend, let alone regulate, how social media has entangled with our lives globally and within the many discreet languages and cultures around the world. 

This has been my area of research for over fifteen years. In 2008, I created the digital archive, R-Shief, to collect, analyze, and visualize social media content. With R-Shief and under the moniker VJ Um Amel, I have shaped my previous work into various forms of media. Using digital media, like clay for a sculpture, I have produced a body of creative scholarship that spans programming and system design, cultural analytics, data visualization, computational art, video art, and live and immersive cinema. I have also published several articles and book chapters on the same transdisciplinary questions and concepts. However, Arabic Glitch is my first book manuscript where I can bring together the various threads of this transdisciplinary project into one narrative. 

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

LSS: I hope the book reaches a wide and diverse audience from the sciences, humanities, the arts, technology, and civil society. I also hope it is not too specialized for general audiences, although I found it challenging to write for both a general audience and these specialized, though diverse, communities. 

Two outcomes would be a real gift to me. The first is that the book inspires others in their fields of research and creative inquiry—whether that be the way in which new creative ideas are achieved through transdisciplinary approaches of theory and practice, or through extending the concept of glitch as liberatory resistance and a tool for unveiling in other areas of research. It is always a gift for me when others engage in conversation or are in play with me and the ideas we exchange and co-create. The second hope I have for the book is that it inspires, even in the smallest of ways, more education in procedural literacy to be made available to everyone in K-12 schools, higher education, and all sectors.

In this first contact with AI, with social media, humanity has lost. We created a model of social media that has rewritten itself into every aspect of our society—reaching customers, politics, media and journalism, elections, values, GDP. What happens in the second contact with AI? If we want to understand what ChatGPT and its kin will bring, we must first understand the basic logics of AI technology, the mechanics of digital politics, and the potential of the glitch. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

LSS: I am working on a couple projects that involve grassroots organizing with other feminist Arab digital rights activists and programmers around questions regarding the languages and gendered cultural objects that shape the training of AI machine learning systems, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. Which languages and cultures are included or excluded? To what extent? In which fields? And how do power imbalances and injustices replicate and expand through these systems? 

Meanwhile, I am developing the next generation of R-Shief X into a platform where users can choose which social media to analyze and have the visualization tools to do so. R-Shief’s website is currently under construction—bits and pieces will become live over the next months. Using R-Shief’s historical archive of tweets from 2011, I am also currently working with my co-director and a team of creative minds to build a futuristic game called Data Bodies. It is an episodic third-person Arab-futuristic exploration game, set in the twenty-third century. We hope to release the first episode in 2024. 

I am also working on some creative projects, including an AI-driven holographic network visualization for a group exhibition and a soundscape of data centers fused with Nigerian beats for an installation in the Data Centered Collective at the Lagos Biennial. At this exact moment, though, I am finishing a music video for an upcoming LP by Checkpoint 303 in memory of the famous Palestinian cartoonist Naji el-Ali. Checkpoint 303 is an activist electronic sound art collective that produces fusion electronic music from field recordings, historical archives, electronic beats, and the oud. I am enjoying the process.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1) 

Naming the phenomena that took place across the region as the “Arab Spring” is more indicative of the perspective of the writer than is necessarily the full picture. It indicates that the speaker or writer is approaching the subject from the historical lens of Western democracy and economic liberalization. Otherwise naming these events the “Facebook” or “Twitter Revolution” overstates the technocultural moment and, again, is only part of the story. At the root of these uprisings, locally within each context, is a human struggle for dignity. A street vendor who suffered humiliation and neglect from local authorities, Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, in front of the municipality building in Ben Arous, Tunisia. Bouazizi’s suicide in 2011 was the catalyst for the Arab revolutions, as Bouazizi’s death only expanded the protests to encompass not only economic reform but also injustice by the government as a whole. Bouazizi’s act was a cry for basic human dignity. 

A year after the uprisings, in conversation with my friend and colleague Maytha Alhassen, she had asked me what topics were emerging from R-Shief ’s social media data analytics. The results I shared with her at the time were that the three most popular words used to describe the uprisings were karama, thawra, and haqooq (dignity, revolution, and rights). Alhassen published these results in an article crediting VJ Um Amel.

This aesthetic research agenda, performing as VJ Um Amel, is my answer that the ambiguity of that process is a practice of embodied locality. As such, the book is informed by a scholarly practice of research, a practice of theorizing, an art practice. Arabic Glitch is inextricably tied to a specific set of digital archives originating from an Arabic-speaking community. Part of this intellectual project is to decenter the United States and the West as the source of digital knowledge production or necessarily the heart of literary canons. It is not the center. It does not always have to be the center. In the case of Arabic Glitch, the Arab world is its intellectual fulcrum.

The first time writers, scholars, and pundits used “Arab Spring” to reference a progressive political uprising in the Arab world was not in 2011. It was just a couple of years after the U.S.-led war on Iraq, when events such as the elections in Palestine and Iraq, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and the Kefaya (“enough”) demonstrations in Egypt hallmarked the emergence of relative political liberalization in the region. In 2005, “The Arab Spring” was used to refer to the desired outcome of U.S. President George W. Bush’s foreign policy of democracy promotion and state-building efforts in his Global War on Terror. In a report on a news conference by President Bush in March 2005 titled “The Arab Spring of 2005,” a pundit explicitly referenced the revolutions of 1848 in Europe—Völkerfrühling in German, “springtime of the peoples,” and printemps des peuples in French, “spring of nations”—when popular uprisings against monarchies cascaded across France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Denmark, and the Austrian Empire. In 1956, the “Polish Spring of October” referred to the period of liberalization and attempted reform; in 1968, the “Prague Spring” referenced a period of attempted liberalization through partial decentralization of the largely state-controlled economy of Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Union. He wrote, “1848 did presage the coming of the liberal idea throughout Europe. (By 1871, it had been restored to France, for example.) It marked a turning point from which there was no going back.” The article went on to say, “The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a similar turning point for the Arab world.” The correlation these journalists drew from the political phenomena occurring from 1848 to 2011 was based on two premises: (1) each revolution was marked by the popular protest against socioeconomic conditions and government corruption; and (2) the domino effect of uprisings transnationally revealed shadows of macroeconomic and geopolitical networks of power, capital, and media at play.

The idea of a trans-local sensibility allows us to expand what we are thinking into a network. Networks often go beyond the boundaries of the nation-state and other technocultural configurations. Taking inspiration from Donna Haraway’s “new citizen” of technoculture, the cyborg embodies that trans-local sensibility through negotiation with its environment and assembling parts and pieces.5 In the introduction to their edited volume, Technoculture, Constance Penley and Andrew Ross depict a coming of age in the 1990s on the tail of the student uprising against the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square, anti-apartheid activism in South Africa, and the first Palestinian uprising (intifada), who instrumentally used fax machines, radio, and CNN broadcast in developing networks across regions and locally from within.6 Arabic Glitch takes place within the edges of that historical path. Another U.S. journalist, Scott Anderson, traced the 2011 revolutions through five historical junctures: Part 1 (1972–2003), “Origins”; Part 2 (2003–11), “The Iraq War”; Part 3 (2011–13), “Arab Spring”; Part 4, “ISIS Rising”; and Part 5, “Exodus,” in his New York Times Magazine article, “Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart.”7 By January 2011, several seemingly unrelated protests in Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, and Algeria prompted political scientist Marc Lynch to write, “Are we seeing the beginnings of the Obama administration equivalent of the 2005 ‘Arab Spring,’ when the protests in Beirut captured popular attention and driven in part by newly powerful satellite television images inspired popular mobilization across the region that some hoped might finally break through the stagnation of Arab autocracy? Will social media play the role of al-Jazeera this time? Will the outcome be any different?”

Competing and overlapping global and local powers together present a more complete and lucid picture. This chapter uncovers a glitch dialectic in its relationship to digital politics and culture where institutions of power try to keep up with the technological adeptness of countercultures, but cannot capture all these possibilities technoculture affords.

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.