Estella Carpi, The Politics of Crisis-Making. Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Estella Carpi, The Politics of Crisis-Making. Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Estella Carpi, The Politics of Crisis-Making. Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

By : Estella Carpi

Estella Carpi, The Politics of Crisis-Making. Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (Indiana University Press, 2023).

Front cover artwork by Syrian artist, visual storyteller, and clown Dima Nashawi.

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

Estella Carpi (EC): This book is not the planned output of a single project; this means I did not start this research with the a priori purpose of writing a book. This book is instead the result of my engagement with the practice and thought of humanitarianism and other forms of crisis management, as well as of my relationships with people in Beirut’s southern suburbs (called Dahiye Janubiyye in Arabic) and the northern governorate of Akkar. As such, the book is an attempt to weave together years of doctoral and postdoctoral research on the identity politics of humanitarian aid provision and the relational history between humanitarians, political actors, and ordinary residents of Dahiye and Akkar.

As an author, I believe, I have been quite demanding with my readers, as they will need to process a large number of accounts from different segments of Lebanon’s society, including refugees from Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Sudan, and Lebanese internally displaced people. In this sense, it is a polyphonic ethnography, where I really wanted to unearth the complexities that underlie everyday talk around the humanitarian experience in Lebanon. 

I also intended to interrogate the unquestionably positive aura with which humanitarianism vests itself: an unquestionability which makes any sort of critique a taboo, and some acts of assistance—especially those championed by the Western world—well-intended. In my critical analysis, humanitarianism emerges as a pillar of today’s neocolonial morality, centered on including and taking care of the war-affected Global South. Against this backdrop, this book conveys my endeavor to question the taboos of the humanitarian lifeworld where we always need to talk about “refugees” or “IDPs” and impersonal “crises” but not about the economic status of those who assist the crisis-affected, and not about the fictitious boundaries of such social memberships. The purpose was also de-exceptionalizing humanitarianism, that is not an aberration in the contemporary world, as we all ended up dealing with it.

How are the political underpinnings of humanitarianism continuously renegotiated across different social groups and polities, and how does it become a lifeworld?

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

EC: This book’s main rationale revolves around how it is not crisis per se that impacts people’s lives in positive or negative ways, but it is rather crisis management and the crisis discourse which can powerfully reshuffle social relations, polities, and class-based groups. Naming this reshuffling as “crisis-making,” it primarily speaks to three tropes of academic literature: the wrestling between politics, neutrality, and ethics; the ethnocracy of the assistance regime; and the moral economy of transnational humanitarianism in Lebanon. 

Much has been written on humanitarianism as a form of politics; I also corroborate this idea, but it should not be the end of the story. How are the political underpinnings of humanitarianism continuously renegotiated across different social groups and polities, and how does it become a lifeworld? These are the generative questions that the book grapple with. 

In this framework, a recurrent theme is the negative fetishization of local politics, while Western politics, extensively operated through humanitarianism in Lebanon, is always out of the question as a problematic source of partisanship, favoritism, and epistemic violence. With such a predominant politics of blaming the local and self-indulging, a common broken record from NGOs is that, “in a country like this,” they do what they can. By this token, anthropologists critical of humanitarianism are often accused of generating an echo chamber of armchair ranting; instead, I believe that shrugging off the politicization of aid only because—from Yugoslavia’s to Sri Lanka’s and Lebanon’s war-induced humanitarian economies—is not a new discussion, and is problematic, to say the least. It should still be discussed right because its workings—as much as the denial of the actors using aid as a political strategy—are deeply rooted and longstanding. 

Finally, war cannot be the mere ecology of humanitarianism in Lebanon, which experiences repeated urban destructions and a collapsed welfare system. By acknowledging such an intersection, the book also provides a brief review of the local history of assistance provision and the histories of urban and infrastructural reconstruction, such as the Elyssar and Solidere projects in the 1990s, the Waad project after the July 2006 war in Dahiye, and the reconstruction of the Beirut eastern suburbs in the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion. 

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

EC: This book embodies my first manuscript-length effort to weave a fil rouge across different research endeavors which happened over a decade-long span. As an output combining more than one research experience in Lebanon, it enabled me to use my previous expertise in a twofold way: first, as someone who had worked in the charity sector and, indeed, came up with the book’s research questions for a PhD project some years after. And second, I found my expertise in linguistic anthropology and my previous MPhil research on Lebanon’s everyday speech of great help. Indeed, conducting fieldwork in Levantine Arabic and knowing the theoretical areas where identity work and everyday speech intersects made me well-placed to question humanitarianism as an encompassing terminology (for example, when I discuss Lebanese Shiite NGOs) and as a politics of self-identification influenced by social atmospheres.

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

EC: I hope I will have academics as well as practitioners and policymakers among my readership. While the book largely speaks to long-standing academic debates such as political neutrality and social cohesion, it intends to inform practice and policy by offering historical evidence of how solidarity and empathy, the presumably underlying messages of humanitarianism, are getting lost in the contemporary bureaucratization of the humanitarian experience. I particularly hope this work impacts the way professional recruitment in the humanitarian sector is organized across unequal political geographies, and how crisis response, often being decontextualized, is (mis)understood in hegemonic policy and practice.

In terms of social impact, I can already affirm that the book is often being perceived as standing “against humanitarianism.” In a sense, it certainly is: who would not stand against it, if they care about a healthy functioning of politics and society? Humanitarianism, indeed, comes as a litmus paper of such a functioning. However, I am still strongly hopeful that the book succeeds in also unravelling the vastly nuanced ways of being a humanitarian

J: What other projects are you working on now?

EC: At the moment, I am pursuing two research ideas that are about different geographic contexts but, importantly, they relate to one another. First, I am presently exploring how group-oriented ideas and practices—such as access to and choice of healthcare—travel from one group to another. I am broadening my knowledge of crowd psychology and of the healthcare biographies of Syrian and Lebanese Turkmens in Akkar. For this purpose, I question identity politics and sectarianism as the exclusive start of any conversation in Lebanon. In line with the “ethnicization of needs and services,” a key concept I unpack in the book, my endeavor is to document the fluid character of social membership in Lebanon. 

Likewise, in Istanbul, a city historically affected by earthquakes, where I also lived, I am interested in understanding how to make state and grassroots-led disaster knowledge cognizant of migrants’ and refugees’ living conditions and access to safer housing. Both research ideas—apparently antithetical in that they question the social group as a well-bounded entity to then reinstate it—suggest how, on the one hand, there is no self-evidence in any group belonging but, on the other, the peculiarities of each group should not go unheeded as they reveal a lot about the outgroup’s gaze and the ingroup’s response to it.

J: What is the impact of the presence of such a huge number of organizations on the Lebanese workforce and the economy?

EC: I address this matter in chapter four, when I discuss the moral economy of aid work and its structural inequalities, and in chapter six, where I refer to some later research I carried out on refugee livelihoods in Akkar, which shows no lasting positive impact of the international humanitarian presence on the governorate’s economy. Overall, the so-called process of “NGOization” affects society at different scales. 

From an employment perspective, it tends to provide temporary jobs for Lebanese people, especially those in their twenties and thirties, holding university diplomas and owning a good command of English. In Akkar, at a time when the Syrian crisis was attracting more funding (2012 to 2016), several Western-funded NGOs used to recruit local professionals. However, in the years that followed, a gradual decline in job opportunities with international NGOs was as tangible as the decline in services for the refugees from Syria. The ephemeral foreign humanitarian presence—and its temporary resourcing of the local economy (for example, employment of local drivers, increased local food consumption, hiring of facilities and properties)—caused a further precarization of skilled work for a class of local practitioners who, due to less privileged mobility rights and a lower professional authority generally assigned to them, were unlikely to continue a transnational career in the humanitarian sector. 

Moreover, from a social perspective, the temporary employment of local people in Western-dominated humanitarian organizations did not even challenge this arbitrary hierarchy of internationals versus locals, including unjust inequality in pay-scales, expertise, and exposure to risk. 

 

Excerpt from book (from Chapter 4, pp. 130-132)

In parallel with the climax of compensatory humanitarianism and the formalization of the Syrian refugee crisis, the media portrayed Lebanon as a vexed host state, triggering microsocial responses to the crisis in Akkar’s society. On the one hand, from the orthodox perspective of long-term displacement, refugeehood historically evokes the global need to label receiving societies as hosts who receive public acknowledgment for their protracted hospitality. On the other hand, the Halba experience shows that the formal humanitarian response to the crisis encouraged Lebanese residents to reconfigure previous Syrian migrants as refugees in a bid to reclaim their homes. While some Syrian migrant workers ran shops in Akkar before 2011, in the wake of the official response to the crisis—institutionally enacted only with the first LCRP in late 2014 and becoming visible with the emplacement of an unprecedented number of INGOs—they became homogenously portrayed as refugee guests whose presence had to be temporary. This was especially relevant for Lebanese residents returning from abroad, having worked for different periods in places such as South America or other Arab countries. Owning and managing shops and discouraging Syrians from accessing public spaces were collective practices of homemaking that allowed the Akkari hosts to reinvent their relationship with the Syrians.

Halba’s residents opened shops selling a combination of hardware, tires, carpentry, and garden tools. The shops containing hardware and tools (locally known as mahallet khardawet w adawet zira‘iyye) were seen as a guarantee of local ownership: “There’s no Syrian refugee or migrant that ever opened such shops in the area. They normally work in this sector as occasional assistants. In the beginning, during the war, there were only two or three shops like this,” affirmed Hadi, a Lebanese resident. “It eventually became the largest business in Halba.” Many shops were owned by Lebanese who had lived in Tripoli and decided to go back to Akkar during the Lebanese Civil War as there was “less political trouble” in the villages if they wanted to open a shop. Many shop owners had personal stories of past mobility and economic migration, especially during the 1980s, when, as some locals recall, Syrian nationals worked in hardware shops in greater numbers. Waleed migrated to Baghdad to work as a waiter for one year before he decided to return to Lebanon and inherit his father’s shop, which is still located close to Halba’s roundabout. Likewise, Hadi migrated to Venezuela, where he ran a clothing shop for eleven years. In 1986, he decided to come back to Lebanon to give his children access to the same education he had received, and he opened a hardware and agricultural tool shop.

A temporal dimension now divides Syrian nationals, who previously managed these hardware shops, and Akkari returnees. From a local perspective, Syrians have always been entitled to provide temporary labor in Akkar as they used to do in the capacity of migrant workers before the Syrian conflict. Throughout the twentieth century, indeed, Syrians mostly provided seasonal work with neither the intention nor the social comfort to create a proper Syrian community in Lebanon by bringing their families with them. The concept of circular mobility describes such migration and inhabitation patterns. Aubin-Boltanski and Vignal found a continuum between preconflict mobility patterns and the current situation of refuge. The return of Lebanese migrants and their exclusive entitlement to own hardware shops contrast with Syrian nationals’ inability to cultivate a sense of personal stability in Lebanon, leading refugees to experience a sense of “permanent temporariness”. Local refusal to have Syrian nationals in the same jobs as Lebanese not only highlights the typical rejection of sharing life and welfare with the refugees, which happens everywhere, but also points to a struggle over the Other’s temporal horizons.

This tension between refugees and locals, along with the increasingly long-term perspective of the humanitarian system (traditionally thought of as providing temporary and short-term action), gives rise to a double clash of temporalities in which permanent Syrian nationals in Akkar are considered threats. While refugees seek to expand their temporal perspectives (lacking other options), residents struggle over their exclusive right to return to, live, and proliferate in Halba with no temporal restrictions. Among the so-called host communities, the role of returnees in this practice of homemaking has gone unheeded.

The expectation for Lebanese returnees to work in Halba’s hardware shops is locally experienced as a collective act aimed at morally and economically monopolizing a commercial activity. It also illustrates the interface between human experiences of migration—in this specific case, between Lebanon, Venezuela, and Iraq—and historical trajectories of socioeconomic practices. Hardware shops in Halba mark an assertive, collective form of home-making to which refugees are not entitled. In other words, owning and managing a hardware shop becomes the local signifier of national legitimacy to “home” and implement comfortable patterns of social order. Such practices of homemaking and order-making are the local response to the officialization of crisis. The resulting existential divide between Lebanese residents and Syrian refugees in respective ability and inability to develop long-term perspectives in Halba—echoing the lack of temporal perspectives for Iraqis and Sudanese in Dahiye—plays a role in negotiating territorial permanence. As Brun incisively writes, “this emptying of the future [of refugees]—or the rendering of an abstract future—shows that the emergency imagery decontextualizes and ‘de-situates’ the lives of people experiencing a crisis.” In this way, the historical sociology of the Syrian presence in North Lebanon was swept away by the institutionalization of the so-called Syrian refugee crisis, shifting the global focus from political terror to individual trauma and giving rise to the denormalization and pathologization of the Syrian presence in Akkar.

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.