Nazan Üstündağ, The Mother, The Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement (New Texts Out Now)

Nazan Üstündağ, The Mother, The Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement (New Texts Out Now)

Nazan Üstündağ, The Mother, The Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement (New Texts Out Now)

By : Nazan Üstündağ

Nazan Üstündağ, The Mother, The Politician, and the Guerrilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement (Fordham University Press, 2023).

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

Nazan Üstündağ (NÜ): I met the Kurdish movement in 2000. Since then, I have been involved with it both politically and academically. The people in the movement related to me always with great care. They were protective of me as much as they were persistent in their demands for solidarity. They were always open and shared their vulnerabilities without reservations. I have learned profoundly from them about friendship, ethics, politics, attachments, knowledge, willpower, leadership, responsibilities, and commitments. Every single person I met in the movement left a print on me and gifted me generously with intimate stories. The movement has transformed me, changed the world I was living in, helped me to know myself better in terms of the criteria according to which I want to live and the genuine needs I have in life (like the needs for enchantment and entanglement). This book is first and foremost a “thank you” to the Kurdish movement and specifically the Kurdish women’s freedom movement for having brought me to the place where I am today.

I would like to think that I thank them by turning my book into another tool by which the movement is linked to other worlds and hence becomes universalized (if we follow Da Silva and her definition of the universal as difference without separability). I say “another,” because the movement practices many universalities through generating differentiation at the same time as it forms links to many other movements, struggles, and ideas, using multiple tools. The methodology and theoretical framework I use in the book aim at communicating my urge and enthusiasm to share the joy the movement gives me—despite all the suffering its members survive—and my appreciation of this joy. The theoretical vocabulary I use is the means by which I translate, recreate, and rework what this movement has carved on the flesh of my world. 

Also, I guess, writing Mother, Politician, Guerilla was a matter of honor for me. I had to leave Turkey because of the investigations opened against me regarding my writings and speeches on the Kurdish movement. In order to avoid prosecution, I left everything behind, including my university position, and moved into exile. It is difficult to be hated by your own people, as was the case with me. Despite my mixed heritage, I consider myself to be Turkish; while I was growing up, I did not experience the same violent gap that Kurds have been experiencing between themselves and the signifiers of the Turkish culture and politics. In regard to the Turkish state, the book is a statement: I continue my struggle and I am firm in my belief and action. I refuse the charges that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) is a terrorist organization. I refuse the entire discourse on terrorism that prevents us from pursuing our dreams of becoming free, becoming “women to come,” and enacting a “perhaps” in the world. My writing and speeches will always be political practices that might be regarded as terrorist propaganda. I am okay with it as long as terrorism entails the blocking of the reproduction of our current colonial, capitalist, patriarchal present as future. 

My book is a desire manifested in writing, an invitation to understand what makes the Kurdish movement in particular and armed resistance movements in general move people and become leaders that incite. I want to underline the potentialities of the Kurdish movement and not be stuck in a place where satisfaction is achieved by obvious, boring, and unproductive critiques that are disguised under the comfortable garments of western humanism, pacifist feminism, sexualist freedomism, and moralist leftism. 

Finally, I have a problem with the Kurdish people being identified only with the struggle in Rojava (northern Syria) and the Kurdish movement being whitewashed due to its resistance against the Islamic State. The book focuses on the Kurdish freedom movement as it unfolded against the Turkish state—a NATO member—within an armed anti-colonial movement under the leadership of a man who has been isolated since 1999 in a Turkish island prison. It is a messy movement that has experimented with many rights and wrongs under very harsh conditions. Western and Middle Eastern countries have been complicit in the victimization of Kurds through multiple counter-terrorism tactics, as in Palestine or Baluchistan. In my book I talk about the marvelous ideas and practices Kurdish women have developed in relation to motherhood and its laws, friendship as a genre of humanity, and politics as that which unfolds at the limits and thresholds of flesh and body, voice and language, the legal and the illegal. These ideas and practices have been generated through a dialectic grounded in Kurds’ struggle to make their lives worth living for themselves, as well as to make their lives matter for the whole world.

I call this the “human as friend” genre and argue that, in the Kurdish movement, life is always offered and played out rather than owned.

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

The book enters a dialogue with Black feminism, feminist psychoanalysis, feminist political theory, and queer studies in order to shed light on the political imagination of the Kurdish women’s freedom movement. 

It is divided into three parts—the mother, the politician, and the guerilla—as it is through these figures that I trace the various lineages and linkages of the Kurdish political tradition that give rise to temporalities, spatialities, and matter-ings (i.e. both what matters in politics and what is the matter with politics) other than those constituted by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. In the first part of the book, I engage the question of what laws of the state are injured when mothers become public and what other laws/loves are conjured up through Kurdish mothers’ acts that are situated between voice and language, myth and sociology. The second part focuses on the figure of the politician and how that figure uses the parliamentary floor and the body granted to it as the holder of a governmental post as limits. It is by occupying these limits that women politicians perform what cannot be articulated by discourse, which is the “Ate” of the Kurdish community, the curse and gift of being Kurdish, which always already equals to violent exclusion from legality and therefore humanity. The third part addresses the figure of the guerilla and how she becomes the “Real” of the Kurdish people by going to the mountains. She leaves one zone of non-being, the space of the family where she is made fungible by patriarchy—to migrate to another, where to mourn her death is forbidden. Here she lays a claim on humanness by enacting radical friendship, which involves the resignification and decolonization of truth, freedom, and being within multiple entanglements with nature, people, and community. Following Sylvia Wynter, I call this the “human as friend” genre and argue that, in the Kurdish movement, life is always offered and played out rather than owned. 

One thing I did not want to do in my book was to present my arguments as somehow filling a gap in literature or being superior to what has already been said. Rather, I would like to think about the people I give reference to as fellow travellers. I parted ways with them and travelled different journeys at times because the home we wanted to go back to or we remembered was different. As such, I make reference to people and theories that others might regard strange bedfellows, without really letting myself be overwhelmed by the deep chasms others have attributed to them.

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

I have always been interested in experimenting with different genres—academic, literary, journalistic—to express the joy and the suffering experienced in impossible lives carved out at the intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and the nation state. This time, however, I am writing about women who are also consciously trying to give birth to a new way of being and becoming to overcome the conditions of their existence. They have an enormous vocabulary to name their own experience and to communicate it to the world. As I said above, I wanted to contribute to this effort by bringing that vocabulary in dialogue with theories of feminist psychoanalysis, Black feminism, and queer theory. I think this dialogue proved itself to be very productive in terms of underlining how the figure of the mother, the orator (the politician), and the fighter (the guerilla) are common themes in different world-making practices and how such a dialogue on the margins points to universalities alternative to those promoted by colonialism and patriarchy. I have a problem with suffering being the only common trope through which we communicate with each other as women. Neither should we communicate through white feminism. Dialogue between those at the margins to mainstream feminisms is vital in building a new internationalism that speaks the language of desire, joy, and invention.

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

I hope that those interested in the question of anti-colonial inventions and post-patriarchal futures will read the book. I also would like scholars of Black feminism to read it to see how their thoughts and those of Kurdish women intersect. I would like scholars to read it who are methodologically interested in links and lineages that are untellable in conventional historical narratives. I would also like those who are interested in the intersection between politics and psyche to read it. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

I am writing a poetry book based on women’s narratives that I collected in my research. I am also working on a book of essays on several concepts that I believe have been marginal to critical theory but are actually vital in imagining and inventing new worlds. The theoretical language of academia has always excited me and given me joy. Now, I want to find ways to abandon its ornaments—especially, in the face of the sheer reality of genocide in Palestine, in Kurdistan, in Sudan, in Congo, in Tigray. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from Introduction, pp. 2-5)

“By resisting here we are opening a space for politics,” a woman guerrilla I met in Cizre told me. She was in her early twenties and had come to Cizre from the mountains surrounding the city with three of her friends. When the first publicly announced peace talks between the Turkish state and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) ended in 2015, Kurdistan youth opened up trenches in their neighborhoods to protect themselves from the raids by the Turkish police forces. With the assistance of guerrilla teams located near city centers, they also mined these trenches and equipped themselves with arms. Meanwhile, in several Kurdish cities, local assemblies that were created during the peace talks as (extralegal) bodies of governance parallel to state bureaucracy had declared regional autonomy. 

Cizre was one of the most organized among the “trenched” cities. I was in Cizre with the Women for Peace Initiative—an initiative we had founded in 2009 to struggle for peace in Turkey between the state and Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). Our visit aimed at showing our support for the people in the town, especially the women, who had experienced an eight days’ long around-the-clock curfew imposed by the state in order for the security forces to raid the neighborhoods where the trenches were dug. Twenty-two people had died during the raids. Despite the losses, the mood in Cizre was high; security forces aided by special counterinsurgency squads brought from the capital, Ankara, and equipped with tanks and drones had failed to enter the neighborhoods because of the resistance shown by the people and the armed youth. The woman guerrilla continued: “They want to annihilate us. We can only push for politics and peace by showing that we will not be annihilated.” 

Once we left her quarters, I contemplated with a friend, who lived in Cizre, why we were so moved by her and her friends. He said, “Because they are like stray puppies, and so loving towards each other.” While there was some truth to that, this did not explain why everyone else also felt so much love for them, following their orders even though they were so young. I thought to myself that the people regarded them also as warriors and prophets, leading the way to a much-anticipated free future with their very flesh. After a moment of silence, my friend added, “They inspire people to be their best.” 

Soon the trenches and the declarations, both acts of sovereignty on the part of the Kurdish opposition, unleashed an even greater violence from the Turkish state surpassing that of the 1990s, when various counterinsurgency tactics had traumatized the whole region. Overall, around-the-clock curfews in “trenched” neighborhoods lasted for more than six months, and Turkish counterinsurgency squads killed hundreds of civilians, youth activists, and fighters, demolishing buildings and infrastructures, which reduced the insurgent cities to rubble. After a second curfew in which state forces destroyed entire neighborhoods in Cizre, displaced thousands of people, and burned alive more than one hundred people (including the resisting youth, politicians, nurses, and other supporters who were waiting for a cease fire and ambulances in three basements), I frantically searched through the pictures of dead bodies on the Internet that counterinsurgency accounts posted to find out whether the woman guerrilla we met was among them. She was. Face down, lying on the ground, her flesh exposed. 

The Kurdish people witnessed numerous atrocities at the hands of the Turkish state. What differentiated this last wave of violence and increased its terror was that—in addition to its intensity and scale—whereas before, the state tried to hide its destruction from sight and hence forced it upon Kurds to prove the occurrence of forced disappearances, displacements, and executions, now the destruction was being done in open sight as proof of the Turkish state’s power.During the curfews security forces regularly produced corpses for public viewing, both as they were attacking the trenched cities from afar and later as they slowly drilled their way into the resisting neighborhoods. Videos and photographs of rotten, crushed, naked, and pulled-apart Kurdish flesh were leaked to the Internet, supplemented by images of captured bodies dragged from place to place. Acoustically, the noise of tanks, drones, and bombs displaying the superiority of the technologically advanced Turkish “Special Forces” accompanied the voices of insurgents who anticipated their own “corpsing” as they talked to Kurdish Television stations on their cell phones In the 1990s, seeing and hearing were unevenly distributed in Turkey, keeping the hope alive that if everybody would know what was really happening they would understand the truth of Kurdish oppression. Now, people saw the same pictures but were affected differently: Turks felt victorious and Kurds were horrified, making it almost impossible to dream a potentially just future of coexistence. 

The spectacle of suffering and destruction was as much about confirming the proper role of Kurdishness in the order of things as it was about performing Turkish sovereignty. As I have written elsewhere, Kurdish bodies that do not perform their own symbolic death by an absolute obedience to state law are made to pose face down on the pavement, testifying to the impossibility of surviving a free life in Turkey. For the purposes of this book I want to remind us of three images of such “forced poses” that constituted a devouring “trauma of representation” for Kurds during the curfew and raids. By the concept of “trauma of representation,” I wish to evoke the difficulty and the obligation one feels to look at the reality of dead flesh and how this disrupts the fantasies invested in the human rights discourses and the ways in which resistance, power, and reconciliation are conventionally understood. If imagination always involves “the image,” “trauma of representation” causes imagination to be poisoned and imagined futures to be ruined. The following images played crucial roles in making it clear to Kurds in general and Kurdish women in particular that all of them had the potential to die like those in the images; their bodies were always open to the gratuitous violence of the state. The same photos rehabilitated Turks by restoring their narcissistic image without troubling them with feelings of guilt because no perpetrator was explicitly shown in them. 

The first image belonged to Kevser Eltürk, a woman guerrilla known with the code name “Ekin Wan” who, after being killed by the security forces in August 2015, was dragged and left on a sidewalk for everyone to see. In a photo the security forces leaked to Twitter, civilian and uniformed men, whose presence and pose could be recognized by their legs captured in the shot, surrounded her body stripped of clothes. Writing about photographs on lynching, David Marriott states, “The camera lens is a means to fashion the self through the image of a dead black man.” In Eltürk’s case, too, those who photographed her fashioned themselves as sovereign Turks through the image of her dead and stripped body. This image also universalized the violence, sexism, and racism across the Turkish community and displayed the fact that law will always remain Turkish and patriarchal in Kurdish lands.

The second image was a photograph of Taybet Inan lying face down on the street. A mother of eleven shot by Turkish snipers, she remained on the street for seven days while the crossfire between the Turkish armed forces and the armed Kurdish youth continued. Despite persistent demands by her family to stop the fire for a few hours so that her dead body could be taken off the street, central and local state authorities denied the ceasefire and her right to burial. Unlike Ekin Wan, Taybet I nan had not fought the Turkish state. Her crime, however, was as severe, because she claimed life in a zone where Kurds were condemned to death. Moreover, her failure to play her part in the racial genocidal order of the Turkish state by not leaving her home so that the state could kill the insurgents in more effective and less costly ways led to her inevitable corpsing.

The last case concerns not an image but a text message and an emptiness to be filled by one’s imagination informed by the horrors already witnessed. The public received news of the injury of three female politicians, Seve Demir, a member of the Party Assembly of the Democratic Regions Party, Pakize Nayır, a member of the Free Women Congress, and Fatma Uyar, the co-president of Silopi People’s Assembly, from the telephone call they made to a Kurdish MP asking for an ambulance. Fire from an armored vehicle shot by the Special Forces had hit them while they were trying to bring to safety the residents of a neighborhood the youth had left. Hours after this call, an ambulance was dispatched to pick them up, but it was their dead bodies that arrived at the hospital. While how they actually died after being able to phone was never clarified, rumors that Seve Demir was decapitated spread, linking the destruction and violence of the Turkish army to that of ISIS, against whom Kurds were fighting in northern Syria. 

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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.