Aslı Zengin, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (New Texts Out Now)

Aslı Zengin, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (New Texts Out Now)

Aslı Zengin, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (New Texts Out Now)

By : Aslı Zengin

Aslı Zengin, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke University Press, 2024).

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

Aslı Zengin (AZ): My motivation to write this book was both intellectual and political. The book is a trans-feminist research piece. That is, feminist research informed by trans politics and centering on trans perspectives, experiences, and stories. It is a product of my decades-long involvement in feminist and queer movements, as well as my encounters with their limitations when it comes to trans issues. One of the key reasons I wanted to write this book was an attempt to contribute to building more bridges and forming coalitions across queer, trans, and feminist theories and struggles. I also wanted to leave an analytical record or archive of our work together in a variety of political sites in the urban queer, trans, and feminist world of Istanbul, ranging from conferences to meetings and from demonstrations against femicides, urban transformation, and police violence to campaigns for sexual and gender rights.

I wanted to write a book that tells a story of transness as also a site of world-making in the thresholds of dominant socio-cultural life. I wanted to develop a critique of the concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality as the only vectors to understand trans lives, and instead shed light on a wider scope of analysis about hierarchies of life, existence, social organization, and ways of knowing. This location of the “trans everyday” is a transnational site of theory that aims to transgress the ongoing hegemony of North American and Eurocentric accounts in trans studies. Contrary to implicit or explicit scholarly assumptions, locations outside the Euro-North American contexts are not merely the places where theories are tested for their applicability or failure. These are geographies of theoretical production to understand the world beyond local, national, and regional boundaries. Moreover, I wanted to center on trans lives within Middle East studies. Despite the substantial research on gender in the Middle East, a vast majority of this acclaimed work revolves around cis women and the themes of women’s agency, secularism, Islam, the veil, and/or the relationship between state institutions and women. This book places transness at the center of analysis, showing how institutional and social troubles with sex/gender transgression shape state formation; the familial, religious, and national order; and the urban geography in Turkey. I wanted to show how trans people in Turkey theorize their everyday lives with all these social and institutional actors.

I offer a novel concept, violent intimacies, to understand the concurrent work of violence and intimacy in the organization of social and institutional life through the lenses of sex/gender transgression.

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

AZ: Violent Intimacies examines how everyday troubles with sex/gender nonconformity in social and institutional life shape the organization of state power, the social production of family and kinship, regimes of sexuality and gender, as well as feminist and LGBTQI activism in Turkey. I foreground in my analysis how trans people respond to this process in their everyday negotiations with state legal and medical authorities, police officers, family members, religious actors, and members of feminist and LGBTQI organizations. Rather than taking sex and sexual difference as given categories, the book addresses them as a social field of constant and emergent contestation.

Urban displacement, social discrimination and exclusion, sexual and gender regimes, blood family and kinship, medico-legal regulation, police surveillance, and religious interpretations constantly produce differential values over life and death for different social groups, intimately shaping the everyday experience of being a trans person. This book is a probe into this complex picture to which I gained access during my ethnographic research with trans people across several sites in Istanbul, ranging from trans people's homes and neighborhoods to the cafes, bars, and streets they frequented, from events such as parties, funerals, conferences, and meetings to political campaigns for sexual and gender rights and against hate crimes. This provided a more comprehensive portrayal of both world-shattering and world-making conditions of the ordinary in trans lives.

One of the main discussions of the book is the everyday creative and constructive tension between violent efforts to constantly define and disambiguate sex/gender transgression, on the one hand, and trans people’s incessant negotiations with these efforts, on the other. As much as trans people are shaped by the cis-heteronormative forces of the state, family, and religion, they also push these actors and act on these frameworks to transform them. To examine this entangled world, I offer a novel concept, violent intimacies, to understand the concurrent work of violence and intimacy in the organization of social and institutional life through the lenses of sex/gender transgression. I argue that violent intimacies as a theoretical concept exposes the connecting tissue or the artery of a cis-heteronormative social order in its intertwinement with neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical order, and authoritarian management of social difference that not only corresponds to sex and gender, but also ethnicity, race, and class.

Another important contribution of the book is around the world-making capacity and practices of trans people. They creatively reform and remake the violent conditions of their living to inhabit the world. For example, they adopt and care for their friends and reclaim their friends’ funerals and monetary needs in the face of familial abandonment and disowning; they invent tactics to cope with state violence which in turn pressure the police to formulate new violent tactics of discrimination and exclusion; and they create themselves as political subjects in organizing and mobilizing around hate crimes, police violence, and state control over gender affirmation processes. I also look at how their local politics is shaped in a transnational context, in interaction with medical discourses of transsexuality, Western LGBTQ terminology, and political and legal discourses of hate crimes and human rights.

While crafting this book, I tried to bring together sets of literature that are not usually in conversation with each other: trans, queer, and feminist studies; transnational studies of sexuality; social theory; political anthropology of state and violence; medical anthropology; interdisciplinary work on intimacy; urban geographical work on sexuality and race; and critical studies of race, racialization, security, and law. 

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

AZ: I have been working on sexual and transgression and its governance for almost two decades now. My previous work examined the everyday experiences of licensed and unlicensed cis-women sex workers with a range of state actors (including police officers, medical personnel, and legal actors). I argued that the Turkish state, through its use of law and violence, constructs “prostitution” as integral to its ruling practices. These forms and technologies of rule establish the state as an intimate heterosexual masculine body. This research was based on my master’s research back in the Sociology Department at Bogazici University and it was published in Turkish as a book, Iktidarın Mahremiyeti: İstanbul’da Hayat Kadınları, Seks İşçiliği ve Şiddet (Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in Istanbul), in 2011Both in my previous and current work, I theorize intimate state formation and organization through its governance of violence regarding sexual transgression and sexual/gender difference. My current work builds on and expands this framework of violence by also showing how violence is a generative social currency not only for state formation but also for the cisheteronormative family, sexual/gendered urban geography, and trans world-making. 

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

AZ: Undergraduate and graduate students; trans, queer, and feminist activists; and scholars of queer and trans studies, anthropology, sociology, social geography, critical law studies, and Middle East studies. I hope readers find the book inspiring in its critiques of normative assumptions about sex, sexuality, and gender, its problematization of universalizing renditions of the relationship between sex, sexuality, and gender, and its theorization of cis-heteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender, and sexuality. I would also like the book to impact new perspectives on studies of statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, political life, and intimacy.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AZ: My new project is on material, symbolic, and affective ordering of death, mourning, and afterlives in the margins of social and political life in Turkey. The margins I examine are ethnic, religious, sectarian, and economic, as well as gendered and sexual. I am interested in how death marks the ethnic, sexual, gendered, and economic limits of belonging in regimes of family, kinship, religion, and state, and in practices of mourning and grief. More explicitly, I look at forms of death, burials, funerals, and practices of mourning for the social outcast, namely homeless and underclass people, cis and trans victims of femicide, disowned members of blood families, earthquake victims, and unaccompanied refugees. This mortal topography also contains the bodies of political detainees who have been “disappeared” under police interrogation and state violence, along with radical leftists and Kurdish guerrillas deemed “unidentified.” A close focus on this mortal topography of margins allows me to demonstrate the limits of social legibility and belonging in Turkey as an organization of disavowals, erasures, specters, and deaths that are made possible by racial, classed, gendered, and sexualized forms of violence. I approach these deaths and disavowals as not only products of unequal relations of race, gender, sex, and class but also as key elements in the formation of these relations of inequality and power.

 

Excerpt from the book (from pp. 170-172) 

Note: Citation references have been removed

Chapter 6: Funerals and Experiments with Trans Kin

Shoes in various colors were lined up next to one another on the floor: red, blue, brown, black, and yellow. There were approximately ten pairs. Some of them were worn out; some were in good shape. All were high-heeled, either sandals or dress shoes. When Esra poked me in the arm, I was abruptly roused from staring at them. She humorously said, “Which one do you like the most? Just take it!” I smiled and made a face, showing a lack of interest in any of them. While I was gazing at these shoes, left behind by Sibel, I was not trying to decide on the best pair for myself but ruminating on someone who had recently passed away and how those shoes carried her life in them. I was caught up in thinking of Sibel, whose funeral story appeared at the beginning of this book. Shoes that once belonged to her were now sitting on the floor of Istanbul lgbtt [a trans-majority LGBTQ organization] and waiting to embrace new feet and walk with different bodies. This was the traditional practice: when a trans woman died, her lubunya friends would collect objects and belongings from her house and exhibit them for people to choose from according to their need. This redistribution of resources—or the intimate gift economy of the dead—frequently took place within lubunya networks of friendship.

The day before, we had attended Sibel’s funeral with Ceyda, Sibel’s close friend and a trans woman herself. As we walked toward the mosque gate, we saw Sibel’s blood mother and sister accepting people’s condolences. It was a pleasant surprise to see them because, as mentioned previously, many blood families reject their trans children, kick them out of house, and refuse them financial and emotional support. Some families denied their trans children funeral ceremonies and burial rituals at the moment of death.

During my research, death and funerals were a constant point of reference and a sore spot that LGBTI+ people loudly spoke about regarding their blood family relations. They frequently communicated their desire to be buried by their queer/trans family and kin, by their real families (gerçek ailesi). Some lubunyalar even wrote wills to give their friends the rights normally held by families. After other trans deaths, the queer/trans community and friends often tried to reclaim the body and organize the funeral, thereby taking the place of the blood family as the real family. At trans funerals we see the intimate work of care, love, and protection and the claims that LGBTI+  activists and friends of the deceased generate after a sex/gender-transgressive death. They consistently invest in their friendships and comradeships and contest the primacy given to blood families. In the following pages, I continue with Sibel’s funeral story from the introduction and detail the entire process. Then I discuss how trans people learn to care for one another in the aftermath of refusal and abandonment, a praxis of love that trans studies scholar Hil Malatino defines as “trans care.” Trans women’s intimate experiments with the kinship repertoire of home and motherhood are powerful examples of this trans care.

As discussed in the previous chapters, urban displacement, social discrimination and exclusion, sexual violence, medicolegal regulation, and police surveillance constantly shape the trans everyday in multiple spaces of life, including institutions, streets, neighborhoods, and homes. These relations of violence also constitute a social field of creative living within which trans people recast, shape, and invent forms of intimacy to dwell in the world. Experimenting with family and kinship is an important currency of intimacy that relies on a discursive as well as a practical repertoire of care, lubunyabelonging, and bonding. Intimacy allows trans people to creatively, productively, and resolutely remake the violent conditions of the quotidian. Family and kinship become a continuous process of renewal, an intimate survival strategy to cope with everyday violence, an imaginative practice that pushes the boundaries of belonging, and a claim to a place in life and death through queer/trans belonging and bonding.

One of the many ways to define kinship is through substances that consolidate ties between persons; in Turkey blood constitutes the predominant substance of kinship. Blood ties are crucial in giving value and definition to the dominant understanding of the family. They are inscribed in social, legal, and religious frameworks. One notable example is the legal regulation of in vitro fertilization, which strictly prohibits egg, sperm, and embryo donation and surrogacy. It only allows married couples to use their own eggs and sperm. Semen, womb, and breast milk are also significant substances of the body that form kin relations, but none of them approaches the prevalence of blood ties as a metaphor in everyday relations and conversations.

Anthropologist Janet Carsten suggests that we can think of the substance of kinship as “the flow of objects or bodily parts between persons, as well as the capacity to stand for the relations between those persons.” Elaborating on anthropologist Roy Wagner’s conceptualization of “analogical kinship” in the context of non-Western societies, Carsten stresses how objects like shells, or foods like meat, can do the analogical work of the flow of substances between people in order to make kin. Here I would like to push this discussion further and ask, What if we approach this substance as violence? How can we theorize violence as the mediator, the creative substance, of family and kin work among trans people? What does kin and family making look like when its substance becomes routinized conditions of exclusion, abandonment, displacement, and police abuse? How does the quotidian experience of violence shape crossings and entanglements among the family, kinship, and other forms of relatedness, belonging, and caring? I argue that the trans everyday offers us a creative way to negotiate and contest, as well as blur, the intimate boundaries among family, kinship, and friendship and hence theorize the constitutive relationship between violence and intimacy through an embodied process of family and kin work.

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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.