Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens, ““Conserve Not Protect”?: Competing Environmental Imaginaries in Jordan’s Conservation Thinking and Practice” (New Texts Out Now)

Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens, ““Conserve Not Protect”?: Competing Environmental Imaginaries in Jordan’s Conservation Thinking and Practice” (New Texts Out Now)

Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens, ““Conserve Not Protect”?: Competing Environmental Imaginaries in Jordan’s Conservation Thinking and Practice” (New Texts Out Now)

By : Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens

Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens, ““Conserve Not Protect”?: Competing Environmental Imaginaries in Jordan’s Conservation Thinking and Practice”Arab Studies Journal, Vol. XXXII, No. 1 (Spring 2024).

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

Katharina Lenner and Sylvie Janssens (KL & SJ): We both spent a good part of our PhD research—which in both cases focused on other issues pertaining to rural Jordan—witnessing negotiations around conservation and exploring some of the contentious dynamics between local populations and the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), the non-governmental organization charged with managing protected areas in Jordan. The depth of the antagonisms we encountered in different places, as well as the obviously significant role of RSCN as a governing agency in rural Jordan, made us dig deeper into the history of conservation in the country in an effort to understand where dominant ideas around protected areas came from, how they connected with imaginaries of conservation circulating across the globe, how they interacted with other dynamics in the country, and how they were (re-)negotiated by different actors over time.

... while conservation is deeply shaped by colonial imaginaries, what environmental colonialism actually means is multiple and specific.

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

KL & SJ: The article engages with competing environmental imaginaries over the course of Jordan’s history, particularly around protected area management. We offer a new interpretation of how intersecting global and local actors and strategies have shaped contemporary struggles around protected areas over time. We particularly highlight two issues. The first one is that while conservation is deeply shaped by colonial imaginaries, what environmental colonialism actually means is multiple and specific. Looking at the circulation of ideas in the transition from British to American hegemony in Jordan is particularly insightful in this regard. 

Secondly, we show how past environmental imaginaries remain deeply ingrained in contemporary efforts to make conservation more participatory. This both relates to the socio-spatial setup and institutional practices of protected areas, and the ways in which communities living around them relate to them. We show how an exclusive notion of protected areas as pristine spaces established in the 1970s has lingered on into the 1990s and after, when conservation was supposed to become more people-centered. By bringing together institutional perspectives with those of communities in and around different protected areas we show how this legacy has complicated a genuine transition in this direction.

Directional sign for Dana reserve (mahmiyat Dana) riddled with bullet holes, near Faynan, Wadi 'Araba. Photo by Katharina Lenner, 2010.

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

KL:  The article connects with my current book project, which focuses on the politics of poverty alleviation in Jordan. It explores the many ways in which rural Transjordanian populations in particular have been socio-economically marginalized over the course of Hashemite rule and traces how, since the gradual reorganization of governance since the late 1990s and 2000s, they have been addressed as (potential) small entrepreneurs expected to wean themselves off dependency of the state, and to what end. The paradigm of integrated conservation and development, which became hegemonic in the mid-1990s—a focus of the article—is part and parcel of this change of governing strategies, and as such it is also discussed in the book, with an empirical focus on Dana reserve and the people living around it. At the same time, this paradigm has its own history in conservationist thinking and practice, which the article explores in much more depth. 

SJ: My PhD dissertation traces the heterogenous socio-material elements through which private property in Azraq has been, and continues to be, performed. It analyzes the role that world-making projects, such as conservation, play in putting together, consolidating, and destabilizing the (private) property arrangement. Through processes such as the enclosure of land for nature’s protection and the imposition of what constitutes a “proper” relation to land (for example, herding versus agriculture), conservation discourses and practices continuously reorder some of property’s constitutive elements (for example, land’s value and the ways in which property becomes intelligible and legible). As such, my research demonstrates how conservation can help effect a world conducive to a particular—in this case private—property arrangement.   

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

KL & SJ: We hope the article will be interesting for a broad range or readers interested in conservation, rural politics, and land issues in Jordan, as well as in other countries in the region and more globally. We would love for it to contribute to discussions of the multiple forms and legacies of environmental colonialism, and on what alternative forms of conservation are imaginable given the lasting legacies of excluding local residents from conservation management. We believe it will only be possible for conservation to be truly owned by populations living in and around protected areas when these legacies are openly acknowledged and addressed by conservation agencies.  

J: What other projects are you working on now?

KL: My recent work has focused on the politics and policies around the labor market participation of marginalized populations, including refugees, migrant workers, and women in the region. At the moment, I am working on a project on garment sector workers, which compares working conditions and prospects for social protection in a largely formalized setting dominated by a South Asian work force—Jordan—with that an almost entirely informally regulated one—Turkey, where Syrian refugees constitute most of the workers. 

SJ: I have left academia and now work for a Belgian independent federal institution promoting and guaranteeing gender equality.

 

Excerpt from the article (from the Introduction, footnotes removed)

Conservation and tourism are among the main ways through which international organizations, NGOs and states have produced and reproduced nature in the Middle East. Over the past decades, these intertwined projects of improvement have substantially contributed to inserting rural areas in the region into transnational circuits of expertise and capital formation. They have also fundamentally redefined the relationship between “nature” and “humans,” including people living in and around designated protected areas, and those passing through them as visitors. 

In Jordan, much like elsewhere, a significant change in institutionalized conservation efforts occurred in the 1990s. The global proliferation of sustainable development initiatives, which advocated fusing development and conservation, coincided with a period in which the country increasingly reoriented itself toward global markets. The country’s protected areas became central to these transformations. The result was new discourses and practices of conservation that gave particular attention to the livelihoods of communities in and around protected areas.

These transformations did not, however, come out of the blue. They tied into previously established forms of thinking about conservation and their spatial manifestations. Researchers have traced these transnational legacies and their colonial underpinnings in other cases in the region. They have particularly highlighted how colonial conservation initiatives decisively shaped dynamics of exclusion and dispossession of local communities, particularly pastoral nomads, on the pretext that they supposedly degraded nature. For Jordan, however, the history of institutionalized conservation efforts and their impact on contemporary forms of conservation remains largely unexplored. Scholars have partially reconstructed the history and institutional dynamics of the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), the nongovernmental organization charged with managing Jordan’s protected areas. They have also analyzed the transnational economies and networks of expertise involved in the design and the daily life of a number of RSCN’s current protected areas and their surroundings. By and large, however, they have focused on the post-1990s period, exploring how the RSCN’s Integrated Conservation and Development (ICD) approach has played out in often conflictual interaction with residents in and around protected areas.

In this article, we build and expand on this literature by combining discussion of Jordan’s earlier conservation history with in-depth analysis of contemporary environmental imaginaries among conservationists as well as residents of the south of Jordan. We offer a new interpretation of how intersecting global and local actors and strategies have shaped contemporary struggles around protected areas over time. Exploring different international visions for conservation in Jordan, and how they have aligned or contrasted with those of local elites and organizations, highlights the significance of competing global imaginaries of conservation and their effects. It helps explain how a relatively exclusive legacy of protected areas as pristine spaces could take hold at the expense of an initial, more inclusive conceptualization of conservation in the form of multipurpose national parks. We argue that the success of the more exclusive model, and the way the RSCN engrained it in their organizational dynamics and the spatial setup of the country’s protected areas, has hindered contemporary efforts to transition to more genuinely community-led forms of conservation. 

By drawing out alternative environmental imaginaries, the article sheds light on a forgotten dimension of conservation in Jordan, which it places in the context of different actors’ geostrategic and economic considerations over decades. Moreover, our analysis offers a rare insight into a context in which notably different (post)colonial environmental imaginaries intersected. When scholars and practitioners discuss the trajectory of international conservation, they often present it as a clear sequence of colonially established reserves, which transformed into national parks in the postcolonial period, but largely maintained their restrictive land-use policies and exclusion of local communities. The case of Jordan complicates such an account, highlighting that the coloniality of conservation does not necessarily or primarily emanate from the (former) colonial power. Analyzing competing global imaginaries in the same context helps to nuance accounts of their persistent effects in the region. It strengthens calls that we should understand environmental colonialism as both specific and multiple. It also points to alternative trajectories, which could have turned institutionalized conservation in Jordan and elsewhere into a less exclusive undertaking. 

Finally, the longue durée perspective we offer contributes to scholarship on factors that shape the (limited) transformation of conservation governance. We highlight how past environmental imaginaries remain ingrained in contemporary efforts to make conservation more participatory, both in the socio-spatial setup and institutional practices of protected areas, and in the ways communities living around them relate to them. By bringing together institutional and community perspectives over time, and by highlighting how communities transmit their perspectives between different locations, we enable a more comprehensive understanding of dynamics that have complicated attempts to transform conservation governance.  

The first two sections trace the evolution of knowledge production about conservation in Jordan and its materialization in the 1960s to 1980s. We show how the interaction among international conservation agencies’ agendas and priorities of international funding bodies and national agencies shaped this process in the context of a gradual transition from British to US hegemony in Jordan. While British proposals for a multipurpose national park in Azraq (section 1) might have led to a relatively inclusive form of conservation, they did not materialize. Instead, during the subsequent phase of US hegemony in Jordan, combined with the Hashemite state’s tightening of territorial control, a fortress conservation model became dominant. This model excluded local communities from using and managing the resources of protected areas (section 2). Section 3 rethinks the degree of continuity and change that came in the 1990s, with the turn toward ICD, focusing on Dana Biosphere Reserve as a laboratory for this new approach. It traces how the intellectual and spatial legacies developed over preceding decades combined with new circuits of capital, knowledge, and people to establish the “Dana model” as a success story. It shows how, despite integrating a socioeconomic perspective into conservation efforts, the model placed limited value on the environmental expertise of local communities, particularly pastoralists. Finally, section 4 explores these communities’ engagement with expert discourses relating to protected areas and conservation. It argues that the Dana model not only has shaped conservation thinking and practices across the country until today, but also has constituted the main target of residents’ critique, appropriation, and mobilization. There has been a partial turn toward more participatory forms of conservation that allow for multiple uses of land, reminiscent of the British approach of the 1960s. The Dana model’s legacy, however, has often prevented a cooperative relationship between local communities and the conservation agency.  

We use the terms “participatory” and “people-centered” institutionalized conservation to denote a new standard of governance that has become increasingly hegemonic in international conservation institutions since the late 1980s. In conjunction with sustainable development discourse, under this standard conservation is supposed to develop a “human face.” The implication is that conservation agencies acknowledge indigenous communities’ rights to the land and include them in conservation management, for example through community-based natural resource management schemes. They also commit to shift from enclosing land for preservation purposes alone toward permitting multiple kinds of use of conservation land, including agriculture. Yet our article confirms the finding in much of the critical literature that many such attempts are tokenistic exercises that do not follow a social justice agenda, and that residents meet them with skepticism because their ingrained experiences of exclusion and dispossession make it hard to imagine a different mode of institutionalized conservation.  

The article is based on archival research in London and Amman, as well as interviews and participant observation among conservation experts and local communities that we individually conducted between 2007 and 2015 in, around, or about different protected areas in the country, especially Azraq, Dana, and Wadi Rum. Fieldwork took place over five stays in Jordan of two to three months for each author. Katharina Lenner’s research stays were recurring short-term visits to different areas around Dana reserve for up to a week at a time, usually based in a community-run hotel or in self-organized accommodations. Sylvie Janssens stayed in Azraq for several weeks at a time with a local family and made several briefer visits to Wadi Rum. Research participants in and around the protected areas consisted of staff working for the RSCN as site managers, community liaison officers, eco-guides, rangers, or handymen, as well as heads and members of local cooperatives engaged in tourism-related activities, and local government representatives. Interviews and conversations were conducted in English and Arabic.

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.