Némésis Srour, Bollywood Film Traffic: A History of Hindi Films’ Circulation in Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai (1954–2014) (New Texts Out Now)

Némésis Srour, Bollywood Film Traffic: A History of Hindi Films’ Circulation in Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai (1954–2014) (New Texts Out Now)

Némésis Srour, Bollywood Film Traffic: A History of Hindi Films’ Circulation in Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai (1954–2014) (New Texts Out Now)

By : Némésis Srour

Némésis Srour, Bollywood Film TrafficA History of Hindi Films’ Circulation in Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai (1954–2014) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). 

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

Némésis Srour (NS): Paris is known for the richness of its cinema landscape: it has, by some counts, the most cinemas and cinema screens of any city in the world. After moving here some years ago, I gradually became conscious of a distinct lack of Indian films being screened, especially given the significant presence of world cinema. Why were there so few Indian films in French cinemas? This in turn led to a larger question, namely why and how do Indian films circulate more or less easily in various countries?

While I was reflecting on this question and how it would shape the direction of my doctoral research, I happened to have a striking conversation with my grandmother about Bollywood. In the 1980s, during the Civil War in Lebanon, she would rent many movies on VHS and watch them time and again. I wondered how these Bollywood films had arrived in the Bekaa Valley, during such a turbulent period. Who were the people behind this distribution network, and how and why had they set their eyes on this market?

My initial line of inquiry was the circulation of films, both ways, between the Indian and the Arab world; their shared cinematic culture was an argument that would often come up when I started my research. But as I dived into the network’s logic, I started to question the given of this shared culture, and my field research in Mumbai, Cairo, Beirut and Dubai confirmed an alternative paradigm and dismantled a kind of Orientalist trope.

The book offers a global history, spotlighting South-South cultural dynamics through the prism of hidden Bollywood networks in the Arab world.

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

NS: Bollywood Film Traffic addresses topics at the crossroads of several fields of research. The book offers a global history, spotlighting South-South cultural dynamics through the prism of hidden Bollywood networks in the Arab world. Not only does this allow us to reshape narratives about the industry, through firsthand insights, but it also offers a transnational ethnographic journey, unveiling the Middle East through the distinctive lens of the Bombay film industry.

The book seeks to address major gaps about Bollywood film circulation and how the film industries in India and the Middle East are connected. My research, by establishing the history of circulations, also makes sense of incomplete data on the history of the film industries (cinemas, exhibitors, distribution, and distributors). My book offers a first step in documenting the circulation of Hindi films in the Middle East and offers an alternate vision of “the Arab space” (Franck Mermier) from the Bombay film industry perspective.

The issue of the invisible dimension of these circulations is key, given the sporadic nature of the sources and the conservation of archives in each of the countries discussed. The book highlights the challenge of providing a history of the films that were screened publicly, given that the history of the movie theaters and their owners is less easy to locate than the production of the films. In addition to this challenge, I discuss the difficulty of tracing the history of a popular cinema, generally despised by the elites of Arab countries, who prefer American or European cinema, and the necessity to consider oral testimonies as vital forms of historical documentation.

From the perspective of transnational studies, I offer an account of how the Bombay industry accommodated the specific issues of various local film industries. My research on the transnational ethnography of Hindi film circulation networks in Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai reveals different types of networks and their transformation over time and various regions. The plasticity at work in the formation of the networks highlights a shifting geography of cinema in the region, participating in the demystification of a homogeneous Arab world that has been saturated by Indian films.

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

NS: The book builds on parts of my master's thesis, which provided an anthropological history of body language in Bollywood movies. The eleventh chapter of the book, “1985, Amitabh Bachchan’s Mard in Cairo: Embodying a Transnational Masculinity,” draws on this approach, shedding light on the convergence of Indian and Egyptian audiences and the embodiment of transnational masculinity in Bollywood cinema.

Beginning my doctoral research, initially my ambition was to establish a cinematographic or filmic body language common to Bollywood and Egyptian cinema (and Arab cinema more broadly) that would explain the extent of the film circulation between these two regions. However, I soon realized that in order to do this, it was crucial to identify the corpus of films that were most widely circulated. My focus of my book thus evolved, from its initial focus as anthropological study of corporeal representation in films, to being an ethnography of the networks behind the scenes. For future research dealing in filmic representations and cultural exchanges between India and the Arab world, my book provides the necessary groundwork.

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

NS: I hope my book will be valuable to scholars in globalization studies and in Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, and equally to those in film studies and cinema history. The term Bollywood tends to restrict our understanding of the phenomenon of the circulation of Indian films, associating it with a cultural commodity destined for the diaspora and contemporary globalization, whereas the notion of “Hindi film” allows me to decompartmentalize these semantic power relations while highlighting the plurality of the modes of distribution of Indian films.

By deviating from the diasporic focus as an apparatus for understanding the dissemination of Indian films abroad, I hope that my book will render visible the manifold links that unite India with other regions of the world. By looking away from the West, the pivotal role of Hindi cinema within a globalized South emerges and the dissemination of Hindi films in the Middle East highlights a history of South-South cinema circuits, at the same time charting a new path through globalization studies.

The impact of the book will be, I hope, to provide a refreshing outlook on the Arab world, by bringing to light the rich subject of film history and circulation from the perspective of the Bombay cinema industry. Through the media lens, the Middle East is often associated with war, violence, and social issues, and scholarship within film studies largely focuses on the same topics, extending them to topics such as exile and war trauma. Given the situation in the region today, it seems particularly crucial that scholarly research presents the Middle East through alternative prisms, as a culturally dynamic region interconnected with many parts of the world, playing a pivotal role in film dissemination and other forms of cultural exchange.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

NS: My new project continues to address the circulation of Bollywood films through the lens of an Algerian distribution company specializing in Bollywood and Arab cinema. Originally based in Algiers, this company distributed Indian films across North Africa before relocating to Paris, where it shifted its focus to the European market. The study traces the history of Bollywood and Arab film circulation, beginning in North Africa, examining its connections—or lack thereof—with Middle Eastern networks, and culminating in an analysis of Paris's cinema landscape that specialized in Bollywood and Arab movies. 

By connecting the history of immigration with the history of Parisian cinemas and the broader French film industry, this project aims to shed light on the cultural, social, and economic dynamics underlying the distribution and reception of Bollywood and Arab films in North Africa and France.

J: What was your methodology, and how was it innovative in the field? What made your methodology particularly effective?

NS: If one relies solely on written sources, the presence of Indian films becomes nearly invisible. General newspapers such as L'Orient-le-JourAn-Nahar, and Al-Ahram primarily list Indian films in weekly programming, while offering in-depth articles and reviews for more prestigious cinematographies. This highlights the importance of moving beyond written sources to incorporate oral testimonies as vital historical documentation.

To analyze the commercial dimensions of film circulation, I focused on the stories and portraits of the men who forged the routes that brought Hindi cinema to the Arab world. Taking an anthropological approach, I placed these life stories at the center of my methodology to reconstruct history from the perspective of the actors directly involved. This approach not only sheds light on an under-documented history but also challenges traditional epistemological tools, highlighting the processes through which certain historical phenomena are erased.

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction)

Among the global audiences for Bollywood cinema, the Arab world is among the most prominent, and the least understood. “Why the Arab World is Infatuated With Bollywood,” GQ magazine online promised to explain, “Forget Hollywood, Egyptians are in love with Bollywood,” was the headline of The World an American radio website on May 17, 2015. These contemporary news stories reflect the Arab world’s long-held love for Hindi films, as historian B. D. Garga testifies:

“Well over a decade after its release in India, the Cinémathèque Algérienne was showing Mother India to a packed house. As I watched the film, I was surprised to discover the spell a rural Indian family had cast on a wholly Arab audience”

The success of Indian films in Southern locales underscores the resonance that Indian cinema has had in “societies in transition” where “modernity competes with tradition, where urban and rural commingle in uneasy proximity, where underdevelopment meets development…” and the creation of “parallel modernities”. The ethnographic documenting of cultural global flows of Indian film in the Arab world, shifting the focus away from the screen and towards the film industry backstage, allows to recenter the gaze from the position of postcolonial societies, in order to look beyond the “centrality of the West”. Yet, the Arab world’s relationship with Hindi films is more ambiguous than it seems, if only we look away from the screen.

In 1965, at a Conference on Arab Cinemas and Cultures, held under the aegis of the UNESCO, the presence of Indian films in the Arab region sparked debate. While some Arab attendees perceived the popularity of Indian films as an “invasion”, the reasons for this success were formulated in essentialist terms by the film historian Georges Sadoul, “As far as the importance that Arab countries attach to Indian cinema is concerned, this is a kind of innate spontaneity that I cannot explain”.

The popularity of Indian films in Arab countries is often seen as an enigma, compared to the barriers they face in Western countries; at times, critics have accredited its popularity to shared values around the notion of family, modesty, and shared sentimentality. The circulation of Indian films within the Arab world, and the Arab public's love of these flamboyant musical melodramas, are determined and explained in essentialist terms, both by agents from the Western world, and by local consumers themselves. The aim of this book could have been to find explanations for this “innate spontaneity”, to support the idea of “innate” cultural affinities between India and Arab countries, and to offer a posthumous response to Georges Sadoul by analyzing the film as text. Rather than start from such essentialist cultural explanations, or give arguments within the framework of this system, I will begin by going back to the geographical and historical places where Indian films were distributed. My first step was to look off screen and go beyond film analysis, be it cultural and/or aesthetic, to make use “of other methodologies and other sources than those typically central to film studies”, that of “archives, trade magazines, newspapers and oral histories”.

In search of these “nomadic” Indian images, to use Hans Belting's concept, which have traveled from Bombay to Beirut, Cairo and Dubai, my research has itself taken an itinerant form to infiltrate these circulations. It followed a nomadic path that had to accommodate the opening and closing of territories, playing with borders and their redefinitions in view of foreign films. In the course of these migrations, images and their status are transformed as they arrive in other spaces. If an Indian film left Bombay as one of the biggest commercial successes of its time, with a star-studded cast of actors and a renowned director, by the time it arrived in Egypt or Lebanon, it was sometimes part of the stream of B-movies confined to second-class cinemas and their popular audiences. Circulation transforms the very value of the film, as well as the modalities of its movement through time. Paradoxically, while contemporary globalization advocates an openness and permeability of borders, my nomadic images come up against barriers that run counter to this supposed fluidity. From these obstacles, Indian films find other circuits and other ways of distribution. The cultural reasons for Hindi films’ success in the Arab world has never been truly evaluated, measured, or questioned. The first thing I wanted to do was to clear the ground for the circulation of these nomadic films, to question the process. How do Bollywood films circulate, through which networks, and who are the agents of this diffusion? Where are the locations of circulation, and what do these locations tell us about the place of this object in the public space?

By examining the processes of circulation of Indian films in the Middle East over a long period of time, from the 1950s to the contemporary era, this work crosses a multitude of histories: that of inventions and technology, a national political history, but also the economic history of the world of film merchants and distribution, as well as the history of migration and the history of piracy. 

[…]

Will studying the modalities of these cinematographic circulations allow us to leave behind an essentialist vision of cultural affinities between countries of the South? Will it help us to decompartmentalize the category of the “South” in order to restore all its depth, ambiguity and plural heterogeneity? To render all these questions in their historical dimension, the book is organized in chronological sections, with focuses on specific years, to capture circulations in the form of a "close-up" on their highlight moments.

Part I opens in the 1950s, and grounds the debate on the presence of Hindi films in the Middle East in general. Part II is a focus on the year 1954, that marks the advent of the first Hindi film diffusion in Egypt. Part III focuses on merchant’s trade routes in the 1960s and 1970s, with Tehran as starting point in 1964 and the distribution of Sangam (Raj Kapoor, 1964), and closing in Beirut in 1977, a couple years after the Civil War started. Part IV examines a central period from the 1970s to the contemporary period, marked by multiple transformations: change of audiences, change of circulations modalities, change of cinematic geographies. They concentrate around key dates: 1973 law on Indian films import in Egypt, 1985 Golden Age of Hindi films in Cairo, and 2007, the launch of cable channel Zee Aflam, dedicated to Bollywood movies. And, finally, Part V offers a dive into the recent reconfigurations of Hindi film distribution around Dubai, and the barriers of circulation outside the Emirates, made particularly visible with the distribution of Dhoom 3 in 2013. The chronological milestone in contemporary times stops in 2014, the year of my last fieldwork in the Middle East. The book chapters are intertwined with interstitial elements, working as a punctuation on the general partition of the text. These interstitial elements are there to give flesh to the unsung agents of the film industry, to save from oblivion, as much as possible, the persons who paved the way for Indian films in the Middle East, as the purpose of this book is not to offer the arguments of a cultural connivance between Indian films and Arab countries, but to document the circulation of films, contributing to a global history of South-South cinematographic circuits.

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.