Maria Gloria Polimeno, Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism: political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy (New Texts Out Now)

Maria Gloria Polimeno, Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism: political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy (New Texts Out Now)

Maria Gloria Polimeno, Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism: political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy (New Texts Out Now)

Maria Gloria Polimeno, Egypt and the rise of fluid authoritarianism: political ecology, power and the crisis of legitimacy (Manchester University Press, 2024).

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

Maria Gloria Polimeno (MGP): Immediately after 2013, I realized that the more Egypt took center stage as an economic and political partner from a Western perspective, and especially from EU member states, the more the game of political and diplomatic moral neoliberalism unfolded, while real political, social, and economic challenges were neglected. Moreover, the rhetoric of stability did not correspond with the political fears and fragility of the entire political apparatus, despite the plan for sustainable industrialization and modernization. While works still refer to hyper-militarization, I realized that this understanding was wrong, and that the regime had transformed into something completely different for the first time since the 1950s. This change was reflected more broadly in the reorganization of the political and economic apparatus, its intra-elite relationship, and its recentralization in international and economic agreements. The environment was instrumentalized, which is exactly what is happening in a system that I defined as a “fluid authoritarianism,” approximating what I called a “non-exclusivist personalist regime.”

Blackouts were not accidental. They were part of the regime’s logic.

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

MGP: The book engages with the debate on transformative authoritarianism and the crisis of internal political legitimacy in Egypt under the incumbent and after the shockwaves. Under this umbrella, I have developed the themes of political ecology and power. However, I wanted to take a completely different approach from classical, academic studies mainly oriented towards debating Max Weber by taking traditionalist lenses. In line with my argument of sub-infrastructural transformations and adaptations which resulted in the internal fragmentation and repositioning of the local elite along the international business interests, I have developed what I define as “a modified Weberian conception of legitimacy.” This unique and multilevel approach combines Gramsci and Baumann with Khaldoun’s cyclical theory. At the same time, it expands on omnibalancing and diffused support theory. The book also addresses the debate around political ecology, with the final economic chapter questioning the role of the environment in politics. I had the opportunity to develop these conceptualizations through a critical approach to the prism of the Social Development Goals and considering international actions in support of the 2030 Agenda. I do not undermine the relevance of sustainability in the region, as the area is massively exposed to climate-related effects for which solutions are much needed. However, nature has ended up being weaponized and instrumentalized as a tool of internal cohesion, rather than a determinant for economic and industrial performance. 

This volume also builds on some personal memories, and the issues of fuel, energy, and energy subsidies are part of them (as discussed in the economic chapter). I remember power cuts at night in my apartment in Cairo in 2012. Locals ended up “dealing with this as part of everyday life”, and I realized this when I shouted in Arabic from my balcony, complaining that there was no light, again. Blackouts were not accidental. They were part of the regime’s logic. This logic was protracted during the transition period. My book intertwines the politics of subsidies with the overall discourse around performance and the crisis of legitimacy. It sits at the intersection of the literature on non-democratic regime types, international political economy, and political legitimacy, with some additions of political ecology. 

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

MGP: The book is intertwined with my wider research on autocracies and elites in the Middle East and Egypt from a political/structural and economic perspective. It departs from my previous works for the strongly transformative approach taken. In addition, it is different in that it opens up to other fields of research and implications that also look at informal governance and environmental politics. I am an interdisciplinary scholar. 

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

MGP: I am aware that this book is quite complex, but I hope that this sensitive topic can also arouse the curiosity and interest of non-experts as well as experts in the field and of course, academics. I would like it to break ground in studies that look at the intersectionality between contemporary autocracies, the international political economy, and environmental politics. I would like this work to be read also by practitioners and to encourage them to revise policies and realize that the regime is anything but a pillar of political and economic stability in the Middle East and North Africa, for many reasons. However, I do not expect the EU member states to move away from their close relations with the country, due to their interests of different kinds, but there is a lot that is being missed beyond industrial modernization, in which Egypt is investing and borrowing heavily. They are betting on the wrong country and taking risks.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MGP: I am working on and leading a few projects/collaborations. The first, and next, collaborative project stems from my lived experience. It explores what I define “Prohibited States” and looks at illicit trafficking and smuggling intertwined with the transformation of informal governance and support to governments’ interests in the region. It features Egypt as my country of specialism, but it also takes a comparative approach to specific dynamics. I embarked on this project for two reasons: the first was a memory of Egypt and a time when a friend asked us to join him for tea in a “decadent” café in downtown Cairo as he wanted to buy hashish for personal use. The relationship between hashish and Cairo’s society is quite complex. Egypt does not produce hashish but is a main consumer, and tribes trade it. Overall illicit trafficking is a main theme in my research, and gold is also at the core, as the latter is redefining relations between formal and informal actors beyond borderlands. The second reason relates to the broader and collaborative theme of transformative informal governance, for which I was awarded a British Academy Seed Funding grant to craft collaborations between my institution and the CNRS in Paris, which I am leading and for which I expect to generate more funding later this year. 

The second larger research project I have designed focuses on ecocides in the Middle East, again with mixed outputs. This is part of the Middle East Institute’s academic research agenda, of which I am in charge, next to additional duties and responsibilities. For now, I can say that I have envisioned a collaboration with Google London and NASA/ESA satellites. There will be a 4K Virtual Reality exhibition.  

Finally, in 2024 I signed a new book contract with Routledge in London, and I am the editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Environment and Middle Eastern Politics.

J: What challenges did you encounter in writing this book and in your research? 

MGP: I encountered challenges and obstacles during my fieldwork due to the sensitive subject matter of the regime. For security reasons, I was institutionally prohibited from travelling back to Egypt to conduct field research. The process of obtaining ethical approval also took much longer due to the topics and profiles I was interviewing. Conducting sensitive research is always a challenge when it comes to fieldwork and personal safety. I am currently facing similar issues in my work on illicit trafficking, informal governance, and autocracies. Beyond this book, we must recognize that changes in formal and informal power and internal dynamics have transformed the region from within. However, closed political spaces on the ground as well as conflicts cannot stop academic research as well as the social, economic, and political implications of our work, even from a policy perspective. We adapt to risks. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Preface, pages xii, xiii, xiv, and xv)

At the time of writing, illiberal powers are on the rise on a global scale – one that transcends regionalisms such as North–South or Western–Eastern divides. Illiberal regimes are proving themselves to be attractive in poisoning the fundamental political, social and moral values of liberal democracies. Likewise, populist narratives are being revived, and while they aim at dividing nations, preventing democratic reforms, in other contexts populist narratives, by relying on ethnosymbolism, aim at recreating the idea and identity of nations, after shockwaves. Myths, memories and symbols have not returned to playing out against neoliberal projects but to tactically reclaiming a welfarist-ethical role and legitimation for business elites’ mandate in new projects of development. In the complexity of these processes, populist narratives and neonationalisms have emerged within a distorted 1950s–1960s socialist-welfarist claim, which is presented as the host-ideology, but anachronistically in a neoliberal capitalist regional system that remains fondly linked to the International Monetary Fund’s loans, and thus condemned to enduring financial indebtedness. The erosion in the qualities of democracies and untransitioned systems, as well as the gap in internal legitimation, that persist in autocracies have been accompanied by a reinterpreted institutionalization of identities, at which core the idea of the greatness of nations started to be employed as a legitimation device. While much is known about the role of regime type and democratisation in international cooperation and the spread of liberal norms, we know relatively little about the regional and international consequences of reverse processes, alias the structural consolidation of autocracies and the role of nature in this process. This book will contribute to the study of internal political legitimacy from a structural, socio-political, and economic perspective in systems that have undergone transformations after shockwaves, like Egypt after the 2013 coup.

From a theoretical perspective, the book engages with the broader debate on autocratic restorations, though it approaches the phenomenon through the prism of non-continuity. What it establishes is intertwined with the theory of rupture and change in times of transition. To this end, the Introduction presents a combined reinterpretation of the Gramscian interregnum through a Baumanian flavour, which sees further development in the theory of fluid authoritarianism, against the immobilism of the scholarship, and which goes beyond empirical and regionalised focuses. In the early phases of this work, the term shockwaves has been limited to Egypt, as the first country that experienced a coup one year after democratic elections in 2012. As the conclusions of the book are approached, other shockwaves have occurred in the region, and Tunisia deserves a mention, next to Lebanon where the persistence of the elite in the country has been at the core of internal protests but also impacted on transforming the system. In a global context of referred ‘authoritarian restorations’, lying in democracy has become normalised in international politics, and this act of lying ended up revealing a struggle to create new bases of internal consensus beyond old practices of coercion, repression and torture. Shockwaves organically can upgrade political machines, thus determining a transition at the level of the organisation of state structure, even from within, and from which the conception of fluid authoritarianism stems. Despite this, violence and coercion have tactically entered a new era of routinisation in the everyday life of the Middle East region, turning into new modes of governmentality that transcend former exceptionalisms. After 2011 elites have returned, playing and consolidating a strategic central function in the economic and development sector, surfing new industrial waves, which have ended up institutionalizing and moralising the environment and nature. In Tunisia, after the collapse of Ben Ali’s regime in 2011, prosperous companies were sold to factions of the elite, which started consolidating their business. This finds application in Egypt, though under different premises and in a sub-transformed political structure in which the architecture of power emerged as polarised for the first time since 1953. Green reforms promoted under the Social Development Goals, including the greening of desert lands, the commercial development of the Suez Canal Area, and the Siwa Oasis project, among others, projected towards green energy transition, saw a constructive presentation through the lenses of a political programme of economic development, were environmentally ethical and committed to making natural resources accessible by all and sustainable. The political seduction of this discourse aimed at a consolidation of the deep internal legitimation void. Despite this, Egypt remains profoundly based on a precarious political and economic stability, which is internationally and diplomatically negotiated with the parable of economic opportunities and growth under the umbrella of Agenda 2030, but which in fact implies major structural and socio-economic risks, which in turn can become boomerang determinants due to the internal realignment of domestic religious, social and military actors along the infrastructural and international spectrum. This lens of analysis with application in the context of Egypt can be exported to other contemporary autocracies in the way illiberal green policies lying about sustainability are being internationally turned into dispositives for political and economic legitimation on the one hand, and for the functioning of a new frontier of moral green capitalism on the other.

Since 2013 Egypt has radically changed many of the historical state’s structural assets, and presents some features reminiscent of a form of ‘personalist’ authoritarianism, though non-exclusivist, embedded into an organically transformed societal materiality which impacted with the linearity of internal alignments. This book distances itself from existing debates, arguing for a simplistic restoration of a militarised structure in the country, and for a continuum between al-Sisi and Mubarak’s model of regime. Illiberal regimes have many sub-faces, they are not static or single level-built entities along the spectrum of their taxonomies. The process of internal legitimation is here designed beyond classical approaches confined to Max Weber. Rather, the book has designed a framework for reinterpreting internal political legitimacy in sub-transformed systems in which micro-structural shifts in the nature of relations are projected towards new categories of material resources. The framework will go beyond Egypt and the Middle East.

A central argument of this book concerns the idea of authoritarian continuity in post-shockwaves settings and the rise of what the book defines as ‘fluid authoritarianism’ as a sub-structural and organic result of shockwaves that collapsed historical and structural certainties and impacted with the transition period. On a transregional scale, this idea of illiberal fluidity is embedded into a regional context that considers the interconnections of domestic political survival with readjustments in transnational alignments in times of transition. The reconstruction of the Egyptian machine of governance through the prism of internal political legitimacy has permitted this book to expand on the broader political design derived at the regional and international level as directly stemming from intra-countries’ structural change. These interconnections can directly influence new forms of political and economic ambitions and rehabilitation along the international system and market that are straightforwardly modulated by the inner-transformations and relationship that take place within the political system itself. In addition, the intradisciplinary multi-level built framework designed in the book has permitted a twofold theorisation where the rise of fluid authoritarianism as a brand-new taxonomy of autocracy that emerged after shockwaves is interlinked with the fluidity of Arab states. The book unpacks these aspects before turning, in the final chapter, to offer a critical radical discussion on political ecology and power as constituting a critical ecosystem for political legitimacy. While the focus is on Egypt, in fact the critique here finds application to what the book calls the fluid Middle East, alias a region in which political, intra-societal and economic relations have become more fluid than in the past as a result of changes at the level of the political structures. The Middle East region remains profoundly brittle, but this is an aspect that is still neglected by Western actors, who continue to view new governments that have emerged and ‘consolidated’ since 2011 or so as politically stable entities and trustworthy economic partners in the Mediterranean area. As the book highlights, these premises risk renegotiating the boundaries and structure of power where nature will become a new locus of political power, exclusion and contestation, in Egypt and beyond.

Please note: references/citations have been removed for the purposes of this excerpt

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.