Corinna Mullin

Islamist Challenges to the ‘Liberal Peace’ Discourse: The Case of Hamas and the Israel—Palestine ‘Peace Process’

This article will examine the reasons behind Israel’s and the international community’s refusal to engage Hamas in the internationally sanctioned ‘peace process’. It will be argued here that more important than the ‘strategic’ challenges Hamas is deemed to pose to this process, are the epistemological and ontological challenges the movement intrinsically poses to the dominant normative framework that underpins the process. In order to understand the roots of this challenge, I will employ the three-pronged approach of what Florian Hoffman refers to as ‘epistemological relativism’. This entails a ‘complexification’ of the normative framework on which the discourse of the peace process is based; a ‘de-exoticisation’ of the normative framework in which the Other — in this case Hamas — operates; and a ‘re-exoticisation’ of the normative framework on which the process is predicated, ‘showing its contingent and idiosyncratic nature’, and therefore creating a space in which the Other may be understood and engaged. The article will conclude by arguing that it is only once this process has been undertaken that we can begin to fathom the establishment of an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine, which is considered ‘just’ by all parties to the ‘conflict’.

Introduction: The West Asian and North African Uprisings and the Limits of Liberal Governance

This special section brings together scholars working in divergent disciplines and locations. By focusing on agency and politics from below in addition to the structural and discursive contexts that condition wider relations between the West Asian and North African (WANA) region and the European Union, the special section makes the case for a critical reinterpretation of WANA–European relations and a paradigm for future intellectual engagement.

Discourses of Power and State Formation: The State of Emergency from Protectorate to Post-Uprising Tunisia

Extending the timeframe of analysis beyond the post-uprising period, Corinna Mullin and Brahim Rouabah retrace the way in which the state of emergency has functioned as a discourse of power and a modality of governance throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras. Specifically, the article focuses on how the state of emergency contributes to the reinforcement of dominant narratives about national identity, and the foreclosure of more radical alternative political, social and economic projects outside of the colonial-modern norm.