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Islamist Challenges to the 'Liberal Peace' Discourse: The Case of Hamas and the Israel Palestine 'Peace Process'
Corinna Mullin Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2010 39: 525 originally published online 8 November 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0305829810384007 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mil.sagepub.com/content/39/2/525

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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies

Forum Article

Islamist Challenges to the Liberal Peace Discourse: The Case of Hamas and the IsraelPalestine Peace Process
Corinna Mullin
Abstract

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39(2) 525546 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co. uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0305829810384007 mil.sagepub.com

School of Oriental and African Studies

This article will examine the reasons behind Israels and the international communitys 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.

Keywords
Hamas, liberal peace, political Islam

There has been a marked change in the way in which religion is approached in both the discipline and practice of international relations in the ten years since the publication of the Millennium special issue on Religion and International Relations. It is no longer entirely accurate to say that religion is merely considered a private affair of individuals, a domestic issue of states, or it is liminal; in any event, it eludes the territorial boundaries

Corresponding author: Corinna Mullin, School of Oriental and African Studies Email: cm39@soas.ac.uk

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characteristic of state-centric IR studies.1 It is evident that, today, more attention is focused on the role of religious actors, ideas and practices in social, political and economic relations within and between states. It is notable that the latest edition in the Task Force Series produced by an influential global-issues think-tank, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, was dedicated to the issue of Engaging Religious Communities Abroad, looking at the opportunities for enhancing US foreign policy by taking religion more seriously. According to the Task Force report: Religion has been rapidly increasing as a factor in world affairs, for good and ill, for the past two decades.2 Despite these developments, there has been a lack of substantial change in the way Western governments engage Islamist movements,3 arguably the most important manifestation of religious politics as far as US/European foreign-policy interests are concerned. When considered at all, there is still a strong tendency among Western policy- makers to view Islamist movements through the narrow modern rationalist lens, which holds that the appeal of religious movements can be seen as a reflex reaction to various economic, social and political processes generally associated with globalisation.4 Within this perspective, Islamist movements are generally constructed as a threat to the national security of individual (Western, or pro-Western) states, or even, occasionally, to the entire international order.5 When considered solely within this security framework, the diversity that exists between and within Islamist movements is often overlooked. This includes different positions adopted on pressing theological, political, economic and social issues, as well as different conceptions both of the appropriate spheres (political, religious, military) in which to act and of the kinds of action that are legitimate and appropriate.6 Also disregarded are the more substantive challenges (beyond security) that these movements may actually pose to the international order on the epistemological and ontological, rather than strategic, levels. One of the most prominent ways in which the modern rationalist approach affects the study of political Islam is via its tendency to ideologise the use of terrorism by Islamist movements. This tendency is predicated on the construction of an organic and inextricable link between the raisons dtre of these movements and the tactics or strategies they employ. Moreover, the ideologisation of terror perspective implicitly denies the specific political and security contexts in which these tactics and strategies are adopted, often as a last resort. Instead, it either focuses largely on economic
1. Vendulka Kublkov, Towards an International Political Theology, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 3 (2000): 675704, at 676. 2. Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: Report of the Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy (Chicago, IL: CCGA, February 2010), 1. 3. The term Islamist movement is used in this article interchangeably with political Islam, referring broadly to those movements and political parties that actively affirm and promote prescriptions, laws, or policies that are held to be Islamic in character, employing Islamic metaphors and references, within the political sphere (International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, Middle East/North African Report, no. 37 [2 March 2005], 1). 4. Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 23. 5. James Piscatori, Order, Justice and Global Islam, in Order and Justice in International Relations, eds Rosemary Foot, John Lewis Gaddis and Andrew Hurrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 263. 6. International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, 3.

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factors assuming that the Islamist is under the influence of false consciousness, and merely reacting to material frustration caused by underdevelopment, inequality, globalisation and so on or, in orientalist fashion, it blames the violence on some pathological predisposition of Muslims, or on the result of their adherence to jihad, patently misconstrued as ideology rather than a theological concept. As these movements are reduced merely to the tactics/strategies they sometimes employ, it is deemed unnecessary to understand the context in which these tactics/strategies are chosen, and hence the motives behind their use. As one prominent Israeli analyst has stated: Motives are entirely irrelevant to the concept of political terrorism. At best, they are empirical regularities associated with terrorism. More often they simply confuse analysis.7 This approach results in what Mamdani calls the depoliticisation of violence,8 where the focus is overwhelmingly on the tactics employed by these movements, as opposed to their motivations or desired ends, which often include, contrary to mainstream opinion, very rational cultural demands, in addition to political ones (nationalist, anti-imperialist and even democratic).9 According to this logic, the West, and often Israel as its civilisation proxy, is constructed as ontologically civilised, humane, reasonable and innocent, in contrast to the Islamist enemy, who is inherently barbaric, irrational, uncivilised and a priori culpable.10 It is within this context that the marginalisation of Hamas, an Islamist-nationalist movement often accused of expressing irrational hatred towards, and practising indiscriminate violence against, its Israeli foe, in the IsraelPalestine peace process can be understood. In addition to further examining the reasons behind Hamass marginalisation in this process in the first section, this article seeks to serve as a corrective to the modern rationalist tendency by taking seriously the epistemological and ontological challenges potentially posed by Hamas to the internationally sanctioned peace process. Fulfilment of this task will be greatly facilitated by the support of two of the analytical components of Florian Hoffmans logic of complexification, including the re-exoticisation of the familiar and known and the de-exoticisationof the Others normative framework.11 Both of these components will be employed in the remaining four sections of the article. The former will be applied to the normative framework underpinning the peace process, and requires self-reflexivity and the application of an anthropological gaze vis--vis the Self, demonstrating its contingent and idiosyncratic nature.12 It is only once this task
7. Boaz Ganor, Defining Terrorism: Is One Mans Terrorist Another Mans Freedom Fighter? (Washington, DC: International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 1999), 6. 8. Mahmood Mamdani, The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency, London Review of Books (8 March 2007). 9. Franois Burgat, Face to Face with Political Islam (London: Tauris, 2005), xvi. 10. Cyra A. Choudhury, Comprehending Our Violence: Reflections on the Liberal Universalist Tradition, National Identity and the War on Iraq, Muslim World Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2006): 2. 11. In his article, Hoffman discusses the logic of complexification in reference to the relationship that exists between the human rights activist defending victims of human rights violations committed in the context of post-9/11 counter-terrorism strategies, and the subject of his/her activism, who belongs to a different socio-cultural sphere. Florian F. Hoffman, Shooting into the Dark: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Human Rights (Activism), The University of Texas at Austin: Visiting Resource Professor Papers (2005): 128. Available at: http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/4082/hoffman.pdf?sequence=2. 12. Ibid., 23.

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has been completed that a theoretical space will be opened in which the Other, in this case Islamist movements in general and Hamas in particular, may be engaged and understood via the process of de-exoticisation, which grant[s] it the same degree of irreducible complexity as is characteristic of the I/we.13 As in the example provided by Hoffman regarding the raison dtre of the suicide-bomber, where the analyst is urged not to reduce the subject to a species of de-subjectivized being whose inner logic is fundamentally incomprehensible, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate the ways in which Hamass inner logic is also marked by the same complex mixing of a multiplicity of variables, only some of which are incommensurable, as any I/we identity, and hence amenable to both comprehension and engagement.14

The Discourse of the IsraelPalestine Peace Process:The Marginalisation of Hamas

On Tuesday 26 June 2007, only hours after standing down as UK Prime Minister and shortly before announcing his decision to relinquish his seat in Parliament, Tony Blair was appointed as the new Middle East envoy on behalf of the Quartet the USA, Russia, the UN and the EU and tasked with jump-starting a faltering peace process, already well into its second decade.15 Remarkably, there was very little criticism of the nature or remit of the envoy post, whose brief is confined to promoting [the facilitation of] Palestinian economic growth, improved security and institutional development, in order to create an environment of trust and confidence in which a peace agreement can be reached.16 Though a new initiative, the Quartets project is the latest iteration of the process set in motion in 1993 by the Oslo Accords, which constituted the first direct agreement between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), intending to establish a framework for future negotiations and for relations between the Israeli government and Palestinians. Like its Quartet counterpart, the Oslo process set aside final status issues,17 to be addressed and resolved at a later stage, and instead focused more attention on issues of security and good governance. Thus far, the Quartet and its partners have refused to engage the Islamist-nationalist party Hamas, which has been highly critical of the process for not addressing final status issues, though the movement has implicitly accepted, through its participation in the 2006 legislative elections, the Oslo-created institutions it has produced. This policy of marginalisation is highly problematic considering that Hamas continues to maintain control over the Palestinian Administration (PA) in Gaza and remains deeply entrenched within Palestinian society both there and in the West Bank.18
13. Ibid., 23. 14. Ibid., 23. 15. Blair Appointed Middle East Envoy, BBC (27 June 2007). Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_ politics/6244358.stm. 16. Key Issues, Office of the Quartet Representative Tony Blair. Available at: http://www.tonyblairoffice. org/quartet/pages/key-issues/. 17. Final status issues include: defining the final borders of the Palestinian state, the plight of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem. 18. Fawaz Gerges, The Transformation of Hamas, The Nation (8 January 2010).

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That there has been so little controversy either regarding Hamass marginalisation or the nature of the envoy post points to an unspoken consensus within the international community on the superiority of liberal peace as a model for conflict resolution, a consensus that can be traced back to the Enlightenment era. Following in the tradition of Oslo and the Road Map for Peace, Blairs mission is premised on a top-down approach to peace, which holds that the key to establishing peace between Israel and Palestine is the prior establishment in Palestine of the institutional, social and economic arrangements that comprise a liberal state, including the rule of law, democratic institutions and a liberal economy, all of which Hamas is deemed to threaten. Yet it is unclear why adherence to this model of conflict resolution is maintained in the face of empirical evidence that clearly points to its limitations. As Heathershaw has argued, outside of mid-20th-century Europe the impact of this approach has been largely negligible or even counterproductive, yet international peacebuilding discourses tend to be reproduced internationally regardless of their repeated failures, as demonstrated in the case of the IsraelPalestine peace process.19 One must therefore question the pious adherence to this approach by the Quartet in particular by the USA, whose hegemony in the region has ensured its disproportionate influence on the process and consider how and why the notion of liberal peace, a model specific to post-World War II Europe, has come to occupy such a dominant role in the international communitys imagination and practice. Instead, this concept, and the various remedies it spawns, should be viewed as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense: a structured system of meaning which shapes what we perceive, think and do on conflict resolution in general, and for the purposes of this article, particularly in relation to the PalestineIsrael conflict.20 By examining the IsraelPalestine peace process as a discourse, it is possible to illuminate some of the factors responsible for the continued rhetorical adherence of influential international actors to the liberal peace model. Like Edward Saids description of orientalism, this discourse model is predicated on a temporal, spatial and ethical construction of the Other, in this case Palestinians in general, and Hamas in particular, as anachronistic, irrational, inherently violent and in defiance of universally accepted norms, and therefore in need of an education by those who purportedly abide by these norms.21 This is in contradistinction to the Western Self, which is both created and reinforced in this construction as modern and progressive, and the principal progenitor of and adherent to the universal norms, rights and institutions with which it seeks to transform the Other. The Other is an inherent agitator, and must be transformed or eliminated before it spoils the order that is produced by these norms and institutions. As Heathershaw puts it, it is the Other in the conflict zone, rather than international political and economic

19. John Heathershaw, Seeing Like the International Community: How Peacebuilding Failed (and Survived) in Tajikistan, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 2, no. 3 (2008): 32951. 20. Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 184. 21. Heathershaw, Seeing Like the International Community, 32951.

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structures themselves, which must undergo change to correspond to mythologized international standards.22 In the case of the IsraelPalestine peace process, the assumption that goes unchallenged in analyses that seek to explain the failure of that process is the universal nature of the liberal peace on which it is predicated. Rather than accepting the discourse at face value and focusing on why certain aspects of the peace process have failed, or how other aspects could be improved, as most critiques have done, a critical approach, which this article employs, would instead require a root and branch assessment of the starting point on which the process is based.23 This assessment could take many forms: it could, for example, come from the perspective of political economy, viewing the peace process as a sham, a mere cover for more duplicitous intentions,24 and perhaps examining the actors that stand to benefit from either the continuation of conflict or the prolongation of the peace process (e.g. the US and Israeli defence industries, Israeli industry based in settlements, Israeli industries that benefit from having a dependency-type relationship with the Palestinian economy, the Palestinian elites, and those individuals and NGOs that benefit from involvement with the peace industry).25 It could also come from the perspective of procedural justice, based on the assumption that the normative framework institutionalised afte World War II is capable of delivering a just peace to the Palestinians and Israelis, if only the various deformities of the international normative framework could be corrected, so that the unilateral and often illegal acts of the strong could be more effectively constrained.26 Though these are all valid and valuable angles from which to construct a critical assessment of the peace process, the analyses they produce would not necessarily explain why Hamas, as a movement and political party, has been so stubbornly sidelined from the process, where its secular, nationalist counterparts have not. In fact, the PLO, the political and (originally) paramilitary umbrella organisation comprised of various nationalist factions, the largest of which is Fatah, was, like Hamas, also considered a terrorist organisation until the Oslo Accords. This process required mutual recognition between
22. Heathershaw, Seeing Like the International Community. For examples of this discourse model employed in the context of discussions on Hamas, see: Congress Shows Israel support, Jerusalem Post (9 June 2010); David Makovskk, Rethinking the Gaza Blockade, New York Times (1 June 2010); Yoram Cohen and Jeffrey White, Hamas in Combat: The Military Performance of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Policy Focus #97 (October 2009); David Frum, Should We Talk to Hamas?, National Post (17 January 2009). Available at: http://www.nationalpost. com/opinion/story.html?id=1187144; Michael Rubin, Diplomacy Cannot Quell GazaViolence, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (5 January 2009). Available at: http://www.aei.org/article/25579; Mathew Levitt, Legitimizing Hamas: Carters Visit Sends the Wrong Message, Weekly Standard (16 April 2008); Con Coughlin, Fundamentalists Threaten Israel from All Sides, Daily Telegraph (15 June 2007). 23. Chris Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice: International Political Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 12. 24. Oliver Richmond, Liberal Peace Transitions: A Rethink Is Urgent, openDemoracy.com (19 November 2009). Available at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/oliver-p-richmond/liberal-peace-transitions-rethinkis-urgent. 25. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (New York: South End, 1999); Said, The End of the Peace Process; Adam Hanieh, Palestine in the Middle East: Opposing Neoliberalism and US Power, Monthly Review (19 July 2008). 26. Rosemary Foot, John Gaddis and Andrew Hurrell, Order and Justice in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 42.

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the PLO and Israel and the initiation of a five-year transitional period in which Israel would gradually remove its troops from Palestinian areas, in exchange for a cessation of violence on the part of the PLO.27 This stands in stark contrast to the asymmetric demands being made of Hamas, requiring the movement to renounce violence, recognise Israel and recognise all previous agreements made between Israel and Palestinian leaders in the past, without requiring similar concessions on the part of Israel. This difference in treatment meted out to Hamas in relation to its secular counterpart seems particularly incongruent in light of the fact that the distance between the two parties positions vis--vis the peace process has increasingly diminished, a fact perhaps best evidenced in a comparison between their respective election manifestos, in which one finds that Hamas manifesto, released in mid-January 2006, differed little from that of Fatah (arguably this is the first official Hamas document to discuss the conflict without explicitly calling for the destruction of Israel), at least on the level of substance, if not process.28 In the interim, several Hamas leaders have expressed the movements willingness to accept a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, as part of a broader peace agreement with Israel. Even the partys position on the right of return for refugees, most often considered to be an obstacle to engagement, differs little from the official negotiating position of the PLO and of Fatah.29 Furthermore, Hamas Chief Khaled Meshaal has indicated that Hamas now endorses the US attempt to negotiate an end to the occupation, thus demonstrating a willingness to engage with the international process.30 Yet still there remains a strong reluctance on the part of the various actors involved in this process to provide Hamas with a seat at the negotiating table. In order to understand Israels and the international communitys intransigence over their refusal to engage with Hamas, it is necessary to consider the fact that, unlike Fatah, which has certainly been seen to pose a strategic threat to Israeli national security at various points in its history, Hamas also poses various epistemological and ontological challenges to the dominant normative framework that underpins the peace process.

Peace Process Normative Framework: Re-exoticising the IR Narrative of the Sovereign State
While the roots of the modern state system can be found in antiquity (e.g. the Greek citystates, 800168 bc), the narrative of the state, as told within IR, is that the modern state system is a European construct that first emerged in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, achieved maturity in the 17th century and culminated in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which put an end to the religious conflicts of the late 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. However, for those seeking to trace the birth of the liberal, constitutional sovereign state, the date and event most often evoked are 1789 and the French Revolution,
27. Mandy Turner, Building Democracy in Palestine: Liberal Peace Theory and the Election of Hamas, Democratization 13, no. 5 (2006): 743. 28. Ibid., 73955. 29. It is generally assumed that the PLOs unofficial position on the issues is that they might forgo the right of return in exchange for the 1967 borders. Amjad Attallh, Hamas Again Accepts a Palestinian State on the 1967 Lines, The Washington Note (3 August 2009). Available at: http://www.thewashingtonnote.com. 30. Ibid.

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when the notion that a states sovereignty could only be achieved with the consent and support of the people was first elaborated by the French philosophes, who, according to Thomas Paine, excoriated the Westphalian states for their egotistical power struggles that sustained the domestic rule of the parasitic plundering classes.31 Despite minor disagreements over the exact origins and timing of this development, there is a general consensus within IR that several factors played a role in the creation and consolidation of the modern state system, including the emergence of the Protestant religions, with the concomitant break-up of the universal Church, war, the development of more effective means of taxation by European rulers, modern science and technology (specifically agricultural and weapons technology and improvements in ship design), colonialism, the birth of capitalism and changes to the modes of production.32 Malaquias points out an additional factor, namely that the development of the modern European state coincided with tendencies to create unifying cultures around a dominant language.33 According to this narrative, it was the elimination of God (and his representatives on earth via the institutions of the Church) from the realm of socio-political affairs that cleared the way for a truly sovereign politics, one that involves both material capacity in its institutionalized forms, such as the public power of the state, and the subjective will of every citizen, as opposed to the divine power that preceded it.34 This new secular sovereignty was based on the same principles that had led to the restructuring of Protestant communities at the time, including individualism personal pursuit of trade and profit, and free markets, and would eventually result in the consolidation of the nation-state, where power was to be wielded by a tight and immensely powerful central elite enjoying a monopoly of violence both internal and external.35 Despite its centrality within IR, there is a growing tendency to challenge this mainstream narrative of the state, and its concomitant theory of sovereignty. These challenges range from the less confrontational historical sociological approaches which like realism give prominence to the state but consider the context, socio-economic and international, in which it [the state] is located and reproduced,36 to the more radical, constructivist and post-structural approaches, which start from the premise that nation-states are unavoidably paradoxical entities that do not possess prediscursive, stable identities.37 As the editors of Politics without Sovereignty have pointed out, this criticism includes both empirical studies that claim to prove the increasing irrelevance
31. Christopher J. Bickerton, Phillip Cunliffe and Alexander Gourevitch, eds, Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 9. 32. Chris Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice: International Political Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 1927. 33. Assis Malaquias, Reformulating International Relations Theory: African Insights and Challenges, in Africas Challenge to International Relations Theory, eds Kevin C. Dunn and Timothy M. Shaw (London: Palgrave, 2001), 13. 34. Bickerton et al., Politics without Sovereignty, 1011. 35. Alastair Crooke, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution (New York: Pluto, 2009), 40. 36. Fred Halliday, The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 35, 43. 37. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: University of Minnesota Press/Manchester University Press, 1998), 12.

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of the sovereign nation-state, as conceived by the mainstream narrative, and normative studies that advocate an end to state sovereignty as we know it, for various moral and political reasons.38 For critical IR thinkers like David Campbell, the shortfalls in the explanatory capacity of this narrative have serious implications for how we understand international relations: if not historically accurate, he asks, then what purpose does it serve? For him, the importance of the narrative is in justifying the ontological status of the state and in normalising the insideoutside distinctions on which it is predicated, and which are inherent in the realist understanding of the anarchical nature of the international realm, and hence the type of power politics necessary to secure a states survival in that realm. To challenge this narrative one must therefore be able to demonstrate that the state actually has:
no essence, no ontological status that exists prior to and is served by either police or war. Instead, the state is the mobile effect of a multiple regime of governmentality, of which the practices of police, war, and foreign policy/Foreign Policy are all a part.39

It is precisely the ontological status of the state constructed via this narrative that is at the heart of modern rationalist analyses of political Islam which focus on security, as discussed above. As (largely) non-state actors who sometimes use violence as a tactic to oppose either what are deemed repressive and illegitimate domestic governments or foreign occupying powers, Islamist movements are seen to pose an ontological threat to the Westphalian state, which jealously guards its monopoly of the use of force within its territorial boundaries. One can understand the marginalisation of motives characteristic of the ideologisation of terror analyses in this context, taking into consideration the fear that acknowledgement of context would lead, as Richmond and Franks contend, to a compromise on the foundational norms of the liberal state.40 Despite these various challenges to the narrative of the state, several assumptions (e.g. that states are the dominant actors in the system, that their sovereignty is derived from the support and will of the people, that they are exogenously constituted, that they define security in self-interested terms and so on) still dominate mainstream IR analyses.41 That this is so is a testament to a broad acceptance within IR of the Eurocentric version of the origins of the state, whence its generally accepted definition is derived. This definition, which Halliday terms national-territorial totality, is replete with legal and value assumptions (i.e. that states are equal, that they control their territory, that they coincide with nations, that they represent their peoples), all of which render problematic its use as a universal concept capable of explaining all inter- and intra-state relations across the globe.42
38. Bickerton et al., Politics without Sovereignty, 1. 39. Ibid., 202. 40. Oliver Richmond and Jason Franks, The Impact of Orthodox Terrorism Discourses on the Liberal Peace: Internalisation, Resistance, or Hybridisation?, Critical Studies on Terrorism 2, no. 2 (2009): 203. 41. Alexander Wendt, Constructing International Politics, International Security 20, no. 1 (1995): 7181. 42. Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 78.

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Islamist Normative Framework: De-exoticising Challenges to the IR Narrative of the Sovereign State
If adherence to the mainstream narrative of the state may still be justifiable when assessing the international relations of states whose development paralleled that of the Westphalian states, its uncritical use in most other instances is problematic. Scholars focusing on the international relations of non-Western parts of the world, for example, have argued that the European state differs fundamentally from the postcolonial state in its origins and subsequent development; therefore, they find the mainstream narrative of the Western sovereign state inadequate when it comes to understanding and explaining developments in these regions. As with the critical Western IR tradition discussed above, these analyses also start by problematising the narrative of the origins of the state, although they tend to focus on its inability to explain the particular development of non-Western states, rather than challenging its empirical accuracy in the context of a globalised world. As Malaquias contends, African states did not emerge as a result of a long period of social, economic, political, scientific, and religious development determined by Africans, but rather result from colonial imposition created to serve Western, not African, interests.43 While their colonial history explains some of the overlapping characteristics marking the development of several Muslim-majority states and that of their African counterparts (not to mention that several of the latter also have Muslim majorities), it could be argued that the development of the Muslim-majority state, in particular those states comprising peoples formerly belonging to the caliphate system of rule that developed in the aftermath of the Prophet Mohammeds death, differs from that of the European state in two additional ways: a large portion of the people of these states have traditionally felt a greater allegiance to the larger, transnational community (ummah), delineated by the borders of religion (Islam) rather than by physical borders, language or ethnicity; and Muslim-majority states, because of their unique historical development and epistemological and ontological realities, have not been secularised in the same manner and to the same extent as their European counterparts. The Islamist critique holds that the state has never actually been a sovereign entity, as it is only Allah who is sovereign, and governments and the individuals they represent can merely strive to implement His will on earth. Furthermore, self-determination in this context only has meaning insofar as the actions undertaken by individuals and states in pursuit of this principle are employed in a way consistent with Allahs wishes, and which thus furthers their ability to become what they were created to be.44 As Sayyid argues, for this reason:
Islamists explicitly reject nationalism, declaring that an Islamic state is not a nationalistic state because ultimate allegiance is owed to God and thereby to the community of all believers the ummah. One can never stop at any national frontier and say the nation is absolute, an ultimate end in itself.45
43. Malaquias, Reformulating International Relations Theory, 13. 44. Robert Crane, Islamic Social Principle of the Right to Freedom (Haqq al-Hurriyah): An Analytical Approach, Arches Quarterly 3, no. 4 (2009): 515. 45. Bobby Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (London: Zed Books, 1999), 91.

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Even for the Islamic modernists in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries who actively sought innovative means of resisting an increasingly powerful Europe as it encroached upon the Islamic worlds weakening borders, the idea of dividing up the ailing Ottoman empire into separate nation-states was greeted with scepticism, with some, like the South Asian thinker Abul Ala Mawdudi, rejecting outright the institution of the nation-state, viewing many diplomatic conventions as alien and destructive of pan-Islamic union.46 For others, such as Muhammad Abduh, the Islamic philosopher who probably came the closest to advocating acceptance of the nation-state as an organising principle capable of resisting the numerous threats emanating from Europe, the division of the ummah into separate nation-states was seen as a last resort, and one that should be mitigated by strict adherence on the part of the newly formed states to the central precepts of Islam. It was for this reason that Abduh referred to the state in terms reminiscent of the caliphate itself, for example, as al-khilafat al-Islamiyyah, or hukumat al-khilafah (government of a caliphate) in order to stress what he believed was the necessary continuity between the former and the latter.47 Although many in the Muslim world came to accept the idea of the nation-state as a necessary tool in the effort to resist European imperialism, the recognition of a basic contradiction between nationalism as a time-bound set of principles related to the qualities of and needs of a particular group of human beings, and Islam as an eternal, universalist message, drawing no distinction between its adherents except on the criterion of their piety meant this support was tenuous at best and therefore capable of being overturned.48 Furthermore, there remained hope among many advocates of this strategy that it was merely the first phase in the struggle to regain a sovereign, and territorially distinct, Muslim ummah, and that the liberation of the respective country or administrative zone was a further step in the direction of one all-embracing Islamic entity.49 According to Burgat, Islam never ceased to serve as a central reference point in the world-views of the majority of those involved in the anti-colonial nationalist movements, even if not made explicit by the leaders of these movements. Furthermore, Burgat explains the proliferation of Islamist movements in the period following independence as the result of activists coming to terms with the fact that the version of nationalism their leaders had adopted, for example secular and heavily influenced by Western ideas and experiences, failed adequately to reflect their own religious and cultural identities.50 As opposed to the essentialist, or orientalist, approach to political Islam, which views these movements as static and unresponsive to material factors or to a wider political opportunity structure,51 the example of the adoption of the nation-state as an organising principle in resisting colonialism, imperialism and foreign aggression, is a good illustration of just how flexible and pragmatic Islamist ideology can be. In the case of Hamas, justifying the adoption of a nationalist guise was facilitated by the fact that the land of
46. James Piscatori, Order, Justice and Global Islam, in Order and Justice in International Relations, eds Rosemary Foot, John Lewis Gaddis and Andrew Hurrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 265. 47. Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (London: Tauris, 2005). 48. Ibid., 114. 49. Andrea Nsse, Muslim Palestine: The Ideology of Hamas (London: Routledge, 1998), 50. 50. Burgat, Face to Face with Political Islam, 26. 51. Gunning, Hamas in Politics, 56.

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historic Palestine is considered a waqf, or religious endowment. According to this Islamist foundational narrative, as one of the lands conquered during the early spread of Islam under the four Rashidun (rightly guided) Caliphs the land must remain under Muslim rule until Judgement Day.52 Furthermore, it is home to what is generally considered the third holiest site in Islam, Al Aqsa Mosque, to which Muslims believe that the prophet Muhammad was transported during the Night Journey.53 Though the Hamas charter has been criticised by many, perhaps most importantly from those within the movement who feel it does not have the correct tone for an official document, and could have been stronger if it had been expressed in more universal language, it is instructive of the way the movement has internally justified its support for the nationalist cause.54 After explaining the waqf nature of Palestinian land, the charter claims: Nationalism (wataniyya) [is] part and parcel of the religious faith. Nothing is loftier or deeper in Nationalism than waging Jihad against the enemy and confronting him when he sets foot on the land of the Muslims.55 The way in which the term jihad is used here signifies a maqasid,56 or objective-oriented, as opposed to literalist, approach to the Quranic verses dealing with matters of justice, war and peace; there are some 150 of these, such as: Fight in Gods cause those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression, for God does not love aggressors slay them wherever you may come upon them and drive them away from where they drove you away, for oppression is worse than killing (2: 1901).57 As Rane explains, the maqsad of these verses entails defence of what is deemed as just war, that is, the use of armed force is for selfdefense, including the preservation of life, religious freedom, and homeland for the socioeconomic security it provides.58 According to this understanding of nationalism, the nation-state is merely a means to an end to defend Muslim life, religion and homeland from outside aggression. In this sense, there is no ontological commitment to the Westphalian nation-state and therefore no need to jealously defend the order it necessitates. If it fails to provide the ends sought by Islamist movements, then it may be challenged through violence. At the heart of the Wests reaction to this violence is not so much abhorrence of political violence as a fear of being forced to compromise on the foundational norms of the liberal state.59 As Crooke points out:
It has not been the case that western Governments abhor violence per se: Iraq, Afghanistan and now Lebanon attest to that; but we see that the Westphalian structure of nation states as the only framework for the legitimate use of violence. States may practice violence; but when
52. 53. 54. 55. 56. Tamimi, Hamas, 152. Ibid. Ibid. The Charter of Allah: The Platform of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) (1998). Available at: http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/www.thejerusalemfund.org/carryover/documents/charter.html. As Rane explains: the scholars of Islamic law have defined the [maqasid] in reference to the purpose and objectives of the law and its sources, specifically the Quran and Prophetic Traditions: Halim Rane, Reconstructing Jihad amid Competing International Norms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 176. As with all Quranic verses, this verse is subject to exegesis on the part of interpreters. In this case, the author is referring to interpretations that could be attributed to Hamas. Rane, Reconstructing Jihad, 181. Richmond and Franks, The Impact of Orthodox Terrorism Discourses, 203.

57. 58. 59.

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movements use it, it seems to threaten traditional certainties the same traditional certainties that underpin the Enlightenment.60

Peace Process Normative Framework: Re-exoticising Liberal Peace

Taking into consideration the various epistemological and ontological obstacles posed by the narrative of the sovereign state in engaging Islamist movements in general, and Hamas in particular, it should come as no surprise that the latter has been marginalised in the internationally sanctioned peace process, which is predicated on the notion of liberal peace and on all the assumptions by which the concept is underpinned. From these narratives, and the overarching modern rationalist approach from which they derive, a peace process is developed which is not only severely limited in terms of the extent to which root causes of the conflict can be considered as there is an implicit fear that this sort of endeavour could end up undermining the liberal norms and rational sovereignties on which the modern system of states has been developed but also in terms of its capacity to take on board the identity needs and normative frameworks of actors that are ontological outsiders to that system.61 The IsraelPalestine peace process is a direct descendant of the Enlightenmentderived theory of perpetual peace, as expressed by Immanuel Kant in 1795. These theories hold that states with representative forms of government would be less likely to go to war than states with non-representative forms of government, as the government of the former would require the consent of its citizens in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), and nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war.62 According to this theory, rational citizens would reject war as it would be viewed as too costly, both in terms of lives lost and national expenditure.63 Underpinning this theory was the notion that war is the result of the absence of the rule of law on both domestic and international levels.64 According to Kant, the former could be avoided via the establishment of a republican political order on the state level, and the latter through the creation of a federation of free states on the international level, which would be guided by a set of cosmopolitan obligations including universal hospitality and the right of the stranger not to be treated with hostility.65 Though there was much discussion of how to achieve perpetual peace in the intervening years, it was only in the aftermath of World War II that a concerted effort was made to institutionalise Kants cosmopolitan theory through the creation of the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. According to Oliver Richmond, in the context of the [newly created] UN system, peace came to engender the rejection of interstate war, the
60. Crooke, Resistance, xi. 61. Richmond and Franks, The Impact of Orthodox Terrorism Discourses, 204. 62. Immanuel Kant, First Definitive Article for Perpetual Peace: The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican, Perpetual Peace (1795) (BiblioLife, LLC, 2009), 120. 63. Ibid. 64. Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice, 44. 65. Ibid., 45.

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provision of humanitarian resources, development, financial regulation and adjustment, and human rights.66 Crucially, this liberal peace would be overseen by the USA, an increasingly hegemonic power in the international system in the aftermath of World War II.67 In its democratic peace manifestation, based on the idea that democracies (rather than republics) are less likely to go to war with one another, this idea gained salience in the 1970s, along with the economic liberalisation programmes that were pushed on developing countries aligned with the USA in the context of the Cold War. However, it was not until the ideological reorientation of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of what many considered the viability of alternative ideological paradigms to Western liberalism that policies derived from these theories became core priorities for the USA and for European states.68 Though perhaps in an exaggerated form, the democracy-promotion policies of US President George W. Bush were also derived from a particular (in this case neoconservative) interpretation of the democratic peace thesis which was developed in the 1990s, and linked to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a Washington-based think-tank that became synonymous with the neocon label, and with its goals of promoting and protecting US supremacy in the world.69 This policy also chimed well with the increasingly prominent position that political violence by non-state actors had come to occupy in the post-Cold War national security discourse, as this was concerned not with relations among potentially warring states, but with class or group dynamics within a single state that may spill over and affect others,70 most importantly, Western states. In their rejection of the monopoly of violence supposedly enjoyed by the sovereign state, and of the secularism and type of instrumental rationality deemed necessary to elect and uphold a liberal, secular, democratic government, Islamist movements came to be seen as posing the greatest threat to the international order in general, and in particular to US primacy within that order. In this context, democracy promotion, in its limited neocon sense based on a modern rationalist understanding of the link between secularisation and modernity, was seen as a means to prevent Islamist movements from destabilising, or gaining power over, Muslim-majority states, many of which were and are US allies.

Islamist Normative Framework: De-exoticising Hamass Understanding of Peace and Conflict

The marginalisation of Hamas an Islamist movement deemed to threaten Israeli national security and the international order in the IsraelPalestine peace process should be seen within the above context. As it is rooted in a modern rationalist worldview, and focused solely on the potential strategic threat posed by Hamas, this approach not only overlooks the numerous issues motivating Hamas including social, political and economic factors but also the identity- and value-driven motivations that can only
66. 67. 68. 69. Richmond, Liberal Peace Transitions, 43. Ibid., 45. Turner, Building Democracy in Palestine. Jonathan Monten, The Roots of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism, and Democracy Promotion in US Strategy, International Security 29, no. 4 (2005): 11256. 70. Stephen Holmes, Futurology, London Review of Books 28, no. 19 (2006): 1316.

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be understood through examining the Islamist normative framework in which they operate, as this article advocates. Contrary to the underlying assumption of much of the ideologisation of terror analyses, which are reinforced by the position of neo-fundamentalist movements such as al-Qaeda, believing as they do that peace is impossible to establish between Muslims and non-Muslims that is, between the societies of the dar al-Islam (house of Islam) and those of the dar al-harb (forces of evil)71 peace is a major component of the normative framework within which Hamas operates. Many scholars argue that peace is at the heart of the religion (if not always practised), as demonstrated by the term Islam, which is derived from the root slm (peace).72 As Abu-Nimer points out: The ultimate objective of the Islamic worldview is peace, not war.73 Though the issues of war and peace occupy complex and dynamic places within the tradition of Islam, from theological, juristic and historical perspectives, it would be hard to refute the existence within this tradition of a wealth of examples on which the Islamist normative framework could and does rely to ensure compatibility with international law and the norms and institutions that underpin it. For example, there are historic examples (e.g. Salahadins 12thcentury battle of Hattin),74 as well as Quranic verses that can be seen as forming the basis for a normative framework which imposes limits both on the possible justifications for entering war (jus ad bellum) for example, Fight in Gods cause those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression for God does not love aggressors (2: 1901) and on the conduct of war (jus in bello), with plenty of examples of injunctions against killing women, children and other noncombatants.75 As Rane points out, a maqsad approach to the Qurans position on war and peace is the upholding of justice, self-defense, and self-determination, including freedom of religion and freedom from oppression.76 Where Hamass normative framework does come into conflict with that underpinning a liberal peace is that it is not based on the deterministic notion that a conflict between two peoples will naturally end once both sides have established the rule of law, democratic institutions and a liberal economy within their respective states (or in the case of Palestine, within its territories) but rather once the causes of the conflict are acknowledged and redressed. Peace, in this case, means not merely the absence of war, but also the elimination of the grounds for conflict and the waste and corruption (fasad) it creates.77 In other words, from an Islamist normative perspective, peace cannot be achieved so long as oppression and tyranny persist, regardless of the institutional or economic arrangements
71. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Global Intifadah? September 11th and the Struggle within Islam, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 15, no. 2 (2002): 207. 72. Rane, Reconstructing Jihad, 192. 73. Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam: Theory and Practice (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 5. 74. The 1187 Battle of Hattin was a crucial battle won by the Muslim armies fighting under Salahadin against the Crusaders, restoring Islamic rule over Jerusalem and several other Crusader-held cities. 75. John Kelsay and James Turner Johnson, eds, Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991), 52. 76. Rane, Reconstructing Jihad, 178. 77. Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam: Theory and Practice, 267.

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that have been established to further this end.78 This stands in stark contrast to the way in which peace and conflict are conceptualised within the normative framework underpinning liberal peace, where the absence of order, rather than justice, is held to be the primary factor responsible for causing war. In considering the roots of the IsraelPalestine conflict, Hamas, as well as many non-Islamist scholars and activists,79 look back to the creation of the Israeli state, which has resulted in a situation where, as Hamas leader Khaled Meshal puts it: Half of our people have been dispossessed and are denied the right to return to their homes, and half live under an occupation regime that violates their basic human rights.80 Though in the past the conflict was defined in religious terms, with statements in the Hamas charter citing Quranic passages such as: And the Jews will not be pleased with thee, nor will the Christians, till thou follow their creed,81 to point out the untrustworthy character of Jews and therefore the inevitability of conflict with them as the basis for their rejectionist position vis--vis the peace process, there have since, as discussed above, been attempts by many leaders of the movement to speak in a more universal language. This can be seen as partially due to the natural evolution of Islamist discourse in general over the past 20 years, and partially to a new-found pragmatism within the movement, especially after winning the 2006 legislative elections, when it seemed necessary to appeal to a wider audience, including both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.82 Regardless of what is stated in its charter, the official position of Hamas today is that the roots of this conflict are colonial in nature, and can be traced back to 19th-century Europe and to that continents efforts to resolve its Jewish problem.83 As Tamimi explains, this was done at the expense of the Palestinians through the creation of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.84 Its effect today is to obstruct the revival of the Ummah, the global Muslim community, and to perpetuate Western hegemony in the region.85 Apart from the reference to the Ummah, this critique is one that is shared by many secular Arab nationalists, as well as by many Western scholars and activists who belong to neither tradition. Former Hamas Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Shaeer in fact blames the Israelis for framing the conflict in religious terms. This conflict is over holy land, so like it or not there is a religious element to it, Shaer explained in an interview with the author. Furthermore, it is the Israelis who use religion to occupy [Palestinian] land, and therefore they are the ones who are insisting on a religious framework for the conflict, they are the ones provoking a holy war.86
78. Ibid., 193. 79. See, for example, Joseph Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Oxford: Routledge, 2006); Ilan Papp, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006); Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000). 80. Meshal, interview with Livingstone, 2009. 81. Sura 2 (the Cow), v. 120. Source, Hamas charter. 82. Tamimi, Hamas, 153. 83. Tamimi, Hamas. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Interview with Nasser Shaer, Nablus, 15 April 2010.

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It is, however, Hamass commitment to the Islamic concept of peace and to that of justice (adl or adala), which underpins it that keeps the movement from giving in on the issue of the refugees right of return, which is one of the key obstacles to the movement being integrated into the peace process. As Rane explains, the term justice in Arabic literally refers to the act of straightening or correcting.87 From Hamass perspective, there can be no peace between Palestinians and Israel until, in particular, the negative ramifications for the Palestinian population of the creation of the Israeli state identified by Ismail Haniyeh, Prime Minister of the Palestinian government in Gaza, as our land, our right to Jerusalem as the rightful capital of our future state and the Palestinian refugees right to return to their homes are corrected.88 One can also witness the influence of an Islamist normative framework at work when considering Hamass rationale for refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the Israeli state, one of the preconditions for Israels and the Quartets agreement to enter into direct negotiations with the movement. As the academic Azzam Tamimi, an occasional international media adviser to Hamas, has explained, to recognise Israel would contravene the principles of Hamass Islamic faith [not] to recognize the legitimacy of the foreign occupation of any Muslim land.89 Hamass alternative to recognition, a hudna (truce) with the Israelis, is an example of how the parameters for Hamass negotiation strategy may be delineated by Islamic jurisprudence. As Tamimi has explained, the term hudna is replete with historical-religious significance it can be traced back to the first truce ever in the history of Islam, the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, intended to end hostilities for ten years between the first Muslim community led by the Prophet Muhammad and the Meccan tribe of Quraysh.90 Yet even in this position there are signs of Hamass pragmatism not in terms of relinquishing the Islamist normative framework and their call for justice, the fundamental principle on which their approach to peace is based, but rather in terms of how they define the parameters within which this correction must take place, which has expanded to allow an implicit acceptance of the Israeli states existence. To that end, some Hamas leaders have begun to veer away from the Hudaybiyyah reference in favour of one that allows for a longer state of coexistence between two parties formerly at war: the peace between Salahadins armies and the Crusaders. This historical example refers to the peace established by the famed Kurdish Muslim military commander and statesman who led the Muslims in battle against the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, and who after liberating Jerusalem from the Crusaders allowed them to retain a coastal state in the Levant.91 In another sign of Hamass increasing pragmatism in this regard, Khaled Meshal recently cited the example of reconciliation that was offered to the Prophets followers in Medina during the Ahzab battle, in which he suggested giving one-third of the citys fruit crops to the attacking Ghaftan tribe in exchange for peace.92 According to
87. Rane, Reconstructing Jihad, 193. 88. Ismail Haniyeh, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh: My Message to the West, The Independent (15 January 2009). 89. Tamimi, Hamas, 157. 90. Ibid., 159. 91. Gerges, The Transformation of Hamas. 92. Interview: Hamas leader discusses relations with PLO, partnership, Al-Sabil (22 July 2010).

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Meshaal, this example demonstrates the Prophets life of flexibility and jurisprudence and the way in which the wise and brave leader took context into consideration, including the condition and situation of his companions and people, when making strategic decisions regarding reconciliation in times of war.93 Yet even with these concessions, and Hamass implicit acceptance of the Oslo Accords the second condition set by the Quartet for the movements entry into the peace process by agreeing to hold office in an institution created by that process,94 Hamas continues to be marginalised. Many analysts and Western politicians point to Hamass violence to explain this. Former UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw illustrated this position in his reaction to Hamass 2006 Palestinian legislative elections: The whole of the international community has the responsibility to accept the outcome of any fair and democratic election, Straw said, but in this case Hamas has a clear responsibility to understand that with democracy goes a rejection of violence.95 Though within the secular Western framework democracy and violence are characteristically considered antithetical,96 we have already seen in the above that, in the narrative of the sovereign, secular Western state, violence is not considered intolerable; rather, the state should have a monopoly of violence within its territory. Seen through the ideologisation of terror lens, Hamas differs little from neo-fundamentalist movements like al-Qaeda that, through their ideological adherence to the notion of jihad, are deemed to threaten Westphalian international order. Similarly, Hamass violence is often seen as a threat not only to Israels national security but to the security of the West as well. As one prominent counter-terrorism expert, Matthew Levitt, contends, Hamas poses a multilayered threat to the West in that it is founded on deep hatred for America and the West and hence directly contributes to the rabid anti-Americanism spreading throughout the region.97 This is despite the fact that Hamas has repeatedly distanced itself from neo-fundamentalist movements, and has struggled to contain the rise of those inspired by al-Qaeda, such as Jund Ansar Allah (Warriors of God), within Hamas-controlled territory.98 As the former Hamas Justice Minister Ali Sartawi argues, Palestinian violence against Israel has nothing to do with an irrational hatred of Israel or of the West, but is rather a result of the hopelessness of the people.99 Rather than lumping all Palestinian violence under some generic jihadi heading, each act of violence should be judged separately and the story behind each act considered. Things can be explained rationally, according to Sartawi, when we look at the details but not when we talk in generalizations, as the ideologisation of terror discourse does.
Ibid. Sami Moubayed, Hamas: Learning from Mistakes, Asia Times (20 March 2010). Turner, Building Democracy in Palestine, 749. Gunning, Hamas in Politics, 12. Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 7. 98. Hamas Rejects al-Qaedas Support, BBC (5 March 2006). Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ world/middle_east/4776578.stm; Gerges, The Transformation of Hamas. 99. Ali Sartawi, former Minister of Justice in the national unity government of the PNA. Interview with the author in Nablus, 16 April 2010. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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One important story missed in the discourse regarding Hamass irrational violence, is the long-running cycle(s) of violence and counter-violence in which both Hamas, and its much stronger (in terms of economic and military might, as well as diplomatic support) Israeli foe partake.100 As Gunning has demonstrated, there is a direct connection between context and tactics in the case of Hamass violence, a point often missed in this discourse. Furthermore, he contends that extreme methods such as suicide bombing would not be used by Hamas, a movement that gains its legitimacy from popular support, without it being countenanced by a significant proportion of Palestinian society. When examining the contexts of two instances, between March and December 1996 and again in March 1999, which witnessed an exponential rise in support for suicide bombing, he finds evidence, in the time leading up to this shift, of a corresponding rise in the impact of Israels repressive mechanisms on Palestinian lives, including increased border closures, restrictions on movement and settlement building.101 Furthermore, as Gunning points out, violence has often been integral to the development and maintenance of democracy, while the ability to inflict violence can be a key component of an elected leaders authority.102 In the case of the IsraelPalestine conflict, for example, there is clear evidence that state violence, and indeed state terrorism, has been integral to the development and maintenance of Israels religion-based democracy. There have been several recent examples of Israels disproportionate, and often indiscriminate, use of violence against Palestinians. Israels Operation Cast Lead, for example a three-week offensive in Gaza between December 2008 and January 2009 which resulted in the loss of 1434 Palestinian and 13 Israeli lives, the destruction of at least 34,000 Palestinian homes, and untold damage caused to vital infrastructure was criticised by several prominent international human rights organisations, by governments and by the UN Human Rights Council for what the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, described as the one-sidedness of the military encounter.103 Even taking into consideration the unlawfulness of Hamas rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel, Falk insisted illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response.104 In June 2010 there was similar international condemnation of the Israeli naval attack, in international waters, on a flotilla of six vessels carrying international pro-Palestinian activists and humanitarian goods to Gaza, and thus challenging the Israeli blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory; at least nine activists were killed, and dozens wounded. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan
100. Jeroen Gunning, Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (London: Hurst, 2007), 217. 101. Ibid., 217. 102. Gunning, Hamas in Politics, 12. 103. UN Criticises Israelis over Gaza, BBC (23 March 2009); Chris McGreal, Demands Grow for Gaza War Crimes Investigation, The Guardian (13 January 2009); Ian Black, Israel Threatened with International Law, The Guardian (15 September 2009); Tim Hancock, Gaza: New Letter to Miliband Urges UK to Fully Support Goldstone Report at United Nations, Amnesty International: News and Events (24 September 2009). Available at: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=18428Posted; Omar Mumallah, In Defense of Goldstone, Yale Journal of Human Rights (5 February 2010). 104. Richard Falk, Israels War Crimes, The Nation (29 December 2008).

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branded the incident an act of state terrorism, with others, including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UK Ambassador to the UN Mark Lyall Grant, pointing out the unsustainable and unacceptable nature of the four-year-old blockade, which, despite Hamass effective ceasefire since Operation Cast Lead, has resulted in a situation where [s]anitation has broken down, the economy has collapsed, 80% of the population are on UN subsistence handouts, and postwar reconstruction is impossible.105 Israels disproportionate and often indiscriminate use of violence, as exemplified in these cases, has led some analysts to conclude that, if one is to employ the paradigm of terrorism to this conflict, it is that of state terrorism that is missing in the scholarly analysis of the developments on the ground.106 The fact that the focus, insofar as the peace process is concerned, is on Palestinian rather than Israeli violence, is another reminder of the continued hegemony of the modern rationalist paradigm and sovereign state narrative in international relations, in both theory and practice.

Conclusion
By examining the IsraelPalestine peace process as a discourse, I hope to have illuminated some of the factors responsible for the continued rhetorical adherence of influential international actors to this agenda, despite its obvious limitations. Furthermore, by applying two of the analytical components of Hoffmans logic of complexification, I hope to have demonstrated the culturally and historically contingent nature of some of the foundational narratives of Western international political thought and practice, particularly that which underpins the concept of liberal peace on which the IsraelPalestine peace process is predicated. I also hope to have highlighted some of the challenges posed by the Islamist normative framework, in which Hamas operates, to these foundational narratives and the normative framework they constitute. In doing so I have pointed out how the real obstacles to Hamass inclusion in the peace process have less to do with its violence, its potential to be a total or limited spoiler, or its failure to accept the various conditions on which the Oslo-derived Quartet peace process is predicated, than with the epistemological and ontological challenges Hamas poses, as an Islamistnationalist movement, to the ontological stability of the Western understanding of liberal peace, on which the peace process is based.107 In viewing the peace process as a discourse, it becomes clear that the function of these policies has more to do with constructing and reinforcing a certain image of the West and of Israel, the Wests civilisational proxy vis--vis the Palestinians as ontologically civilized, humane, reasonable, and innocent than with putting an end to the violence, with levelling asymmetrical power relationships in the region, or with finding a viable solution to the conflict in the form of a two-state solution, with two democratic States,

105. Seumas Milne, If Gazas Relief Is a Step Closer They Wont Have Died in Vain, The Guardian (3 June 2010). 106. Illan Pappe, De-terrorising the Palestinian National Struggle: The Roadmap to Peace, Critical Studies on Terrorism 2, no. 2 (2009): 144. 107. Oliver P. Richmond, The Transformation of Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5.

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Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace within secure and recognized borders.108 According to the peace-process discourse, peace between Israel and a future Palestinian state is not dependent on recognising and addressing the underlying causes of the conflict, as to do so might result in a compromise on the foundational norms of the liberal state, and hence result in disorder the opposite of peace according to the normative framework that underpins this discourse.109 By pointing out the foundational limits of the peace-process discourse, my intention is not to undermine the entire normative framework associated with this agenda, many aspects of which are also adhered to by Islamist movements in general, and by Hamas in particular. Rather, the purpose of this article is to open up a theoretical space in which what Richmond describes as post-liberal peace less encumbered by idealistic prescriptions and more locally resonant, can emerge. It is possible that, in reflecting thin cosmopolitan norms and thick local expectations and identities, it would be a peace that would satisfy the security and identity needs of all sides.110 Despite the hegemonic hold of liberal peace in discussions around the peace process vis--vis the IsraelPalestine conflict, there are reasons to conclude that a space may be opening for a post-liberal peace approach to take hold. This is the result of several factors that have caused a shift, however small, in the balance of power of the conflict system, away from the seemingly invincible Israeli state and its main ally and source of economic and military aid, the United States, and towards the economically, militarily and politically weaker Palestinians. In addition to the impact of popular international outcry at Israels heavy-handed tactics over the past year, various additional factors can be attributed to this shift, including the election on a platform of change from the neoconservative policies of the previous administration of Barak Obama as US President, the world economic crisis, and the incremental, though tangible, shift in the balance of power in the international system away from the US/West and towards the East, as expressed in the US National Intelligence Councils Global Trends 2025 report.111 All these factors have contributed to an increased potential for self-reflexivity and introspection on the part of the principal actors involved in the peace process, and to the prying open of a diplomatic space to allow for previously marginalised voices, including that of Hamas, to enter the formal peace process. There is increasing recognition on the part of these international actors many of whom not long ago forswore the possibility of including a movement consigned to US and EU lists of proscribed terrorists of the inevitability and substantial benefits to be gained from engagement with Hamas.112 One
108. Our Mission, Office of the Quartet Representative Tony Blair. Available at: http://www.tonyblairoffice. org/quartet/pages/about-oqr/. 109. Richmond and Franks, The Impact of Orthodox Terrorism Discourses. 110. Richmond, Liberal Peace Transitions. 111. Demetri Sevastopulo, US Report Sees Shift of Power to East, Financial Times (20 November 2008). For a rigorous analysis of the effect of Obamas election on the USAs foreign policy in general and its Middle East policy in particular, see Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, Obama and the Non-American World Order: Redefining the Role of The Leader of the Free World, Safe Democracy Foundation (29 January 2009). Available at: http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/7373. 112. Philip Webster, Hamas Must Be Brought into Peace Process, says Tony Blair, The Times (31 January 2009); U.K. Foreign Secretary: Talking with Hamas The Right Thing to Do, Reuters (25 February 2009); Limor Edrey, Former Peace Negotiators Urge World to Engage with Hamas, Haaretz Service (26

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of these prominent actors has even called on the international community to recognise that: Hamas should be treated as a political actor the blockade should be terminated immediately, and the UN should insist on the end to the blockade as a condition of Israels normal participation in the activities of the Organization.113 There is a corresponding willingness to engage on the part of Hamas, as expressed on separate occasions by several leaders of the movement over the past two years.114 Yet it is only once the epistemological and ontological challenges posed by Hamas to the peace process are fully understood and acknowledged that what Adib-Moghaddam has referred to as a policy of engagement can be implemented, and an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine, which is considered just by all parties to the conflict, can be established.115 Author Biography Corinna Mullin is a Lecturer in Comparative and International Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), with reference to the Middle East. Her current research involves comparative international political theory, considering both points of commonality and contrast between Islamist and Western conceptions of peace, war, justice and sovereignty.

February 2009); Fawaz Gerges, Engaging Hamas? Hamas Is a Mideast Reality, Los Angeles Times (31 January 2009). 113. Hanan Chehata, Exclusive Interview With Prof. Richard Falk, Middle East Monitor (9 April 2010). Available at: http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/articles/europe/884-richard-falk-qi-believe-that-hamasshould-be-treated-as-a-political-actor-that-the-blockade-should-be-terminated-immediatelyq. 114. Amjad Attallh, Hamas Again Accepts a Palestinian State on The 1967 Lines, The Washington Note, (3 August 2009). Available at <http://www.thewashingtonnote.com>; Jay Solomon and Julien BarnesDacey, Hamas Chief Outlines Terms for Talks on Arab-Israeli Peace, Wall Street Journal (31 July 2009). 115. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, How to Make Peace with Iran, Monthly Review (May 2010).

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