Middle East Critique

Palestine Is a Global Issue: Situating the Genocide and Beyond

This special issue of Middle East Critique, “Palestine Is a Global Issue: Situating the Genocide and Beyond,” brings together interdisciplinary scholarship examining Palestine as both a specific historical and political struggle and a critical site through which contemporary configurations of colonialism, imperial power, international law, knowledge production, cultural memory, and transnational resistance can be reconsidered. Emerging from the international conference of the same title, convened by the Observatory for Palestine Studies (OPal) at Iscte–University Institute of Lisbon in May 2026, the issue seeks to develop a sustained interdisciplinary conversation about what the ongoing genocide in Gaza and escalating colonial violence across Palestine reveal about the structures, institutions, and epistemologies through which Palestinian dispossession is enabled, contested, represented, and remembered.

However, the issue is not conceived as a publication of conference proceedings. Rather, the conference provides the intellectual point of departure for a selective collection organized around a clearly defined conceptual intervention: the proposition that Palestine must increasingly be understood relationally, transnationally, and globally. To describe Palestine as a global issue is not simply to argue that events in Palestine have consequences beyond it, but rather to identify the transnational structures through which the Palestinian condition is itself produced and contested, by means of political, military, economic, juridical, technological, academic, and media networks—alongside a Palestinian resistance increasingly articulated with wider movements for decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, racial justice, abolition, feminism, migration, and climate justice.

The destruction of Gaza since October 2023, alongside escalating dispossession and violence in the West Bank, has generated renewed debates about genocide, settler colonialism, forced displacement, apartheid, international law, humanitarian governance, media representation, academic freedom, cultural destruction, and the responsibilities of institutions and intellectuals, among others. The issue will resist treating October 2023 as an exception, inviting contributors instead to situate the present within the longer histories of an ongoing Nakba, Israeli settler colonialism, and Palestinian displacement and resistance.

The issue is organized around a central question: What becomes visible when Palestine is understood not only as an object of international concern but as a global analytic through which contemporary structures of power, knowledge, violence, memory, and resistance can be interrogated?

We invite scholars, artists, journalists, and activists to engage critically and creatively with these urgencies. Contributions may engage a range of formats, from academic papers (particularly encouraged are interdisciplinary approaches), creative work including visual and photographic works, poetry or creative non-fiction writing, as well as works not confined to academic work and scholars only. The format and content may reflect your practice, whether rooted in community-based work, education, art, humanitarian action, journalism, or research. We do especially encourage early career researchers and PhD students to submit.

Possible Topics

Possible topics should revolve around the three core themes, which have been identified for the international conference, but are not limited to:

1. Connecting Palestine: Resistance(s), Transnational Solidarities, and Activism

• Different waves of mass mobilisations: mass protest, student encampments around the world, and initiatives such as the Global Sumud Flotilla
• Interconnection of movements for climate justice, decolonization, and liberation
• Transnational activism and civil society engagement around Palestine
• Everyday resistance(s), smaller mundane acts of activism/solidarity and community building/coalition building
• Resistance in the shatat (diaspora/exile) through cultural preservation, storytelling, artistic expression, and digital media
• Social media and digital platforms, cybercolonialism and “the permission to narrate”

2. Reckoning Palestine: International Law, Justice, and Education

• Accountability failures: enablers, displacers, and replacers left unprosecuted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide
• Epistemologies of justice and collective knowledge production
• Media and institutional propaganda as obstruction of justice
• Western academia's silence and complicity in genocide and neocolonialism
• NGO complicity and institutional reinforcement of colonial systems
• Pedagogies of liberation and their intersection with international law
• Feminist and gender-justice approaches to emancipation
• Abolitionist perspectives on law and justice
• Political economy of international law
• Indigeneity and land rights under international law

3. Preserving Palestine: Politics of Memory, Heritage and Erasure

• Question of memory and dispossession
• Resistance and ongoing struggles over history and identity
• Forms of destruction: environmental destructions, land and resource grabbing, pollution
• Memory as a form of resistance across generations and geographies
• Memory as continuity
• Archives and heritage preservation (both tangible and intangible)