Frameworks of Emancipation: The Palestine-Israel Conflict as a Case Study for Assessing the Narrative, Rhetorical, and Ideological Differences Between Modern Western, Decolonial, and Settler Colonial Theories of Liberation (2025-2027)
The aim of this project is to examine the Western English-language academic discourse about the Palestine-Israel conflict since October 7th, 2023, as a case study for understanding the current ideological debates between modernist Western conceptions of struggles for national liberation, decolonization, and political self-determination – namely, conceptions that favour the building of a national state – and more recent conceptions of decolonization that have emerged in light of newer theorizations of settler colonialism.
To conduct this study, I am developing a narrative and rhetorical analysis of the logical presuppositions and assumptions used in settler colonialism studies notions of decolonization compared to those developed in modernist Western conceptions of national political self-determination.
I am using narrative analysis to look at ways that critical theory, itself, as applied to conceptions of oppression and liberation, is structured like a narrative or story, containing elements often viewed in storytelling, such as characters, plot, action, and ethics, aimed at conveying a particular moral perspective. Viewed from the perspective of narrative analysis, the moral standpoint of critical theory can be regarded as the value-laden ideological core of the argument that it represents.
From the perspective of critical theory, the narratives in question – the Palestinian and Jewish Zionist narratives of national liberation and decolonization – pertain to stories about oppression and emancipation. They typically begin by conceptualizing a situation or a problem expressing a certain form of unfreedom and/or exploitation – i.e., colonialism, antisemitism, the Shoah, and the Nakba – leading towards liberation.
My goal, is thus, to use narrative analysis to interpret the ideological presuppositions used in Palestinian and Zionist narratives of liberation, based in competing assumptions from settler colonial studies and modernist Western notions of political self-determination.
This project is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2025-2027).
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MATTHEW FLISFEDER 