One paradigm among many: Nida Alahmad, ‘Deexceptionalizing not Reinventing: Genocide, Palestine, and Zionism’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2026

27Jul26

Excerpt: The Israeli genocide in Gaza amplified debates that question the paradigmatic, and sometimes also epistemic, foundations of different fields of scholarship, including Genocide Studies. These discussions are motivated by a need to re-examine key questions when addressing how the political problem of Palestine’s colonization and occupation can be framed in search of emancipatory politics. This essay is a theoretical intervention that zooms in on those discussions in the context of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. It offers a critique which prioritizes a sociologically grounded and historically sensitive approach to deexceptionalize paradigmatic experiences when re-examining conceptual categories such as genocide. These debates have brought together related, even if distinct, strands of literature: Settler Colonial Studies (SCS), decolonial theory’s epistemic decolonization, Indigenous studies, Genocide Studies, and studies that focus on Palestine, Israel, and Zionism respectively. One result of this convergence, which is the focus of this critique, is an attempt to produce new conceptual categories (e.g. a reconceptualization of genocide) to decolonize knowledge and, possibly, pave the way for political possibilities of a just future. In this essay, I propose an alternative approach that centres political questions through deexceptionalizing paradigms that inform conceptual categories rather than replacing one hegemonic narrative (or paradigm) with another in an attempt to reconceptualize concepts. The proposed approach opens the space for political imagination rather than locks the discussion in epistemic games.