Feras Hammami

What does it mean to publish ethically in a world where knowledge production is shaped by human rights violations, social inequalities, colonial legacies, and systemic exclusions? This reflection draws on ten years of experience with plaNext, an open access journal created by the Young Academics Network of the Association of European Schools of Planning to support early career scholars. It explores how ethical publishing can act as a form of resistance to dominant academic norms, the marginalization of alternative epistemologies, and the politicization of knowledge. Through personal and collective experiences, the article examines plaNext's commitment to academic freedom, equity, decolonisation, and inclusivity, expressed through practices such as voluntary management, half-blind peer review, and a justice-based ethical policy. It also addresses the challenges of sustaining these principles within the constraints of institutional expectations, the publishing industry, and global crises. Ethical publishing, it argues, is not about pretentious neutrality but about taking a principled stance in support of marginalized voices, critical scholarship, and transformative knowledge production. Whether this vision remains viable is an open question that plaNext and many other international journals must continue to examine.

Diaspora and Israel Jews are increasingly engaging their historical narratives of liberation within new forms of co-resistance to the Israeli Occupation, a history that controversially has been weaponized by the settler colonial power to manifest its dispossessive policies. ‘Occupation is not our Judaism’ has become a political slogan to mobilise Jews against land confiscation, house demolitions, trees uprooting, interrogations, and the Annexation Wall. Activists are concerned about the enactment of violence in the name of Judaism, and seek to contest the establishment of a Jewish nation-state as a solution to antisemitism. Their Jewish identities are articulated on the basis of Israel-centrism, and through intersectional struggles for universal liberation. This article explores the ways in which Jewish historical narratives inform the settler colonial policies in Palestine and the counter activism in which Jews play a potential role. It focuses on the patterns of ‘co-resistance’ which emerged after the collapse of the Oslo Accords of 1993. While co-existence was propagated during the 1990s to reveal the occupier and occupied as two equal sides, co-resistance emerged as a counter narrative in which Jewish and Palestinian activists stand in solidarity against the occupation. Interviews and on-site observations in the Old Town of Hebron showed how heritage and history have been weaponized by settlers to construct Jewish-only enclaves and to destroy the social and spatial realities that signify the collective identity of the Natives. Despite the failure of co-resistance to reverse the settlement project, the interviewed activists saw it as a viable form of resistance to this project. This article explored its potential in dismissing any claim that casts the settler colonial project in Hebron as a natural return of Hebron’s Jews to their history, and to link Nakba to tikkun olam, challenging its exclusion from the moral universe of the Jewish legacies of liberation.

This article explores the role that heritage might play in the representation of ‘difference’, within the context of neoliberal cities. The case is a large-scale urban change in the former working-class neighborhood of Gamlestaden, Sweden. Interviews and on-site observations revealed how authorized heritage practices can enable the celebration of particular social and cultural values, while naturalizing the erasure of others. People’s cultural diversity, and diverging interpretations of the past, have been guided by the power of heritage into a process of subjectification, according to which only ‘unthreatening’ forms of cultural diversity were celebrated and revealed legitimate. The ‘fetishized’ difference and particular historical records have served to conceal the political interest at stake in its’ production and maintenance, and led to a politicised representation of cultural diversity through what Annie Coombes’ terms ‘scopic feast’. All this was made possible through BID, the first neoliberal business improvement district model in Sweden, and its investment in a deeply rooted process of heritageisation. Uncritical engagement with difference in the context of heritage management and neoliberal urban development, make it appear almost natural to erase the cultural values that fall outside the authorized narrative of value.

Over the years a growing number of planning and urban theorists located in, or writing on, planning and urban theories in the global South have argued that theories emerged on the basis of assumptions within a northern context that do not ‘fit’ or are not applicable in global South contexts (Rao 2006; Ferguson 2006; Watson 2009; Roy 2009; Myers 2011; Parnell and Robinson 2012). Hence, they maintain, there is a need to rethink the northern bias in planning and urban theory and to develop new concepts, ideas, vocabularies and practices from southern perspectives. McFarlane (2008) uses the term ‘southern turn’ in urban studies, while arguing that productive comparisons across contexts constitute an epistemological transformation in urban theory. He uses the term ‘urban shadow’ to explain how southern cities are considered marginal and on the ‘edges’ of a predominantly Euro-American oriented urban theory canon (McFarlane 2004; 2008). Rao dwells on Amin & Thirft’s (2002) Cities: Reimagining the Urban to develop her ‘slum as theory’ wherein she critically reflects on the dominant discourses that inform and guide planning and urban theory. In 2009, Watson (2009), a scholar based in the South, introduced the idea of ‘seeing from the south’ to explain the need for context-rooted theory development. Yiftachel (2006) introduced a South-Eastern approach instead to break the binary of North-South and East-West. Roy (2009) calls for new geographies of ‘imagination and epistemologies’, as dominant theorizations are based on Euro-American experience, and are unable to capture the grounded reality of the global South.