IT’S always an effort publishing any book. But publishing under genocidal conditions directly affecting your authors and yourselves as editors, feels miraculous. But sometimes miracles happen.

Last week, On November 21, 2024, we received an email from our publisher saying, “Dear Hyab, Tawona and Alison, your book is in the depot and the open access version is now online.”

Our book – Cultures Of Sustainable Peace (below) – bears a title which can easily produce a hollow laugh. What hope of sustainable peace? Have you seen the levels of killing in Sudan, in Gaza, in Tigray, in Lebanon? What hope when at present just desperately petitioning our governments to uphold recognition of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice feels like nailing jelly to a tree.

The equivocations and phrases used by Cabinet ministers to try and avoid discussing the arrest warrants against Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence secretary Yoav Gallant compared to those warrants against Russian president Vladimir Putin, for example, reek of hypocrisy and also an increasingly well-founded fear.

Sustainable peace requires legal mechanisms for its pursuit. Without respected authority – be it elders sitting under trees determining a local land dispute, or the judges in the ICC, it is vital that actions which cause harm and breach legal norms have consequences.

READ MORE: Holyrood: Bill to release short-term prisoners early passes

But legal mechanisms are not everything and a sustainable peace, as we know in contexts which have mercifully been spared the perpetuation of the effects of armed conflict, blockade, enforced starvation and other egregious crimes against humanity, requires hard cultural and intercultural work. It needs truthful, creative and bold leadership and it needs freedom of expression, free from fear and without hate. Such is the work documented by our inspiring authors in Cultures Of Sustainable Peace.

It’s not a small book – with more than 16 chapters – but it is an international miracle, produced by women’s collectives in Mexico, scholars working on child marriage in Ghana, theatre practitioners in Zimbabwe, artists and academics working on religious oppression and its contestation in Morocco and then our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza, working on creative writing, storytelling and peace-building and theatre-making, prior to October 2023, for women who are subject to violence both domestically and through the illegal blockade.

The book has survived war, famine, natural disaster, drug cartels, religious oppression, femicide, and latterly genocide and scholasticide. Some of the authors are published in the book posthumously.

The dedication of the book is as follows:

“For Refaat Alareer

Our Colleague in Creating Cultures of Sustainable and Inclusive Peace

Brilliant Decolonial Thinker

Gentle Human

Fierce Critic of Violent Colonialism

Poet of Peace

Assassinated in a targeted Israeli airstrike on December 6, 2023.

And for the women killed in violence 2019-2024.”

The book has survived the UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund cuts to Overseas Development Assistance.

And if it hadn’t been for a principled stance by the University and College of Social Sciences, this would never have seen the light of day, the lead editors would have been redundant, and many of the authors in the book in prison for having received funding and then lost it through no fault of their own.

Over the last year – with the utterly honourable exception of The National and two small poetry presses – Wild Goose Publications and Sídhe Press – getting work published that engages with Gaza has not been straightforward.

This has also been true for academic work. Multilingual Matters, the book’s publisher, are an ethical, academic publisher, and has been an exception to a creeping rule of “delay” in academic publishing.

Whilst writing through the last year on cultural and educational work in Palestine – as is my right under academic freedom and freedom of scientific inquiry – I’ve found pieces commissioned by editors and fellow academics becoming “lost” in systems.

I have many emails detailing equivocation, delay, followed by requirements to fill out many more forms and legal disclaimers than is at all usual, or the invention of new forms, and new systems for work to pass through.

All of this, and the chasing, is part of the additional work required to bring to publish work legitimately, but on Gaza. This is, of course, one of the many ways in which the erasure of people takes place and it’s part of “scholasticide”.

Scholasticide is a specific term coined by Oxford scholar Karma Nabulsi in 2009 referring to the intentional mass destruction of education, including the killing of scholars, destruction of libraries and cultural artefacts, archives and digital and physical infrastructure.

It is what our colleagues in Gaza have been subject to since the illegal blockade began more than 17 years ago and with ferocious intensity since October 2023.

It is one of the strands of evidence of genocidal intent. The deliberate destruction of educational infrastructure and assassination of scholars, particularly those prominent and vocal – like Professor Refaat Alareer, or Sufian Tayeh, Unesco chair and vice-chancellor of the Islamic University of Gaza, last year in the early months of the aggression by Israel on the Gaza Strip.

Protection of scholars, whilst an elite group, and production of students is a vital strand of humanitarian work and it is work every university in Scotland can undertake. It is how those in the diaspora, temporarily or long term, with refugee or humanitarian protections, can be custodians, in exile, of the cultural heritage, tangible and living, and keep the life of a culture alive.

At present, the visa restrictions on Palestinian students from Gaza are severe. It is almost impossible to fulfil the visa requirements of the UK Government, e.g. English language test results or biometrics, given the level of destruction of such infrastructure in Gaza. It is perfectly possible to set these aside or undertake such testing on arrival but so far, the responses from ministers are implacable and unyielding. A sustainable peace needs paperwork, and for Palestinians, mountains of it.

It requires far more work than for other groups seeking protection. As does the publishing of a book full of lived experience academic study and testimony of the way in which a sustainable peace might be assured and has been destroyed.

But every now and then, and we hold in our hands a sign, not a hope, but evidence of the work of sustainable peace, undertaken in ordinary communities, but extraordinary cultural workers, and a miracle happens.

Alison Phipps is Unesco chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts at the University of Glasgow