Endurance without Resolution: Ethos, Time, and the Failure of Critical Moments to Produce Historical Settlement

Abstract

This study provides an explanation of the Will-Time Equilibrium (WTE) framework, which helps to understand how collective will can survive even when there are major transformative events that don't result in sovereign or institutional or political settlement in the process. The study sees unresolved conflicts not as failures, but as continuations of collective significance that happen when historical possibilities reappear and then fade without resolution. This study uses an interpretive comparative-historical framework to examine four trajectories, one of revolution in Algeria, one of negotiated transformation in South Africa, one of specific Indigenous experiences of settler-colonial disruption, and one of the Palestinian experiences of enduring without resolution.

According to the study, political settlement failure cannot mean the failure of collective will. Ethos, when perceived as a value anchored in time, can be categorized as memory, language, symbolic continuity, and future-oriented agency. Palestine demonstrates that although every uprising and conflict, every diplomacy and political opportunity, has come and gone, the will to keep going persists and is expressed in language, story, memory, and symbols of return and resilience. The study introduces a new concept of non-resolution endurance as a specific historical path that demands for a non-binary approach to success and failure in theories of political change.