Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring

Rethinking Democratization

Larbi Sadiki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317650027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December 2010 heralded the arrival of the 'Arab Spring, ' a startling, yet not unprecedented, era of profound social and political upheaval.

The meme of the Arab Spring is characterised by bottom-up change, or the lack thereof, and its effects are still unfurling today. The Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring seeks to provide a departure point for ongoing discussion of a fluid phenomenon on a plethora of topics, including:

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• Contexts and contests of democratisation

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• The sweep of the Arab Spring

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• Egypt

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• Women and the Arab Spring

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• Agents of change and the technology of protest

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• Impact of the Arab Spring in the wider Middle East and further afield

Collating a wide array of viewpoints, specialisms, biases, and degrees of proximity and distance from events that shook the Arab world to its core, the Handbook is written with the reader in mind, to provide students, practitioners, diplomats, policy-makers and lay readers with contextualization and knowledge, and to set the stage for further discussion of the Arab Spring.

1

Unruliness through Space and Time

Reconstructing ‘Peoplehood’ in the Arab Spring

Larbi Sadiki

Introduction

This chapter presents a critical account of the phenomenon of the ‘Arab Spring’. This it does via an unorthodox interpretation of why the Arab Spring élan represents a departure point from many 20th-century revolutions. Many scholars seek to find correlation between the Arab Spring and democratization. There might be hints at democratization within the Arab Spring. The focus here is on the dynamic of unruliness, defiance against and resistance to authoritarian rule, the common denominator in all Arab uprisings, whether successful (producing ousters in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen in 2011) or incomplete and/or bloody (Bahrain and Syria). The chapter therefore refuses to reduce democratic politics to a form of rule cemented to conventional templates and practices, invariably assumed to culminate in law-based contestation, participation and supportive civic publics and non-personalist systems that are contracted to either run government or organize orderly opposition periodically and peacefully. The argument presented in this chapter assumes this matrix of democratic politics to be an artefact integral to established and consolidated democracies. The gist of the account attempted here is to draw attention to an important aspect of political activity within the Arab Spring: the spatio-temporal dimension of the unruliness informing anti-authoritarian protest and resistance. The crux of this unruliness is public mobilization and organization through self-configuration and reconstructions of space and time. Rebellion against these two instruments of authoritarianism does not necessarily have a democratizing effect in an institutional sense. Unruliness is simply ‘occupation in reverse’ of spatial, temporal and discursive fields, which have for so long been constructed, reproduced and occupied by the postcolonial power-holders. In the quest for dignity (karamah) and freedom (hurriyyah), unruliness is society’s agential deployment against the ‘occupiers’ of the authoritarian state. Central to this unruliness, apart from informally engendering bottom-up notions of sovereign identities and participatory citizenship in the public squares of protest, is the people’s coming together to ephemerally substitute the authoritarian regimes’ practice, thought and language of controlling power with their own conceptions of political practice, thought and terminology. Thus the regimes’ routinized notions of stability, loyalty and deference, for instance, are traded for spontaneously conceived practices, thought and language. Stability cedes to fluidity, loyalty gives way to hostility and rebellion, and deference to resistance. To borrow a term from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ‘critical consciousness’ is thus forged and invented in the public squares of protest as a necessity to counter the hegemonic order with action, thought and all kinds of signifiers of opposition and resistance (Freire 2000b). While instantaneous and spontaneous, the critical consciousness summoned in the public squares of protest seems to generate (e.g. Egypt and Tunisia in 2011) the necessary democratic agency to unify the rebellious publics around a spirit beckoning new beginning. The stand as a united public with unified practice, thought (perhaps dreams) and terminology constitute initial steps towards reconstitution of democratic subjectivities, and rejection of subjection to authoritarian rule and rulers. There are three distinct arenas where the Arab masses proved their supremacy over the authoritarian state in their bid to subvert the existing authoritarian paradigms: space, time and language. Two, in particular, explain the Arab masses’ triumph over their oppressors: the ability and creativity to occupy public space and refigure time itself. They are both the focus of the ensuing analysis. Space here means more than a geography or a public square; it is the ethos that derives from resisting authoritarianism, the thought-practice of emancipatory protest that engenders citizens in a state of flux, self-reconfiguring and in the process remapping the political. One caveat is in order: the chapter does not seek to explain the roots of the Arab Spring. Chomsky (2013), for instance, has a leftist take, implicating neoliberalism in the advent of the Arab Spring, which he describes as a ‘triple revolt’. He even goes further by crediting the ‘labour movement’ with Tahrir Square’s triumph in overthrowing the authoritarian regime (Chomsky 2013, 45–49). Negri concurs, showing his own leftist leaning in his interpretation of the Arab Spring. In his newly published Factory of Strategy, he links the origin of the Arab Spring with ‘a new cycle of anticipated struggles for the emancipation of labour, social equality and common freedom’ (Negri 2014, xi).

Briefly, two observations derived from Harold Joseph Laski’s classic text, Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, are pertinent to understanding the roots of the Arab Spring. Writing about another epoch during World War II, and in describing the nature of the fundamental change conditioned by a state of massively destructive conflict, Laski notes that the revolution of his time ‘is not made by thinkers’ (Laski 1968, 9). He adds that ‘fear is the parent of revolution, for it inhibits that temper of accommodation which is the essence of successful politics’ (1968, 18). This relates to what he calls failure to recognize ‘necessary social change’ (1968, 18). Laski’s observations may have some relevance, nearly 70 years later, to the nature of Arab revolutions: they are not ideational revolutions led by thinkers, reformers and philosophers (such as during the radical reforms sought in the 19th century by leading Arab and Muslim scholars of the Nahda Period); and the failure of politics to create genuine openings for social change and inclusiveness partly explain the advent of the Arab Spring, which for the Arab region is a match for the profound change Laski addresses. From the perspective of remaking peoplehood, the Arab Spring equals in significance the revolution of Laski’s time.

Space and politics for remaking the people

The Arab Spring: Enacting empowerment

To aver that the Arab Spring has dealt a blow to Orientalism and Western paradigms of transitology is no exaggeration. In looking at the civility of the Arab Spring – values of participation, organization, mobilization, expression and self-governance – one finds ample evidence of how the Arab Spring has forced contestation of how Africa and the Middle East (AME) have been studied by scholars of democratic transition. A look at the nexus of public space and politics in enacting people power in the revolutions of 2011 in Egypt and in Tunisia helps to illustrate this.

From Cairo through Libya to Tunis, the central squares developed by the postcolonial authoritarian states’ urban planners – named after political icons or iconic historical events – were part and parcel of a form of socio-political engineering aimed at defining the territory of power and largely of state-holders. Tahrir (liberation) square and the mugamma’ edifice¹ adjacent stood centrally as powerful reminders and symbols of centralized power, and of the Egyptian state’s authoritarian–bureaucratic clout. Tahrir as liberation is a powerful idiom that conveys messages of historicity as well as legitimacy. The mugamma’ was the one inevitability the majority of the Egyptian citizenry could not avoid: it housed the huge bureaucracy producing their legal personas and paperwork for the construction of their identities. Under the control of autocrats, the mugamma’ had effectively – as its name in Arabic denotes – been the collective unifying repository through which Egyptian citizenry is filtered, as if the very conception of ‘Egyptian-ness’ could not be imagined outside the Interior Ministry’s labyrinth of windows and clerks that formed the bureaucratic mill inside the mugamma’. That link to the Interior Ministry was a thread that ‘shackled’ the collective psyche to fear of both state power and the over-bureaucratization that served as an additional device of control over the citizenry and the construction of Egyptian identity since the Free Officers’ takeover in 1952.

In Tunisia, the capital’s central boulevard, at the end of which stood the Interior Ministry’s massive building, was named after the country’s postcolonial leader and national mentor, the late Habib Bourguiba. Like him, the boulevard his urban planners named after him was an example of how the politics of space was never innocent. Bourguiba and the space – the squares, gardens, memorials, libraries and streets – all represented value-laden signifiers of power (Bachelard 1994). They stood for an Ataturk-like brand of nation and state-building inspired by the former colonial metropolis, Paris. Thus, following the bloodless coup of November 1987, the first thing his successor did was to rename the squares, often deleting ‘Habib Bourguiba’ to cede to the new administration’s politico-social engineering label ‘7 November’, supposedly a symbol and idiom of the ousted dictator’s ‘New Deal’ – a deal that never was. The Habib Bourguiba Boulevard survived the architectural purge that saw the redesigning and relabelling of public space. Like in Cairo’s Tahrir, the Interior Ministry stood as an eyesore in the Bourguiba Boulevard, a powerful reminder of the police state Bin Ali and his henchmen built over 23 years of authoritarian rule. Like the mugamma’, it evoked fear as well as indignation. It is this indignation that proved resourceful and momentous in both countries’ protests in January and February 2011.

So what is the relevance of the dimension of space in the politics of civic resistance in Cairo and Tunis in 2011?

The Tunisian and Egyptian protesters contested regime monopoly over the control, use and manipulation of public space. When the Tunisian protesters began their build-up of a critical mass, they first had to reclaim the space the state claimed as its own, the hub of its centralized authority, as a physical edifice and politico-moral authority. A critical mass was needed to reoccupy the geography of the authoritarian state and the terrain from which it organized the lives of the citizenry. Just as the authoritarian state had purged the citizenry from the terrain on which it pitched, designed, diffused and sustained the reproduction of its authority, the citizenry had to recover that terrain and redesign it as its own in order to navigate it as a new topography of mass resistance against state hegemony. And just as the state had purged the citizenry from its geography of power, the protesters had to purge the state from that very space. That space was thus converted into forums for mass organization and mobilization. It is within the precincts of that space that a new imagining of community and democratic politics was made possible by the protesters in both Egypt and Tunisia. The space was literally transformed from authoritarian space into popular space, and reorganized into forums for democratic reticulation and display of solidarity. Universal messages of rejection of authoritarianism were designed and redesigned, and communicated through the use of all kinds of techniques, ranging from new national anthems to communal prayers and marches. The critical mass of protesters turned the central public spaces – squares, for instance – into ‘gymnasiums’ of civic activism in which the citizenry sharpened both its skills of anti-systemic protest and its appetite for democratic politics through sustained and creative mass protest. Thus the masses in Egypt and Tunisia were able to reinvent themselves by contesting the authoritarian state’s politics and programmes openly. Ultimately, this is what led to the transformation of former spaces of reified state authority into public space for re-enacting popular sovereignty and collective re-ownership of the state. In these reclaimed spaces – Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the Habib Bourguiba Boulevard and the Kasbah in Tunis – the fight against authoritarianism was concretized, built into a critical mass, and defiantly sustained to eventually yield the tipping point that brought the authoritarian structure completely unstuck.

The transferable value of the exploration of the dimension of space as an angle on the ‘Arab Spring’ is today evident in Syria. Thus far, in neither Damascus nor Aleppo have protesters reclaimed public space such that they can directly display solidarity and resist hegemony through collective participatory action. This limits their ability to render the state unable to act or offer acceptable responses. Were public spaces to be reclaimed as they were in Tunisia and Egypt, the public resolve, now focused in a space it claims as its own, could shift from the former politics of accommodation with the state to total defiance and rejection of authoritarianism. In Libya also, the rebels felt the need to occupy Gaddafi’s compounds and ‘Green Square’ – which they renamed ‘Martyrs’ Square’ – in order to claim possession of their revolt and realize a kind of political closure in the wake of the overthrown political order.

One can see, then, that a critical dimension of the Arab Spring has been the protesters’ claim over and creation of public space. Egyptians, Libyans, Tunisians and Syrians, less consistently, have sought to remake both the moral and the physical worlds in which they want to thrive as free citizens. They came together to dismantle the physical worlds framed by the powers that restrict their potential as free agents. Then they proceeded to populate those spatialities and ‘worlds’ with ‘words’ through which to speak back, write back, strike against the authoritarian state and re-envision the madeena or ‘polis’ they aspire for (al-sha’ab yureed, as it were, ‘the people’s will’). In the protesters’ agency to change their physical world lie hints at the spatial implications of the Arab Spring as a potential geography of dissent, free politics and good government.

Under authoritarianism, space and its architecture were geared towards reproduction of subjection and control. The Arab Spring challenged this order. By reclaiming public squares, the peoples in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia re-enacted peoplehood by reclaiming the spaces of tyrannical rule, breaking all barriers of fear, and redesigning space into a realm of res publica – where the public breathes life into ossified politics. More importantly, they reconciled² psychological space (feeling free again, reclaiming citizenship through protest and rejection of tyranny) with architectural space: thus, Gaddafi’s Green Square ceded to ‘Martyrs’ Square’ and Tunisians unofficially, then officially, renamed many public boulevards ‘Bou’azizi Place’. In doing so, they have opened up endless possibilities for self-mastery and socio-political spheres of freedom and dignity. Ultimately, this is a matter of political organization: that is, democratic political organization in the age of the Arab Spring.

‘Clock-wise’ protest: Reimagining time in the Arab Spring

There is something striking about ‘time’ under the aegis of an oppressive and authoritarian political order. It is framed in a straight-line-type thinking: the march towards progress, new citizenry, modernity and the like. In the Arab setting there are endless examples of how linearity is engineered in the postcolonial moment to drive forward being, thinking and doing to erase the traces of colonialism. These range from the violence of subjection exacted by the colonizers to the results of its effects on the psyche and living conditions of the formerly colonized peoples. The postcolonial state’s chief undertaking – and one that is integral to its mode of legitimation – is to de-colonize. Such an undertaking meant, among other things, some form of commitment to mimicking the former colonizer’s bureaucratic decision-making, construction of newly independent national identities, and adoption of ‘rational calculation’ in all matters concerning modernization and development, including organization of public time. The postcolonial state envisaged this through socio-political engineering of individual and collective identity. The invention and formation of national identity could not be conceived within ‘traditional’ notions of time: a notion that made identity fluid rather than stable, and decentred rather than cemented to a centre or a single locus of power. In other words, the traditional notion of time did not fix identity to a centrally organized system for producing and reproducing meaning, power and commodity. Formalizing labour, bureaucracy, national identity, mass education and loyal citizenry all implied standardizing time as part and parcel of reordering lives in ways that can singly determine individual and collective identity. Introduction of a European calendar, including adoption of the Saturday–Sunday weekend (e.g. the Arab Maghreb), of business hours and national holidays (e.g. Day of Independence, Revolution Day, Republic Day, Labour Day, etc.), all served to either dilute the staying power of traditional seasons or cause them to assume a secondary role in the daily lives of the citizens of the newly founded Arab realms. Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (2002) find that even neoliberalism itself has its own mechanisms for managing and shaping space, and by implication reformulation of polity, society and economy.

The reorganization of time – and inevitably its commodification as a regime’s exclusive bastion – had from the outset suffered from a serious handicap. The rationale was to ‘rationalize’ time in the bid to create rational polities and societies. However, the irrationality of all of this laid in the fact that the real intention was to control citizenries, rather than deliver them from either the heavy excesses of colonization or those oppressive aspects of traditional time (e.g. khumus or fifth of the produce in return for timeless labour by peasants in North African societies). As part and parcel of the new states’ panopticon organization of time, power-holders and their cadres committed the mischievous act of seeking to ‘centre’ national identities. This meant engaging in subversion of existing paradigms of time and attendant notions of belonging, loyalty, autonomy and self-understanding. The cardinal sin of most newly independent states – namely, the new Arab republics – was to seek a demolition job on peripheral existence. The targets were legion: clans, tribes and all marginal spaces for acting out not necessarily potential rival identities, but merely existing as parallel forms of being, acting and thinking. Only fully centred identities, with a national mind-set and self that was fixed within centrally demarcated space and centrally organized time, were accorded a margin of existence as agents of reproduction of power – not agents of change or opposition to the newly constituted political orders.

This is one reason which explains the new states’ hostility to sharing the management of identities with the supposedly ‘backward’ (rij’iyyah) or ‘primitive’ voices representative of tradition. Tradition devotes a great deal of effort and attention to affective aspects of human interaction that when released from centrally organized time can develop parallel forms of the self into potentially alternative solidarities and programmes that could challenge existing imaginings of political community. The national-secular state’s reorganization of time in the postcolonial moment allowed a great degree of penetration into the lives of citizenry that rivalled the impact of the revolution of mass education, radio and national conscription – all of which were deployed to deepen national consciousn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Preface: The Meme of the Arab Spring
• 1 Unruliness through Space and Time: Reconstructing ‘Peoplehood’ in the Arab Spring
• PART I Introducing the Arab Spring: Reflections on Contexts and Contests of Democratization
• PART II The ‘Travel’ of Revolution: From Tunis to Sanaa
• PART III Egypt in the Arab Spring: Islam, the State and the Military
• PART IV Women’s Voices in the Arab Spring
• PART V Arab Spring: Breakdown of the Old Social Compact
• PART VI Uprisings: The Technology of Protest
• PART VII The Arab Spring: The Wider Middle East
• PART VIII The Arab Spring in a Global Context
• Select Bibliography
• Index