Arab Revolutions and World Transformations

Anna Agathangelou, Nevzat Soguk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317980414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Stories about institutions and regimes that have failed us are echoing worldwide. This book critically engages the multiple uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) following the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010. It brings together authors who critically analyse the unstoppable force unleashed in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Libya and Yemen.

This book analyses the roots and trajectory of the recent revolts in the context of the global transformations that have redefined the politics of movement and revolution. For example, some authors engage extensively with the strategies embraced by the younger generation of activists. Others argue that the power of these revolutions lies in the people's creative orientations including their collaborations. While much of the mobilization efforts in these different parts of the world happen through word of mouth, radio, cartoons, placards, and SMS services; sites such as Facebook helped people meet each other with a click, carrying their claims through stories, songs, poetry and art of protest across international borders quickly enabling them to rapidly bring authoritarian regimes to the brink of collapse and make a qualitatively different expression of uprisings.

All authors in this volume address the question of the stakes in these revolts, as through them, spectacular and everyday violence can be challenged, and alternative social projects can emerge. Neither a footnote to the West's history, nor an appendix to neoliberal capitalist global projects, people are actively drawing on their power to disrupt domination and oppression, creatively responding to global problems and calling for democratic institutions with viable ecologies.

This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

INTRODUCTION

Rocking the Kasbah: Insurrectional Politics, the “Arab Streets”, and Global Revolution in the 21st Century †

ANNA M. AGATHANGELOU & NEVZAT SOGUK¹

The Arab Spring revolutions have caught the global elites flat footed as they have watched Arab peoples challenge and pierce the thin veneer of the structures of inequality and repression in place in the Arab world. The Arab uprisings also signaled to the rest of the world’s peoples that the relations and institutions of political and economic control and domination are far from being permanent; they can be rattled to the core, pushed into a crisis, and be transformed in radical-democratic ways. Arab revolutionaries have shown that it is possible to organize non-hierarchically and effect change without engendering authoritarianism. Their struggles have already inspired others around the world including the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the US. All this might yet be a new beginning. We argue that undercurrents of discontent, in the Middle East and North African region, about the unfinished national liberation struggles, the military regimes, and the neoliberal elites propelled the rocking of the Kasbah, or of the familiar order in the regions and beyond. We end the piece by describing in short the authors' contribution to the whole forum.

This forum opens up space to continue the conversation about what has become a powerful, unstoppable force in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Yemen. The Middle East and North Africa, as we have known is no more. It has taken the Arab masses, long dismissed as prisoners of the “Oriental soul”, little time to radically transform the region at a time of a broad “political” crisis around the world.

At the time of writing, in Egypt and Tunisia, the initial uprisings have ushered in transitional processes, including constitutional reforms heralding greater participatory politics. Various political groups, ranging from the secular to neoliberal to Islamist are vying for political prominence, if not for dominance. In Yemen, the struggle for power has spiraled into a protracted war of attrition with no end in sight. Bahrain has managed to suppress the popular uprisings using its geo-strategic importance to enlist both Arab (i.e. Saudi Arabia) and US support. In Syria, months of relentless repression by the Assad regime have failed to stem the tide. Although the regime showed few signs of buckling under pressure, “people’s power” forced it to announce measures of democratization. In fact, the writing was on the wall for Syria, either to capitulate on demands for vast changes to the political system or to shift its global power in the region altogether. Lastly, the rebels in Libya, a sui generis case, are currently in the throes of overthrowing Qaddafi who for four decades ruled the country, reserving all important decisions, including the oil industry for himself. A consummate salesman of eclectic ideas in the Arab world and Africa, including some form of African unity, he was seen by some as working to attract capital to Libya, especially in the energy sector and to build up loyalties by distributing resources into the African continent. However, liberation from Qaddafi is not yet liberation for Libya. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, head of the rebels' National Transitional Council said of governing post-Qaddafi: It is “not [going] to be a bed of roses” (Reed and Stephen, 2011).

A tectonic shift has hit the Middle East and North Africa, rippling through the rest of the world’s political imagination. While the changes are not yet consolidated, multiple transformative forces with rich, normative orientations have been unleashed. The shift is ongoing and the end is not yet in sight, but we have already harvested a wealth of insights into the politically and economically “insurrectional movements” (Soguk, 2011).

These revolutions claimed the streets, resisting the police/military and saturating spaces with a collective effervescence to challenge “business as usual”. They pushed us to engage the transformations of physical and political landscapes, including our systems of understanding and articulating global politics. Several authors point to the major political force comprised of living bodies who challenge us to understand and participate in politics anew. The protesters required us to recognize an expressed collective “no” and an affirmation and expansion of life. As a 28-year-old protester said when his ribs were broken by the police: “But I don’t care – just look around you. The energy of the Egyptians is amazing. We’re saying no to unemployment, no to police brutality, no to poverty.” And indeed, that “amazing energy” has been palpable. This collective energy is the political force behind global transformation and affects how we theorize and chant revolutions.

The uprisings that ousted the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen and their catalytic effect on revolutionary movements in the rest of the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, underscore the pressing desire of the people for transformation, democracy, and the right to an equitable, meaningful and just life. But everything that has transpired, and more importantly, the speed at which it has transpired, has shattered the familiar presumption that only a Western European or a North American is the authentic agent of direct (i.e. unmediated) democracy and political change. These regions and peoples, once bracketed as “traditional” and lacking agentic visions, and hence having no ability to chart the course of their communities, let alone to change and shape their world, are now making a visible and audible claim to global just politics. Neither a footnote to the West’s history, nor an appendix to neoliberal capitalist projects in the new global economy, the people have arrived.

Dominant discourses guided by the gurus of capital have labored to cast these uprisings as nothing more than affirmations of the liberal political logic. A plethora of arguments appear in Financial Times, Dollar and Dissent, Newsweek, Bloomberg, and Businessweek seeking to persuade us that Arabs are trying finally to be like our (neo) liberal selves. Speeches by major leaders of the world, including Barak Obama, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Hilary Clinton have listed the reasons for the protests. Appropriating the language and practices of revolts and uprisings, to re-orient and capture those vulnerable spaces out of which radically different temporal experiences are emerging (Agathangelou, 2011), they claim that these “revolutions” will “prove themselves to be beneficial going forward and …see[ing] stronger and stronger institutions there that are good for the long-term investor who can set valuations in that context”.

Those with critical radical visions disagree, explaining the uprisings as being against systemic global economic policies that result in the exploitation of the majority of people in the world. These policies, obdurately neo-liberal in design and intent in spite of neo-liberalism’s manifest failures in the last decade, sharply limit ordinary peoples' life possibilities, reducing their living standards, increasing their personal debt, and creating severe inequalities of wealth.

Still others, enamored by the visual allure of the internet age, contort these struggles and trivialize their actions by arguing that they are Facebook revolutions or Twitter uprisings as if the use of such technology makes the revolution. They forget that geography in the sense of both inhabiting it and being inhabited by it cannot be tweeted or emailed. Bodies inhabit streets, and the streets are being traversed by the uprisings' transformative, if not transgressive, energies. This cannot be reduced to a tweet.

Yet the revolutions in the Arab streets and squares cannot be abstracted from the other revolutions going on worldwide. Nor can they be abstracted from the life shattering experiences which have emptied people’s creative energies. Instead of being able to constitute their lives and communities with visions of justice and solidarity, they have been living their lives in the name of a promise to come (Agathangelou, 2011). Their leadership and their states have consistently betrayed them, making the connection between this latest round of uprisings and prior protests in the US, Europe, the rest of Africa, and the rest of Asia of utmost importance. We may be witnessing a global “revolt of the masses” against the dominant neo-liberal economic order. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each is also about the undermining of people’s existence through rising costs of living, lack of financial opportunity and security, and above, all constant displacement through war or restructurings. Throughout the world, the situation is guided by similar logics of violence: wars, imprisonments, slaughtering, unemployment, and poverty (Agathangelou, 2011).

Although the uprisings have global systemic characteristics, their qualities and dynamics make them unique in the fierce urgency of now. Our analyses must not flatten or remove the insurrectional capacities born of the tensions of everyday life. What, for example, is the role played by religious political and philosophical imaginaries in informing, inspiring, and energizing these mass movements? How do we theorize the agency of women, men, and youth from all walks of life? How do we register the women wearing hijab and leading the charge in the Tahrir Square along with their hijab-less comrades? How do we account for the youth becoming the uprisings' leaders? How do we conceptualize the labor unions rushing to the picket lines for liberation and not for wage increases? These insurrectional events must be named. We must acknowledge that these revolutionaries have joined their counterparts across the planet in challenging assumptions that underpin dominant relations and institutions.

No matter what our views, these global uprisings, which have only just begun, demand that we examine the shattering experiences that led people to organize against and also intervene in the repressive mechanisms that limit their lives. Given that they are ongoing and we cannot possibly know their conclusions, it may be wise to frame “our takes” on these revolutions through multiple questions. In this spirit we offer the following questions, admitting that many others are both possible and necessary.

What shattering experiences have impelled people into the streets and the squares? Are these uprisings and revolts a response to the implementation of a centralized worldwide neo-feudal economic order? What does it mean to have been “sold out” by the present, by democracy, and by the law?

Seeking to answer these and other questions, in this special forum we engage the revolutions, revolts and the uprisings from several entry points analytically and “empirically”. We have organized the forum into three sections: The Arab Spring and Emerging Analytical Encounters, Arab Spring Revolutions, Revolutions of the World and Global Poetics and Aesthetics of Revolutions.

In the first section, “Emerging Analytical Encounters Through the Arab Spring,” five authors engage with the revolutions and articulate emerging analytical encounters with the Arab Spring.

To begin, Mamdani locates his analysis spatially and temporally within the larger African revolutions and its relation (i.e. romance) to violence. His analysis of the Tahrir square brings to the fore that these contemporary revolutions as events and as processes are shaped and informed by other revolts. More specifically, he visibilizes what he considers connected: the 1976 Soweto’s revolutions and those of Tahrir Square in Uganda. Both make away with the romance of revolutionary violence and put forward a “new antidote, being an alternative practice that unites those divided by prevailing forms of governance”.

Similarly, Grovogui sets up his analysis within larger temporal and spatial governance relations, exposing the tensions in the global relations between the “West” and “Africa” broadly defined. He argues that the African non-cooperation regarding the decision of the West to intervene in Libya “is the result of a tension that is much deeper and, contrary to pun-ditry, goes to the core of the future of global governance and international morality today”. For Grovogui, this tension is a part of world politics that came into focus “during anti-colonial struggles over Western interventions in Vietnam, Madagascar, Kenya, Algeria, and Rhodesia”. He concludes that the sentiment expressed in Africa is that decisions made by the West undermine the “spirit and practice of participative global governance”.

For her part, Sassen engages with the significance of the city in the Arab Spring by suggesting that the city is engendering a new kind of subject. She claims that the global city can provide us with insights about organizing and revolution. More concretely, she argues that the city engendered today is very different from a Weberian or a medieval city. A contested site out of which the civic is erected, it provides a “scale for strategic economic and political dynamics”.

Agathangelou argues that the protests and revolutions in the MENA region define and exceed the imperial’s new manifestations and challenge the “stabilities” and “business as usual” of imperialism, neoliberalism, nationalism, and corporeal relations in their moves to make anew the Arab region. More specifically, she argues that sex and poetics are crucial sites of contestation toward the positing of ethical imperatives in time of revolution. She articulates a critical sexual poetic framework (chants, affects, slogans, and resonances) that emerges from the revolutionary expressions and inhabited struggles, methods of ethical recognition and praxis of multiple worldings, albeit in tension, for de-territorial, trans-regional, just worlds. She concludes that these inhabited “revolutions revolutionize the political” and revolution itself by mobilizing existential energies to “disrupt… the deferral of the present in the name of a promise to come, as such uprisings remind us that the present belongs to those who tend to it”.

Soguk concludes the section with a provocation. He calls for thinking beyond modernity’s certainties with respect to the fundamental relations and institutions anchoring contemporary political and economic institutions and doing so without insubstantializing their significance and currency in life. Soguk argues that if nothing else, the insurrectional intent and the readiness to go beyond the hackneyed certainties of the modern imagination make the uprisings already successful.

In Section II, “Arab Spring Revolutions, Revolutions of the World” several authors engage with the exhilarating encounters with those sites out of which the revolutions sparked.

Karim raises the issue of foreign policy and our understanding of it. Karim explains that the current uprisings in the Middle East suggest the need to reform a US foreign policy based on economic liberalism, as it has marginalized the desires of the majority of the MENA people. Since the end of World War I, the US has played a significant role in shaping the Middle East political economy. A series of geopolitical approaches (based on the dichotomization of “allies” and “foes”) that justify political and economic alliances and interventions have empowered a favored few in oil related industries. Karim argues that these uprisings are a desperate call for democracy to end elitism and corruption; they are a reminder of the need to rethink the agendas and interventions which have destabilised the region for almost a century.

Veltmeyer argues that politics and economics have to be seen as intertwined if we are to “properly grasp political dynamics of capitalist development”. In his view, the dominant narratives of the US and other neoliberal leaders “distort and misread the nature of these protests”. Following Adam Hanieh, he says that the “overall logic [of the protests] is inextricably tied to broader questions of capitalism in the Middle East”. Further, the protests raise questions about which class rules Egypt and in whose interest the Egyptian state functions.

Farhi notes that little has been said of Iran. A few wishful observers have expressed their hope that similar spontaneous popular uprisings will take place in Iran, but no such movement has materialized. Iran remains relatively quiet, albeit far from politically or economically stable. Farhi argues: “Despite the success in suppressing dissent for the moment in the name of national security, the cycle of events that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction — Rocking the Kasbah: Insurrectional Politics, the “Arab Streets”, and Global Revolution in the 21st Century
• 2. An African Reflection on Tahrir Square
• 3. Looking Beyond Spring for the Season: An African Perspective on the World Order after the Arab Revolt
• 4. The Global Street: Making the Political
• 5. Making Anew an Arab Regional Order? On Poetry, Sex, and Revolution
• 6. Uprisings in ‘Arab Streets’, Revolutions in ‘Arab Minds’! A Provocation
• 7. Stratagems and Spoils in US Policy in the Middle East
• 8. Unrest and Change: Dispatches from the Frontline of a Class War in Egypt
• 9. Tehran's Delayed Spring?
• 10. Model, Event, Context: Globalization, Arab Social Movements, and the Modeling of Global Order
• 11. The Winter of the Arab Spring in the Gulf Monarchies
• 12. Radical Changes in the Muslim World: Turkey, Iran, Egypt
• 13. Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience: Regime Responses to the ‘Arab Awakening’
• 14. Globalizations Forum on Middle East Protests: Commentary
• 15. Libya's ‘Black’ Market Diplomacies: Opacity and Entanglement in the Face of Hope and Horror
• 16. Revolutionary Humor
• 17. Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring
• 18. Talk About a Revolution: Social Media and the MENA Uprisings
• Index