Arab Spring: Uprisings, Powers, Interventions 9781782384663

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Arab Spring

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer

Volume 8 NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca

Volume 2 GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun

Volume 9 Identifying with freedom Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day

Volume 3 CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill

Volume 10 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE COMMONS’ Edited by Donald M. Nonini

Volume 4 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin

Volume 11 Security and Development Edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie

Volume 5 STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6 THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer

Volume 12 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION A Critical Stance Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Thomas Faist Volume 13 War, Technology, Anthropology Edited by Koen Stroeken Volume 14 ARAB SPRING Uprisings, Powers, Interventions Edited by Kjetil Fosshagen

Arab Spring Uprisings, Powers, Interventions

Z Edited by

Kjetil Fosshagen

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Paperback edition published in 2014 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2014 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-1-78238-465-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78238-466-3 (ebook)

Contents Introduction: The Arab Spring—Revolution or 1848 Reaction? Kjetil Fosshagen 1 Tahrir as Heterotopia: Spaces and Aesthetics of the Egyptian Revolution Paola Abenante 21 Beyond the Arab Spring: The Aesthetics and Poetics of Popular Revolt and Protest, 2010–2012 Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots 33 Emergency Law and Hypergovernance: Human Rights and Regime Change in the Arab Spring Michael Humphrey 47 The Promises and Limitations of Economic Protests in the West Bank Sobhi Samour 65

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Stability or Democracy? The Failed Uprising in Bahrain and the Battle for the International Agenda Thomas Fibiger 81 The Turkish Model for the Arab Spring: The Corporate Moralist State Kjetil Fosshagen 95 Notes on Contributors 113

Introduction The Arab Spring—Revolution or 1848 Reaction?

Z Kjetil Fosshagen

The first crucial question about the so-called Arab Spring revolutions asks whether they can be considered social revolutions in the historical and political sense, in that they promised and introduced a radically new social order. This definitional problem is compounded by the fact that the word ‘revolution’ has become part of everyday popular discourse about change. The second question asks whether there is a structure of social forces underneath the apparent chaos of the Arab Spring uprisings and their aftermath. Liberal discourse in the West hailed the Arab Spring as revolutionary within the idealistic scenario of despotism versus democracy. The revolts have also been celebrated as significant democratic and social events by radical commentators such as Žižek (2012) and Badiou (2012). The latter sees the riots as ‘pre-political’ events marking the rebirth of history, since their occupation of central spaces grounded a vision of a new and lasting social order. For Badiou, rioting is the only possible shape of historical action at the present moment in capitalism’s history. A positive view on the potentiality of the revolts is shared by two articles in this volume—one by Paola Abenante and one by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots. These two contributions analyze how the

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aesthetics, performance, and use of space in the revolutionary moments in Egypt (Abenante) and beyond the Middle East (Werbner et al.) opened up new practices and visions of the political. Despite the clear strength and breadth of the Arab uprisings and their links to protest movements and earlier labor strikes, they did not produce coherent political organizations or socially radical policies. The emergent regimes at best expanded individual political rights, most importantly for the middle classes. However, the military and security apparatuses remained intact; in Egypt, they even joined the ‘liberal’, secular factions and struck back with great force against the elected government. In short, the broad social uprisings appear to end up like the 1848 revolutions—that is, as bourgeois revolutions and not as social revolutions. In order to grasp the dynamics of the uprisings, it is necessary to widen the analytical scope and locate the dynamics of national Arab revolts within transnational and global assemblages that have profoundly reconfigured the socio-economic and political spaces of many nation-states in the last decades. Analyses confined to national borders and internal politics tend to overlook crucial deterritorializing dynamics that cut across national borders and reconfigure internal processes. Such a perspective risks internalizing the process by attributing it to population growth, economic fluctuations, food prices (see Mitchell 1991), or overbearing local despotism. Socio-political processes within Arab states must be located within two central, globalized dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorializion (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The first is the economic and political ‘opening up’ of Arab national spaces. The formerly closed spaces of state-directed socio-economic development have been deterritorialized by external forces since the 1980s. International regulations and conditions have

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reconstituted the terms of national policies, resulting in an expansion of capital flows. International agents of development, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, national development agencies, and local and international NGOs, have been central in the reconstitution of the socio-political space. These agencies are most often not directly state-controlled or coordinated, although they are often heavily state-funded. They constitute a decentralized transformative operation on social patterns and socio-economic processes, pushing for forms of civil society ‘empowerment’ and participation that are mostly individualizing, liberal, and anti-political. Connected to these globalized power formations of capital and political pressure there is the second deterritorializing dynamic of vast Arab upper-middle-class diasporas that constitute decentralized social, economic, and political assemblages. They mediate between these groups and are themselves empowered in the process, emerging as new power blocs that have worked actively to deterritorialize and reterritorialize processes and groups within many Arab nations, as with El Baradai’s Association for Change leading up to the riots in Egypt. These two dynamics—economic and regulative forces and diasporas—can be seen as interlinked and as forming part of a decentralized global nexus involved in an ongoing reconfiguration of state power on a global scale (Kapferer 2010). An important dimension of this nexus is the expansion of international criminal law that legitimizes military interventions in order to introduce democracy and human rights (see Michael Humphrey’s contribution to this volume). The two interlinked dynamics have the potential for violence and for producing a dominance of wealthy groups, but their deterritorializing operations also involve or feed into governmental processes that increasingly embed the social within the economic.

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This volume presents three articles on states that were not—or were not considered to be—part of the Arab Spring, revealing the dynamics involved in the rebelling societies. Thomas Fibiger’s article discusses how the discursive register of terrorism and security was invoked to support the crushing of the democracy protests in Bahrain, a crucial US ally. Sobhi Samour’s article critically analyzes how the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has embraced a neoliberal strategy (within the Oslo Accords) of development that is based on successful securitization as the condition for national development and future independence. This approach has turned its population into an Israeli labor pool and produced a thriving upper middle class. Kjetil Fosshagen’s article discusses why the West has promoted Turkey as a structural model for the ‘post-revolution’ Arab states.

The 1848 Spring of Nations and the Arab Spring A comparison with the European revolutions of 1848— known as the Spring of Nations, the Springtime of the Peoples, or the Year of Revolution—can be instructive. This series of upheavals, which spread rapidly to 50 countries, was the first and only Europe-wide (temporary) collapse of traditional authority. The uprisings can generally be said to have emerged out of increasing poverty, disillusion, and despair and growing anger against the privileges of the established elites. They were led by short-lived ad hoc coalitions comprised of reformers, workers, and the middle class. Despite massive popular participation and unrest, the revolutions did little to change established economic and political structures and lost out to reactionary forces within a year. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx ([1852] 2006) outlines why the French revolutionary forces,

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after a long battle following the July Revolution of 1830 (and even the Revolution of 1789), were finally defeated by the haute bourgeoisie. The structure of landownership and property holding had not changed much after 1789, despite the adoption in 1830 of minor liberalizing reforms. During the 1848 Spring of Nations, masses of people from different classes took to the streets across Europe, demanding bread, improved social conditions, and political reform. In France, this brought the July Monarchy to an end and led to the establishment of the Second Republic, with universal suffrage and a ‘right to work’ realized through National Workshops. These reforms, however, were short-lived. The alliance between workers and the liberal, republican bourgeoisie soon ended as the former found themselves dominated politically by conservative bourgeois and peasant interests. The workers’ insurrection of June 1848 was crushed, and the socialists were pushed out of the political scene. They were soon to be followed by their worst enemy, the petite bourgeoisie, who had been used by the wealthier classes to obstruct the socialists before largely falling into poverty themselves. The Second Republic became dominated by the industrial and financial aristocracy and ended with Napoleon III’s emperorship in 1852. The revolution never restructured the economy; it merely introduced formal political rights that turned it into a republican political form of bourgeois society. The call for participatory rights had masked a divergence of interests, and in the end the Year of Revolution was hijacked by the industrial and finance bourgeoisie. The Arab Spring uprisings appear to share crucial features with the 1848 revolutions. Again, a variety of social groups have entered into ad hoc coalitions with different or vague agendas of democracy and ‘freedom’. In Egypt and Tunisia, the uprisings undoubtedly mobilized many important sectors of society,1 including labor unions,

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and protests articulated egalitarian political and social demands, expressed in slogans such as “Bread, freedom, social justice!” There was nevertheless an upper-middleclass dominance in organization and discourse. While the Egyptian mass revolts started as a middle-class movement (albeit after years of labor strikes), the Tunisian middle class stepped in and more or less appropriated the ongoing socio-economic protest, shaping it into a liberal rights-oriented protest (El-Meehy 2011). My intention is not to diminish the broad social basis or the democratic potential of these uprisings, but to point out a structural dynamic concealed by the undifferentiated picture of protests. Already in demonstrations shortly after the fall of Mubarak, conflicts appeared between middle-class and working-class demonstrators (Haddad 2011). The Arab upper middle classes pushed for the removal of small oligarchic state elites in order to gain access to the market and to state institutions and agencies, and the recent authoritarian hijacking by the liberal upper middle classes of the Egyptian revolt in the name of democracy and revolution demonstrates this dynamic.

The Reconfiguration of Arab National Spaces During the period of Arab nationalism, most Arab states built up large middle classes as a crucial modernizing element of projects that were intended to break a long history of Western domination and to build communities oriented to a common state-based identity. These modernist projects created national social spaces characterized by equal social rights, public education and welfare systems, social mobility, and egalitarian individualism. This stood in sharp contrast to the earlier social structures of semi-feudal and capitalist agriculture and limited social mobility.2 The

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Arab states sought to create autonomous national spaces through import substitution, nationalizing foreign companies, redistributing land, and building up shared national identities centered on the state. The militaries had a central role in achieving and protecting national sovereignty. Acting as vehicles of modernism, they produced social mobility and independence from entrenched social powers, which gave them a measure of legitimate autonomy within the nation-state spaces. This modernist nationalist project of creating a unified identity grounded in social, cultural, and economic forms of autonomy protected and promoted by the state began to erode with Sadat’s introduction of infitah (opening) in Egypt in the 1970s, and with the launch of neo-liberal policies in Tunisia and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s. In line with IMF and World Bank programs, land reforms were reversed, and banks, industry, education, and health services were privatized. Poverty increased, and the gap between the poor and the rich grew. Land tenants and rural laborers in Tunisia (see King 2000) and Egypt protested in the early 1990s against conditions that effectively evicted them from the land through liberalized land rents (which increased by 2000 percent in Egypt), water pricing, and the cessation of easy credit access (Kishk n.d.: 6). These structural changes removed the social protections and flexibility offered by the former system, which gave a greater role to the state in the economy and in the management of class differences. The restructuring process gained a further boost from massive US debt relief and loans remediated through the IMF and the World Bank that were partly remuneration for Egypt’s support in the First Gulf War. The policies of opening up in effect pushed millions of rural dwellers off the land and into the cities, where unemployment soared further. As Mitchell (2002) has shown, the structural adjustment

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programs concealed and rephrased their transformative work of encompassing the social within the economic behind a sense of simply being efficient technical operations. Free trade agreements with the US and industrial free zones3 are examples of the deep restructuring of internal socio-economic relations that also reach deeply into the political, for they involve the partial suspension of national laws. The US’s bilateral free trade agreements with some of the Middle Eastern states have been described as strikingly comprehensive and deep in character (Lawrence 2006: 22). The main effect of neo-liberal policies was that large sections of the Arab peasantry and lower middle classes were progressively impoverished. The relative share of total household expenses spent on health care and education in Mubarak’s Egypt ranked second and third in the world (Mitchell 2002: 229). Social mobility declined dramatically for many lower-middle-class graduates, due partly to the steep decline in public service positions. This led many university graduates to depend increasingly on personal connections for private sector jobs (Binzel 2011), creating compartmentalized networks of patronage. Both Egypt and Tunisia, star examples of successful neo-liberal structuration programs, have vast populations of poor workers and people employed in the enormous ‘informal sector’. Just above the sector of the ‘officially poor’ we find the vast lower ‘middle classes’. They are being statistically concealed and rebadged as ‘middle class’ so as to downplay the forms of class polarization that are taking place. Statistically, the middle class is defined in absolute terms as those with a per capita spending above $2 a day,4 and this often includes most people in the informal sector. The Tunisian middle class was often presented as making up 90 percent of the population, and the Egyptian middle class at almost 80 percent.5 These figures did

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not differentiate between different sectors of the middle class and thus served to conceal massive poverty and economic inequalities.6 The widespread presentation of Arab economic inequality as the result of inherent despotism and corruption is misleading, for it casts economic inequality as emerging from internal traits. The despotism-corruption discourse disguises how the increased wealth gap, the deterioration of public services, and the enrichment of the elite are integral to the production of increasing difference within post-industrial capitalist states and their adoption of neo-liberal forms of economic rationality. The oligarchic power of Arab leaders and their allies does not represent an Arab exceptionalism or essence but rather a particular articulation of Arab state machinery with decentralized economic dynamics through which the social becomes embedded in the economic (Kapferer 2010: 145). These Arab states have been strongly repressive and apparently closed, but political power that had originally been aligned with decentralized economic forces on the outside started to operate internally as social networks for the distribution of privatization contracts, licenses, and protection (see Mitchell 2002). Top Egyptian capitalists filled six minister posts and made up 17 percent of the Parliament in 2004. The combination of crony capitalism and militaristic authoritarianism is a form of oligarchic state that is related to the historical particularity of Arab military apparatuses as providers of social mobility and nationalist liberation and development during the early post-colonial era. It is akin to the crony capitalism of the post-socialist states of Central Asia and Eastern Europe (Hamm et al. 2012; Rigi 2009) and of the Southeast Asian Tiger states (Ong 2000, 2006). In Mubarak’s Egypt, the military was pushed out from the top oligarchic circles (Kandil 2012), but was granted

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vast land holdings, which were central to the country’s economic boom, and it remained a major agent in industry, tourism, finance, and industrial production (as in Turkey). It also had personalized connections to local ruling political oligarchies and was even oriented to the international market, somewhat akin to the Asiatic Tiger states (Ong 2000). The partial autonomy of the military in the neo-liberal age came from its entanglement with economic forces outside the state that effectively fragmented and undermined the modernist state projects.

Diasporized Upper Middle Classes National dynamics have to be analyzed within global processes and institutions. The diasporized Arab upper middle classes constitute decentralized power assemblages as capital holders and political agents. The diasporization started among non-Muslim groups, such as Lebanese and Syrian Christians, who were already linked to Western societies and culture through trade and family ties.7 Large Muslim diasporas emerged much later. Many wealthy Egyptian families left the country due to Nasser’s nationalization policies in the 1950s. Between 4 and 6.5 million Egyptians (5–8 percent of the total population) and around 1 million Tunisians (about 10 percent of the total population) currently live in diaspora.8 In the 1980s there was a shift in emigration dynamics that was closely related to the profound transformation of the global economy, whereby the expansion and integration of production structures demanded relatively small and mobile skilled labor forces. Henceforth, only the educated upper middle classes could migrate to the West, reinforcing the elite character of these diasporas. During the last 30 years, the share of these diasporas’ remittances in the national economies has risen dramatically

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(ninefold in Tunisia and sixteenfold in Egypt), making remittances the third largest source of income in the (pre-revolution) Egyptian economy, after oil and tourism. The remittances often flow through informal channels, circumventing state control over these social spaces and groups. In Egypt, the remittance flow through unregulated money management firms destabilized the entire banking system in the late 1980s (Mitchell 2002: 278). The impact of the recent global economic crisis was made worse due to an upsurge in the replacement of Arab labor with cheaper subcontracted Asian labor in the Gulf states. This produced a sharp decline in remittances, further increasing economic pressure on the middle classes and creating a ‘steam boiler effect’ in many Arab states. The reduced flows of foreign income from diasporas fueled political discontent among the resident middle classes. Despite the scale of remittance flows, the diasporas’ access to investment in vital sectors in the economy was largely blocked by the oligarchic state elites’ control. Most Arab diasporas for a long time kept a low public profile in relation to their homelands, out of a pragmatic wish to invest in and possibly return to them (Ashour 2010).9 This changed in 2009–2010 when the Egyptian Association for Change, led by Mohamed El Baradei and supported by the US philanthropist George Soros and the US government, emerged and demanded diaspora voting rights and regime change. El Baradei, who has also been a member of Soros’s International Crisis Group, toured different states and declared that it was time for change in Egypt. The diasporas had a strong interest in removing the tiny nepotist elites. They formed a rhizomic force that cut across national boundaries, putting outside pressure on states as part of an external dynamic that cannot be easily manipulated or intimidated. The diasporas played an important role in the uprisings, using cyber communication to support and promote

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them. Diasporic bloggers played a key role in the Tunisian organization of revolts (Graziano 2012), finding channels that allowed local demonstrators to communicate support and feeding back information about local events (Severo and Zuolo 2012). US federal agencies supplied funding to tech firms that enabled dissidents to use the Internet anonymously and evade national controls (Shapira 2011). Cyberspace thus provided a decentralized communication means that broke the control of national governments over their spaces. Google launched a special service that allowed people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by phone number and leave voice messages (Harb 2011).

External Political Engineering Another key dynamic is the decentralized power of agents such as development agencies and NGOs. Some of these— for example, the International Crisis Group funded by Soros, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Freedom House, the International Republican Institute—are liberal or neo-conservative think tanks that promote capitalist democracy through free markets, civil society, and entrepreneurial middle classes, as well as by identifying ‘crises’ and calling for political intervention. Their activity must be seen as consistent with Western state policies and economic forces within a decentralized global regime of hypergovernance. Many of these organizations operate locally in Arab societies to build civil society and foster ‘democratization’ as part of contemporary transformations in Western development policies that increasingly channel aid through NGOs (Roy 2008).10 Since the 1990s, considerable resources have been put into this region through such entities by Western

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states, in particular the US. The US government allegedly spent $334.3 million on NGOs in Egypt over 14 years, and in 2010 alone the NED spent around $2 million on grants to youth organizations in Egypt (O’Connor 2012). These efforts form a central part of the US’s ideological project of building a ‘democratic’ Greater Middle East while spreading a view of freedom based on individualism, the free market, and democratic political institutions. As such, this social engineering project also seeks to empower and separate civil society from the state. Indeed, this project is even anti-state, in sharp contrast to the nationalist statebuilding projects that dominated modernization in this region. These liberal organizations strive to build democracy through privatization, economic liberalization, antinepotism, and the growth of an entrepreneurial middle class outside the state (see Roy 2008: 32). Their vision implies full political freedoms within an aggressively neoliberal social space the like of which has not been seen before.11 The educated upper middle classes are central to the local operations of these organizations. Inherent in this social engineering project, which can be termed the ‘global civil society model’, is a strong universalistic vision of the social as ‘free’ only if it is grounded in the private and in the individual. This activity can be seen as ‘governing at a distance’ through a variety of institutions, including NGOs, the IMF, and the World Bank. In Tunisia and Egypt, Western foundations, such as Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations (founded by Soros and until 2011 known as the Open Society Institute), and the NED, substantially funded NGOs working for regime change in the years leading up to the uprisings, as they had done successfully in the liberal ‘revolutions’ in Poland, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. The young and well-educated NGO cadres were trained in organizational

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skills, tactical media use, and communication technology directly linked to demonstrations, as well as in ideological topics like democratic and civic values and free business enterprise doctrines. A broad coalition of organizations, united through using a discursive framework of liberty, universal human rights and freedoms, and the value of the free market, have thus been supported to work for regime change in a certain direction. What is more, they successfully connected this ideological discourse to the broad social protests against poverty and injustice, translating those protests into liberal reforms that do not challenge the structural dynamics that produce these problems. This ideological process of appropriation is related to the broader, ongoing process whereby nodal oligarchical forms of ‘corporate state power’ are emerging out of former centralized nation-states. The crucial element is the embedding of the social within the economic (Kapferer 2010). In the Arab case, we see the demands of the working class, the poor, and the lower middle class for social improvements being translated into calls for increased political participation and universal human rights that will probably not improve their impoverished condition. Instead, these demands will more than likely increase the neo-liberal processes of privatization, internationalization, and state minimization that have dismantled protections for the poor and put the costs of enormous private profits on the workforce. The civil society model of development and empowerment assumes that capitalism produces both democracy and welfare.

Concluding Remarks: Reterritorialized Arab Spaces The last decades of neo-liberal policies have reversed central social reforms of Arab states, including land distribution, free education, and health and social welfare

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benefits, which were part of universalistic political spaces. These reversals are not simple recolonizations but must be understood as a new, decentralized dynamic that is deterritorializing and reterritorializing national political spaces, opening up social and economic processes to the forces of a decentralized empire. The despotic Arab regimes were in many senses reterritorialized. Their oligarchic authoritarian structure, however, blocked local and diasporic upper middle classes’ access to power, the market, and other benefits. The discourses of the recent uprisings were dominated by a celebration of liberal freedom and individual human agency, which fits right into the agenda of liberalizing the economy and of reducing public welfare and protections further. There was a great anger among the majority of both the rural and urban Egyptian middle classes, who felt abandoned by Mubarak’s state (Kandil 2012: 219). Most slogans of the uprisings demanded the end of despotism and corruption and the introduction of democracy.12 These demands were largely shared with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), but they were translated into calls for accountability, good governance, and a market economy without political nepotism. In its short period in power, the MB government failed to legalize independent labor unions and sacked and prosecuted striking workers and independent labor union members (AhramOnline 2012). Despite the government’s economically neo-liberal orientation, which could have provided a careful balance with the military, the Egyptian Army, the core of the secularist nation, was finally mobilized on behalf of ‘the nation’ and ‘the revolution’ against the ‘fascist’ and ‘terrorist’ MB by an alliance of liberal and socialist forces in July 2013. This recent backlash seems to seal the fate of the Arab Spring as ending like the 1848 revolutions—that is, as a short-lived euphoric event hijacked by reactionary liberal

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forces that also played a central role in the uprisings. The series of uprisings must furthermore be considered within the context of direct and indirect military interventions from the Iraq invasion onward, now causing havoc in Syria. The national and the international social and economic forces of reactionary liberalization, along with the discourse of crisis and legal emergencies that legitimizes military interventions, constitute part of a powerful global nexus of forces that have effected a transformation of the state and society in the region—and continue to do so.

Notes 1. Both the Kifaya movement and the 6 April Youth Movement were dominated by the middle class, but the latter movement was more concerned with the conditions of the poor and of workers. 2. These structures were largely a result of longue durée Western interventions that opened the economy and the finance sector to Western control and dominance. A new landed gentry had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century out of the reorganization of society and agriculture to produce for the global market (Mitchell 2002). Before and during the period of British occupation of Egypt, banking, finance, and agricultural trade were dominated by non-Muslims and non-locals, including Jews (Suares, Cassel) and Greeks (Salvago, Sunadinos). 3. Free trade agreements with Middle Eastern states were initiated in 2003 by President George W. Bush as a key element of the US’s vision of the Greater Middle East. There are presently free trade agreements between the US and Israel (significantly including the Palestinian Authority), Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, and Morocco. Many of these states also have special industrial zones that operate outside normal national regulations and produce for export, often with underpaid Asiatic labor forces. Qualifying Industrial Zones have a percentage of Israeli trade as a condition for free trade with the US. 4. A consumption level below $2 per day is the UN’s definition of absolute poverty.

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5. This is stated in an African Development Bank Report. See http:// www.afdb.org/en/news-and-events/article/africas-middle-classtriples-to-more-than-310m-over-past-30-years-due-to-economicgrowth-and-rising-job-culture-reports-afdb-7986/. 6. This is not an exception but the common result of structural adjustment programs (see Harvey 2005). 7. The Lebanese and Syrian diasporas are old and very large, commonly estimated to be around 12 to 15 million persons each, a considerable number of whom live in the Americas. These diasporas are mainly Christian and, like the Greek ones, are linked through trading networks that emerged in early modern capitalism. The Mexican Carlos Slim, ranked the world’s richest man from 2010 to 2013, is of Lebanese Christian descent. 8. Diaspora estimates vary greatly. See Zohry (n.d.) and Zohry and Debnath (2010). 9. According to a study conducted in 2009 by the Change Institute, the majority of the Egyptian Muslim community in Britain saw their own economic opportunities in Egypt as being clearly impeded by the old political regime. See http:// www.intercultural-europe.org/site/database/publication/ understanding-muslim-ethnic-communities. 10. Another central field is the ‘empowerment’ of women and the poor. 11. The US wrote a flat 15 percent tax regime into the new Iraqi Constitution (along with full tax exemption for up to 15 years for joint venture companies and no limitations on foreign ownership), significantly reducing the corporate tax rate, which had been at a maximum of 40 percent. 12. Such slogans included “Fall, fall, the gang, the boss, and the wolves”; “Dignity and freedom is the demand of all Egyptians”; “Liberation, liberation, from rule by the gang of fraud”; “Husni Mubarak, you agent, you sold the gas and [only] the Nile is left [to be sold].”

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Egyptian-labour-movement-accuses-Morsi-of-betrayal.aspx (accessed 15 October 2012). Asouor, Omar. 2010. “El Baradei and the Mobilization of the Egyptian Diaspora.” International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, 30 September. http://icsr.info/2010/09/el-baradei-and-the -mobilisation-of-the egyptian diaspora/. Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso. Binzel, Christine. 2011. “Decline in Social Mobility: Unfulfilled Aspirations among Egypt’s Educated Youth.” IZA Discussion Paper No. 6139, University of Heidelberg–Alfred Weber Institute for Economics. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. El-Meehy, Asya. 2011. “Transcending Meta-Narratives: Unpacking the Revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia.” e-International Relations, 8 May. http://www.e-ir.info/2011/05/08/transcending-metanarratives-unpacking-the-revolutions-in-egypt-and-tunisia/. Graziano, Teresa. 2012. “The Tunisian Diaspora: Between ‘Digital Riots’ and Web Activism.” Social Science Information 51, no. 4: 534–550. Haddad, Bassam. 2011. “English Translation of Interview with Hossam El-Hamalawy on the Role of Labor/Unions in the Egyptian Revolution.” Jadaliya, 30 April. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/ index/1387/english-translation-of-interview-with-hossam-el-ha (accessed 3 January 2012). Hamm, Patrick, Lawrence P. King, and David Stuckler. 2012. “Mass Privatization, State Capacity, and Economic Growth in PostCom­­munist Countries.” American Sociological Review 77, no. 2: 295–324. Harb, Zahera. 2011. “Arab Revolutions and the Social Media Effect.” M/C Journal 14, no. 2. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/364. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kandil, Hazem. 2012. Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt. London: Verso. Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “The Aporia of Power: Crisis and the Emergence of the Corporate State.” Social Analysis 54, no. 1: 125–151.

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King, Stephen J. 2000. “Neoliberal Reforms and Democratization in Tunisia: Civil Society in a Rural Community.” Pp. 201–219 in Economic Liberalization, Democratization and Civil Society in the Developing World, ed. Remonda B. Kleinberg and Janine A. Clark. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Kishk, Mohammed Atif. n.d. “Mechanisms of Impoverishment of the Rural Poor in Contemporary Egypt.” Institutional and Social Innovations in Irrigation Mediterranean Management. http:// www.google.no/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source= web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2 Fwww.isiimm.agropolis.org%2FOSIRIS%2Farticle%2FegMechani smsImpoverishmentEgypt.pdf&ei=5fFaUJbAFKai4gSg2IGACw&u sg=AFQjCNFwfeui0RQUhKGRDOMNff0mUQ3nTA&sig2=Zonah J041RspMTbmF9Iihg. Lawrence, Robert Z. 2006. “Recent US Free Trade Initiatives in the Middle East: Opportunities but No Guarantees.” KSG Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP06-050, December. Marx, Karl. [1852] 2006. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library–Literary Society. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. “America’s Egypt: Discourse of the Development Industry.” Middle East Report 169: 18–36. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. O’Connor, Jenny. 2012. “‘NGO’: The Guise of Innocence.” Irish Foreign Affairs 5, no. 1: 5–8. Ong, Aihwa. 2000. “Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia.” Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 4: 55–75. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rigi, Jakob. 2009. “Post-Soviet Formation of the Russian State and the War in Chechnya: Chaotic Form of Sovereignty.” Pp. 53–83 in Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval, ed. Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn E. Bertelsen. New York: Berghahn Books. Roy, Olivier. 2008. The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, in association with the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris. Severo, Marta, and Eleonora Zuolo. 2012. “Egyptian e-Diaspora: Migrant Websites without a Network?” Social Science Information 51, no. 4: 521–533. Shapira, Ian. 2011. “U.S. Funding Tech Firms That Help Mideast Dissidents Evade Government Censors.” Washington Post, 10

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March. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2011/03/09/AR2011030905716.html. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. �The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London: Verso. Zohry, Ayman. n.d. “Impact of the Economic Crisis on Egyptian Migration and Egyptians Abroad.” Migration for Development. http://www.migration4development.org/content/impact-economic -crisis-egyptian-migration-and-egyptians-abroad. Zohry, Ayman, and Priyanka Debnath. 2010. A Study on the Dynamics of the Egyptian Diaspora: Strengthening Development Linkages. Cairo: International Organization for Migration International Organ­ization for Migration (IOM).

Tahrir as Heterotopia Spaces and Aesthetics of the Egyptian Revolution

Z Paola Abenante

Many scholars have criticized the exclusive focus on Tahrir as the ultimate space of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 (see Sowers and Toensing 2012). They argue that the 18 days of Tahrir were made possible by the local protests simultaneously taking place in other towns, provinces, and parts of Cairo itself that outbalanced the power relation between Mubarak’s police forces and the masses. Other works have furthermore emphasized that Egyptian street protests started at least a decade ago and that the Tahrir protests thus did not come out of the blue (Bayat 2012; El-Ghobashy 2012). Anthropologists have suggested that an exclusive attention to the space of the square reinforces the iconic image of the young male revolutionary (Winegar 2012), concealing gender and other power relations that regulated access to Midan Tahrir (Hafez 2012) and backgrounding the protests that occurred elsewhere (Abu-Lughod 2012). Despite these timely questionings of the redemptive media image of Tahrir, I consider the uses of the square and its role as an iconic space of the Revolution to be crucial to the uprising and its aftermath.1 The persevering presence of

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crowds in Tahrir opened up new notions of ‘the public’ and ‘the people’, and their relation to politics. Paying attention to the uses of the square during the nine months following 25 January, we can see that the accessibility to public space should be understood diachronically, in terms of different levels of inclusiveness and exclusiveness. If Tahrir Square was a privileged space during the initial days, it became more inclusive in the immediate post-revolutionary period, opening up a vision of the public as a common space. Although such inclusiveness was continuously contested through sexual harassment and Salafi violence, the persistent use of Tahrir by unstructured masses produced a radical reconfiguration of the relation between the public—including unprivileged members of society—and the state. The use and occupation of the square and the spread of artistic expressions in public spaces constitute a crucial legacy of the Revolution, implying the defiance of hegemonic understandings of the public and the emergence of new visions of ‘publicness’. These visions were produced in ongoing encounters between an abstract idea of publicness and particular events in public spaces. Publicness as an abstract and ideal quality of openness and indeterminacy (Manoukian 2005) suggests the possibility of empowerment. It refers to spaces and multitudes/ crowds who defy stable references, as do the occupants of Tahrir, and are therefore less easily governed through state-produced identities (such as ‘the Egyptian people’) and control of places/events.2 The new manifestations of publicness triggered by the protests still live on in forms of artistic expression. Those who stage events and perform on the streets continue to challenge the use of public space, and artworks that represent ongoing political events continuously pinpoint the ambivalences and inherent tensions of such happenings, highlighting their yet unfinished nature as well as opening them to new meanings.

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Ambiguities of ‘the Egyptian People’ Since February 2011 and for approximately a year, a weekly ‘Claim the Revolution’ demonstration took place in Midan Tahrir in order to remind the SCAF (the military council then temporarily leading the country) of what ‘the people want’ (el shaab yurid). Groups of individuals from all walks of life were found across Tahrir, making different uses of the square—sitting, eating, selling, drawing, performing, or holding discussions on the fate of the country and the possibilities for future action. On 6 October 2011, a ‘Claim the Revolution’ day overlapped with the national celebration of Egypt’s victory against Israeli forces, which had always involved showing off Egyptian military power and celebrating the government. Nine months had passed since the Revolution had begun, and although enthusiasm was still high, disillusionment was already seeping into the general mood. The outcome of the uprisings remained unclear, as the army was still speaking in the name of Egypt and of the Revolution. On that morning, military airplanes had flown above the square to celebrate the day, but this also reminded people of the attacks by the army that they had endured during the protests. The square was filled with families, men and women, children, street vendors, activists chanting Revolution slogans, amateur and more professional artists, and young men improvising a parade and shouting patriotically “Tahia Misr” (Long life to Egypt). Midan Tahrir had become available to everybody, and the crowd was claiming a dimension of publicness out of the yet ambiguous public space of the square. Its ambivalent nature and the co-existence of otherwise nearly incompatible realities made of Tahrir a ‘heterotopia’, as Foucault (1967) has defined the necessarily corrupted reproduction, in a real place, of a utopia.

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The heterotopian nature of Tahrir comes out clearly in the practice of working-class amateur artists, for instance, in this drawing by a poor, middle-aged carpenter named Mohammed (see fig. 1). The drawing, along with the spatial and social position of it and its creator, provides insight into the crucial relation between publicness and the public. This artwork was leaning against the ground next to other drawings, all colored with felt-tip pens, in an alley right behind the square. The text inscribed on it describes a journey into the ‘guts’ of an army colonel, who is speaking to a youth: Stand up my boy, take me into your arms, and tell me why—when I try hold you near to my chest—you push me away. You taught me what ‘Egypt’ means, you taught me what love is that melts the heart, you taught me how to be loving, and you taught me how to travel with the words, you have taught me the meaning of life and taught me that even Tantawi is under the responsibility of God. Stand up now, my heart, and release the country. Since the most important victory lies in the [good] government.

By citing the authoritative rhetoric of patriotism, the drawing sheds light on the tensions underlying the notion of the people that is inscribed in the construction of the public space known as Liberation Square. In the colonel’s words, revolutionary spirit and national sentiment intersect and merge within the patriarchal rhetoric of patriotism, just as the army in everyday life outside Tahrir merges with the nation’s children.3 The vignette also links a positive outcome with control over space, implicitly warning against the danger of unstructured publicness. If the Revolution had given a new fundament to the Egyptian identity, says the colonel, it was now time for public order and governance to be restored and for the people to leave Liberation Square. The colonel, with a nasty face telling of

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Figure 1 Mohammed’s Drawing, Midan Tahrir, 6 October 2011

Photograph: Paola Abenante

Mohammed’s antipathy toward military power, is claiming the public space of Tahrir, which frames liberation, the idea of the nation, and the Egyptian people in terms of the dominant reading of history. The square became widely known as Tahrir (Liberation) after the 1919 Revolution against British colonial power, but it was officially renamed only after the 1952 Revolution, when the color of liberation took the ambivalent shade of the military regime. By its ordering role as the spatial center of the nation and by its name, this space was important in the production of the modern subject and citizen, setting out the crucial role of the military in the formation of the free Egyptian people. The carpenter Mohammed’s presence on the square denounced and defied this

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spatialized order on this particular day, when the tension surrounding the notions of ‘the Egyptian people’, the public space of Tahrir, and the nationalistic discourse on liberation was most dangerous. The materiality and position of the drawing within the time and spaces of post-revolutionary Egypt can tell us something more. The drawing was made with simple tools—pencil and markers—and showed mistakes in spelling and syntax, both elements suggesting that the author did not belong to the young, educated middle class that was reportedly responsible for the Revolution. Around Tahrir, many of the writings, drawings, and paper sculptures on display were the first artistic attempts by their creators. A number of these improvised artists were middle-aged and came from the poorest neighborhoods. Lacking access to the Internet and unfamiliar with the web, they had no connections to social media such as Facebook. These artists were among those least represented by the media coverage since they had no articulated political demands or connection to activist movements. Unlike that of the middle-class artists, their work was not oriented toward a Western audience. When I approached him, Mohammed did not look up or try to explain his drawings, as if he felt that his pictures spoke for themselves. When asked what he wanted from the Revolution, he told me what he did not want. He immediately assured me that his drawings were not for sale but were simply on display as a contribution to the Revolution. He did not want to be confused with one of those shabab, the young artists of the Revolution who had left the square, excited about the possibility of making a career out of their artwork. Mohammed was not only defying the SCAF’s right to govern but also challenging other national and international forces competing over the identity of the Egyptian people.

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Artistic Expressions in Public Space The artistic dimension of the Egyptian Revolution, inflated by media coverage, soon became the target of national and international forces. Only four months after Mubarak’s fall, the EU bureaucratic dinosaur launched a project, titled ‘Revolution and the Arts’, to sustain the Egyptian revolutionary artists. This gives an idea of the interests involved in the ‘art and revolution’ affair. A number of national, international, institutional, and private funders competed to define the representation of the Revolution and the ‘appropriate’ spaces for its artistic expression. Artists supported by private funding were called on to produce ‘revolutionary art’, somehow responding to the intent of disambiguating the meaning of the events and fixing it within a democratic and secular framework. Artists improvising on the square were spotted and transformed into media icons of the Revolution, situated within a democratic and inclusive discourse that was comfortable for an international audience seeking reassurance against the dangers of an Islamist turn.4 Concomitant with these initiatives, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture organized a theatre festival and several workshops in an attempt to redirect expressions into ‘appropriate’ public spaces. Even the most spontaneous declarations were soon caught up in this net of interests. Shortly after the revolutionary chaos, a group of young women and men started drawing in Tahrir. Calling themselves the Revolutionary Artists’ Union (Rabtha Fanan el Thawra), they drew for themselves, for the Revolution, and for anybody who asked them to draw. They soon attracted attention by hanging their drawings on the walls of the Kentucky Fried Chicken fast-food chain in Tahrir and eventually opened a Facebook page. By late 2011, the Rabtha had left the square and had a ‘private’ exhibition space. The drawings on exhibit ranged from cartoon satires

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against the Mubarak regime, to portraits of the shuhada’ (the Revolution’s martyrs), to images of Egypt as an allencompassing motherland peacefully reuniting religious and cultural differences, to symbolizations of a new desired freedom. These middle-class artists were educated but lacked professional training. Their drawings had already been featured in a number of exhibition centers, and the group was now sponsored by a tourism magnate. They were hyped as the reference image of the new, freed Egyptian people—the brave youth of Egypt who had brought about the Revolution peacefully by expressing their desire for a new country through the arts. A member of the group explained that their drawings had been a way to show tourists, especially Westerners, that the Revolution ‘really’ had been a mission to achieve democracy and freedom. After their moment of fame, the drawings of the Rabtha had been gathered in a room given to them by a radio station sponsored by the businessman and were now locked in that private space, to be seen by nobody. They had left the square and the streets to address a specific public and somehow had lost their publicness. In contrast, the persistent presence on the square of people such as Mohammed and the unarticulated claims of their drawings—purposeless and indeterminate with respect to public and private dominant interests and policies—continued to defy and challenge this process of the spatial ‘confinement’ of art. These artists could hardly gain any personal benefit from the Revolution since they do not fit into any politically useful category. They belong to the ‘wastes of neo-liberalism’ who had seen most of their life ruined by Mubarak’s regime. After Mubarak’s fall, Mohammed started coming every week to Tahrir to support the Revolution with his drawings. Through their presence on the square, he and other artists were claiming access to publicness, both for themselves and for those who did not

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have a specific place from which to speak. Their persistent presence warned against the ambivalences haunting the heterotopia of Tahrir and reclaimed an ideal notion of ‘the public’ as a common dimension, one that is “open and available in the sense that it is ‘in view’ and at somebody’s disposal” (Manoukian 2005: 59). The square opened multiple possibilities and ways of inhabiting space to a multitude of people, who were as yet un-subjected but at the same time exposed to competing regimes of identification. It was a space where a new understanding of the people— one that could involve hope or risk—was still at stake.

The Legacy of the Revolution Asef Bayat (2012: 76) has described the “pandemic potential” of street politics to attract the attention of the stranger. Whereas workers’ strikes and neighborhood demonstrations are mainly directed at contesting the government over the control and uses of particular private and public activities and spaces, protesting on the streets, in our time, conveys the “collective sentiments of a nation or community” (ibid.). In this sense, it attracts an undefined wider public, extending beyond localized confrontations and particular aims. In Egypt, it was particularly the use of the space of Tahrir that mediated the passage from fractioned and localized dimensions and aims of specific protests to a national and international framework, thus exploding the boundaries of the confrontation between state and civil society and more generally claiming a redefinition of ‘the national’ itself. Badiou (2012) argues that a central space that transcends its own locality is a key example of what he defines as ‘riot’, the only possible form of historical action in our times.

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During the infamous attacks in Maspiro on 9–10 October, the centrality of spatial dimension became clear when the SCAF collapsed the ‘state’ with the ‘nation’ in its assault on peaceful protesters who were demonstrating against abuses that had been endured five days earlier. The army used its patriotic-patriarchal tone to call upon the Egyptian people for support against the demonstrators, who were presented as Coptic Christians threatening the security of citizens and the nation. By choosing a different spatial route—marching toward the television tower on the banks of the Nile—these protesters separated themselves from Tahrir and ‘the people’, laying themselves open to accusations of separatism and public danger. The space of Tahrir became a common space, defining a more inclusive dimension of publicness that challenged the established, authoritarian notion of the public. It is here that the state itself was questioned, not only in its rulings but also in the legitimacy of its discursive and violent production of the Egyptian people. The utopian unity that emerged in Tahrir bridged differences in political aims and tensions between political and class factions that still overshadow the political future. The relation between the Revolution and artistic expressions such as Mohammad’s drawing sheds light on one of the ways in which Egyptians have been striving to keep hold of the possible empowerment that the publicness provided. By July 2012, many groups of artists had returned to perform in the streets, metro stations, poor neighborhoods, and even spaces in front of government palaces, as well as in other cities (see Abaza 2013; Pahwa and Winegar 2012). A new phenomenon had been established out of the perseverance of people like Mohammed, namely, the use of the streets and squares as spaces to perform and stage arts, in defiance of ‘appropriate’ spatializations of arts as

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established by national cultural policies.5 Exhibiting also outside of the heterotopia of Tahrir, street artists and artistic expressions today continue to extend the challenge to dominant articulations of the public and of the Egyptian people as a political subject by forging new audiences and proposing new ways of relating to public space.

Notes 1. This article was written before the July 2013 military backlash against Morsi. 2. The intensive and extensive control of space has a long modern­ist trajectory in Egypt, stretching back to Mohammed Ali, through the colonial period, up to the modern era (Mitchell 1988). 3. The 18 days of the uprisings reached the turning point when Tantawi—then leader-in-chief of the military—raised the white flag, ‘dispensing’ the army from fighting against their ‘own relatives and friends’. The army thus declared its belonging and allegiance to the Egyptian people. 4. The ambivalent and dangerous effects of such media forces may find an example in the unfortunate popularity that resulted in Ramy Essam, one of the ‘singers of the Revolution’, being arrested and then tortured by the army. 5. The tentacles of the cultural policy of the Mubarak era, driven by national and international funding, are still active in trying to place arts into specific spaces that, in their turn, appeal to the specific publics that such national policy wants to address. Within this logic, the arts are intended to expose the public to high modern and international culture in order to form a modern Egyptian identity.

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References Abaza, Mona. 2013. “The Dramaturgy of a Street Corner.” Jadaliyya, 25 January. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/9724/ the-dramaturgy-of-a-street-corner. Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2012. “Living the ‘Revolution’ in an Egyptian Village: Moral Action in a National Space.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1: 21–25. Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. London: Verso. Bayat, Asef. 2012. “The ‘Arab Street.’” Pp. 73–84 in Sowers and Toensing 2012. El-Ghobashy, Mona. 2012. “The Praxis of the Egyptian Revolution.” Pp. 21–40 in Sowers and Toensing 2012. Foucault, Michel. 1967. Heterotopias. http://www.foucault.info/ documents/heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html. Hafez, Sherine. 2012. “No Longer a Bargain: Women, Masculinity, and the Egyptian Uprising.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1: 37–42. Manoukian, Setrag. 2005. “Power, Religion, and the Effects of Publicness in 20th Century Shiraz.” Pp. 57–84 in Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim Majority Societies, ed. Armando Salvatore and Mark LeVine. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pahwa, Sonali, and Jessica Winegar. 2012. “Culture, State and Revolution.” Middle East Report 42, no. 236: 2–7. http://www.merip. org/mer/mer263/culture-state-revolution. Sowers, Jeannie Lynn, and Chris J. Toensing, eds. 2012. The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest and Social Change in Egypt. London: Verso. Winegar, Jessica. 2012. “The Privilege of Revolution: Gender, Class, Space, and Affect in Egypt.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1: 67–70.

Beyond the Arab Spring The Aesthetics and Poetics of Popular Revolt and Protest, 2010–2012

Z Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots

The Arab Spring uprisings shook the world. In the flood of newspaper articles, media documentaries, online blogs, YouTube postings, and scholarly articles that followed the rebellions and worldwide protests in 2011–2012, there is however a remarkable feature of the protests that has remained mostly unrecognized, untheorized, and certainly not analyzed comparatively.1 This was the salient presence of images, songs, videos, humor, satire, and dramatic performances in the uprisings. Although visual images drawn from the protests were repeatedly deployed to adorn media documentaries or publications, no serious scholarly attempt has yet been made to analyze their means of production and extensive presence as a distinctive force of twenty-first century popular global political communication.2 The aesthetic constitution of the political in the uprisings and protests went far beyond earlier protest movements, with a much richer and more inventive archive of evocative signs and bodily gestures, and this was true even beyond the Middle East.

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Performance, Aesthetics, and the Political The failure to recognize the salience of the aesthetic—that is, the creative use of material, visual, auditory, theatrical, and sensual expressions—in constituting a politics of revolt has also arguably been a failure to identify the central motor energizing the massive mobilizations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes, and the apolitical silent majority. The role of the aesthetic was critical in enabling solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists, and opposition parties. Within an emergent anthropology of protest movements, the centrality of the spectacular, of humorous satire and embodied performance, has only now begun to be noted (Haugerud 2013; Juris 2008). In a vivid description of the earlier Global Justice movement’s protest tactics, Juris (2008: 63–64) proposes that these ‘image events’ communicate to wider audiences by ‘hijacking’ the global media, while at the same time creating affective solidarity through performance. Many have noted the ‘carnivalesque’ dimensions of protests (Tancons 2012), enabling the forging of intense solidarities across difference, even if, as Bakhtin (1984) showed for the medieval carnival, they are contained moments of ‘rebellion’ or run the danger of being misinterpreted or trivialized by the media (Juris 2008). Conceived of as rituals, the Arab Spring protests generated and amplified powerful feelings of joy and terror and fashioned new subjectivities in lived moments of mass action that demonstrated the centrality of experience in the constitution of political subjects (ibid.: 64–67). These lived moments of ‘freedom’ and collective effervescence created a sense of ‘suspended temporality’, ‘newness’, and ‘becoming’ (Manoukian 2011; Nugent 2012). Performance art and spatial occupation have thus become, as Mouffe (2007) argues, key tools of protest.

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In India, ‘spectacular’ protests have of course long been a feature of social movements, from Gandhi’s 1930 Salt March, which attracted worldwide media attention, to the women’s tree-hugging Chipko movement of the 1970s (Shiva 1988), but the impact of such demonstrations has been amplified in the twenty-first century by global media coverage and, more recently, social networking. Alongside the emphasis in past studies on visual images and the spectacular, one might include the role of popular music in protest movements, from the Rock Against Racism campaign initiated in 1976 (Gilroy 1987) and the 1985 Live Aid concerts to benefit the Ethiopian famine to the songs of the American civil rights movement and trade union protest songs. It is the contemporary combination of popular music with dramatically staged visual performances and their dissemination via the global media and the World Wide Web that make the present-day protests qualitatively unique. The aesthetics of revolt that emerged during the protests of 2010–2012 in North Africa and beyond are thus not concerned with the trivial ‘decoration’ of serious politics, the ‘icing on the cake’, so to speak. The uprisings and protests signaled a radical shift in modes of mobilization and political activism, a new embodied and aesthetic way of doing politics worldwide. None of the uprisings were isolated events, and even when they began in response to local grievances, as in Botswana, India, or Israel, they invariably linked themselves to protests elsewhere. They ‘spread’ and were connected, most saliently through tangible aesthetic references and inter-textual ‘citations’, despite being locally concerned, in each country, with a range of specific issues: regime change (the Arab world, Russia), corruption (India), the demise of the welfare state and tycoonery (Spain, Israel, Greece), a living wage (Botswana, Wisconsin), and the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and

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corporate greed (the Occupy movement in the US, Canada, and Britain). Several themes traveled widely across borders, animating protests transnationally. It is not simply that social networks have spread globally even as they ‘aggregated’ massive numbers of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical national spaces, using modern means of communication (Juris 2012). It is that non-verbal images, music, and bodily gestures have traveled across borders and been incorporated into local vernaculars. Citation occurs, as Manoukian (2011) perceptively argues, both geographically (across borders) and historically (across time), recalling earlier protest movements (see also Collins 2012). One may speak of emergent new ‘vernacular cosmopolitanisms’, which are local in their material and bodily manifestations and expressions, yet cosmopolitan in their demand for rights and justice and in their borrowing of aesthetic forms from one another. The spread of protests across the world has affected peoples in many different, widely separated countries. It has, of course, been associated with terrible violence and civil war in some places. But it is equally important to recognize that it inaugurated new mass forms of peaceful political participation. This has barely been commented upon, and the long-term impact of the protests is yet to be explored fully. The historical continuities as well as the differences between the 2010–2012 popular movements and revolts and past popular mobilizations are significant. But the recent protests were ‘new’ in significant ways that challenge our analyses.

The Arab Spring and Beyond Undoubtedly, the rebellions of Tunisia and Egypt, epitomized in the giant gatherings in Tahrir Square, became a

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global symbol of protest against the odds and of courage in the face of brute tyranny. They inspired a series of subsequent rebellions in Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arabic world. What is equally important to recognize, however, is that huge protests beyond the Arab world also followed—in India, Israel, Botswana, Iran, Spain, Greece, the US, Canada, the UK, and, more recently, Russia. In Spain, the Indignados filled Madrid and the squares of other Spanish cities. In Botswana, nearly 100,000 public service trade unionists sang songs of rebellion as they gathered daily for over two months under a giant morula tree in the capital and in other towns (Werbner 2010, in press). In Israel, thousands of tents filled city boulevards and parks in a ‘dwelling’ protest against the unbearable economic burden of spiraling prices and the attack on the welfare state. In Greece, the Indignados movement, formed in the summer of 2011, encamped for over a month in the key central square of the country, with rallies of 500,000 people out of a population of 10 million. General strikes and major protests have taken European debt-ridden countries by storm since May 2010. In India, mass protests, media attention, and public debate about the economic and social direction of the country coalesced around a public fast by the social activist Anna Hazare. Its purpose was to pressure the government to institute a ‘people’s draft’ of the Lokpal bill, a piece of anti-corruption legislation intended to hold politicians and bureaucrats to account that had been stalled by successive Parliaments for over four decades.3 In Chile, students took to the streets against the post-dictatorial state’s policies in education, particularly its neo-liberalist agenda, and against the police. Protests by the workers of Wisconsin, even before the Arab Spring uprisings erupted, brought attention to the labor movement in the US (Collins 2012), and these

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were followed by Occupy movements in North American and British cities. In February 2012, the all-girl Russian punk band Pussy Riot publicized the call for regime change in Russia and worldwide through their allegedly blasphemous aesthetic performance in a Russian Orthodox cathedral in central Moscow, which resulted in the arrest of three of the band’s members.4 From Egypt to India, from Botswana to London, all of these countries witnessed worker, youth, and middle-class rebellions against the political and bureaucratic status quo and the privilege of the few wealthy and often corrupt elites at a time when the majority can no longer earn a decent wage. In the case of India, Israel, Greece, and Botswana, the protests encountered criticism for being apolitical and not attending to the plight of the most underprivileged or excluded groups (such as the unemployed, Palestinians, etc.). Without depoliticizing or undermining the political objectives of the protests, however, we, as comparative social anthropologists, need to approach the uniqueness of these protest movements that swept the world during 2010–2012. They were not simply echoes of earlier protest movements; rather, they were innovative aesthetic and poetic articulations in an age of global media and social networking. Their material, visual, physical, and sensual manifestations were the means of mobilizing action and contesting corruption, inequality, autocracy, and neo-liberal policies that were sweeping away workers’ rights and citizens’ rights, where these existed, and of demanding these rights where they did not exist. The ethnographic accounts by anthropologists who witnessed them make evident that the protests were strikingly imaginative, creative, and democratic, utilizing aesthetic popular media, electronic media, shared hand gestures, visual and material discourses, artistic activities, and theatrical speeches to convey their message. At the same

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time, many protests emerged out of a more enduring activism against corruption and authoritarianism that had taken place over many years, as in the case of Egypt and Tunisia, which had witnessed earlier activist and trade union mobilizations, and of India, in which the campaign against corruption had been fought by activists for many years (Alexander 2011; Webb 2012).

Citational Travel and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism The first element central to the spread of the protests worldwide was their use of visual and audio citation and inter-textuality, both historical and spatial, whereby past images, tropes, slogans, musical refrains, or images reproduced from events elsewhere were fused with current images in new bricolages and assemblages that invoked the past or other places in the present. For example, in Israel the chant “The people call for social justice” recognizably echoed the speech rhythm and cadences of Tahrir Square chants. In Botswana, the gesture of rolling hands echoed that of the Indignados in Spain. In India, protesters wore caps that echoed the headwear of the movement’s leader, Anna Hazare, and, in turn, referenced the Gandhian cap worn by activists in the struggle for independence from colonial rule. As critical anthropologists, we need to interrogate the role of such (re)iterative performances (Butler 1993), the use of mimesis (Benjamin 1968; Taussig 1993), the ‘doubling up’ of signs (Bhabha 1994: 119) and their displacement in revitalizing and (re)inventing the ‘political’. Arguably, in spreading globally to different local contexts, such citations have led to a newly forged vernacular cosmopolitanism—an invented language that is shared widely across countries and divisions of class, ethnicity, religion, race, and gender but is also inflected by local

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forms of popular aesthetics, power relations, and politicized understandings of inequality and injustice. Another key feature of the protests was their peacefulness, even though they embodied powerful, new transcendent solidarities and aspirations through popular culture and performance. Violence occurred only in the face of repression, often after months of peaceful protests. It usually took the form of attacks by the repressive forces of the state and was followed by the aestheticization of violence, including that of martyrdom. This was true especially in the Middle East as more and more peaceful activists lost their lives, expressed in widely broadcast poetry and songs of martyrdom on social media sites. The aestheticization of sheer courage and heroism in the face of adversity and its impact still needs to be theorized.5 A third critical feature of the protests was the aestheticization of the state. This was as much true in Botswana, where strikers constructed an authoritarian image of their president, Ian Khama, as it was in Wisconsin, Egypt, India, or Syria. Comic, satirical representations of autocratic, dictatorial, anti-democratic, neo-liberal, and corrupt governments, along with the mocking and satirizing of corrupt politicians, greedy bankers, and tycoons, were signature features of many of the uprisings. These aesthetically embellished targets of the protests were pitched against countervailing values of ethical governance. At stake was a reassertion of the same values that informed anti-colonial freedom movements, the welfare state, the right to a living wage, transparency, and the egalitarian ethos of democracy. Protests included a performative ‘prefiguring’ of an envisioned ‘just society’ through satire, visual puns, food sharing, and on-the-ground democratic forums and debates. In some cases, as among some participants in the Occupy movement in New York City, the protests appealed to anarchist values (Graeber 2009; Juris

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2012), dramatizing the yawning pay gap and huge wealth differentials between workers and tycoons, oligarchs, and bankers, set against the cutbacks and retrenchment of public services. Some protests expressed radical activism, for example, by taking over spaces such as the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Moscow or by spectacular public fasting in Delhi. As Butler (2011) has argued in relation to the uprisings, the media require bodies on the street to have an ‘event’, and it is mass gatherings that capture squares, buildings, and neighborhoods, embodying new political ‘spaces’ in which demands can be articulated, whether in Cairo, Athens, New York, or (one might add) Moscow, Delhi, and Gaborone. Among some streams in the Occupy movement, ‘direct democracy’ was a particular philosophy that aimed to claim sovereignty by not directing its demands to the state (see Graeber 2009; Razsa and Kurnik 2012). Most of the movements, however, were protests against local regimes and addressed their demands mainly to the state. The question thus needs to be asked: what long-term role have the protests and uprisings played in the achievement of democracy and social justice? In many parts of the world, the protests forged, emotionally and bodily, a shared identity across class, religion, gender, and other social differences through aesthetic creativity and performance. They witnessed the re-emergence of the carnivalesque, of moments of collective effervescence, of communitas, when ‘time stands still’. In an early study of London’s Notting Hill Carnival as a cultural movement, Cohen (1993) stressed its capacity to bridge differences among participants. Similarly, in her masterly account of the 2011 Wisconsin protests, Collins (2012: 7) analyzes the convergence in a single movement of a wide range of social actors with diverse economic and political stakes: public- and private-sector trade unions; community

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action, anti-racist, and anti-poverty groups; the gay movement; the interfaith coalition for social justice; and “massive numbers of non-union community members.” She was led to wonder “what kind of alliance or amalgamated movement was emerging in this snowy square in the upper Mid-West” to occupy the Wisconsin State Capitol building (ibid.). Such diversity highlights the futility of previous singular theoretical approaches to the rise of social movements that stress, for example, ‘post-materialist’ identity politics (Melucci 1989), resource mobilization in economic and political protest, or mobilizations for citizens’ rights against the state (see Edelman 2001). The 2010–2012 worldwide uprisings and protests thus raise broader questions related to political activism in these social movements. To what extent were mass mobilizations (as in the Anna Hazare protest in India or the North African protests) grounded in years of less visible activism and ‘resource mobilization’ (see Webb 2010, 2012)? Alexander (2011), for example, argues convincingly that the protests in Tahrir Square followed years of worker mobilization and civic activism in Egypt. There is also the need to debate the youthfulness of many of the participants, who drew on youth culture, ludic elements, and humor, as well as the centrality of middle-class participation. How have global developments in education and the media led to the rise of this new generation of activists? What are the consequences of the mobilization of the middle classes, the silent majority who rarely engage in rebellious activism? Finally, and for many critics most saliently, it is clear that the media, social networking, cyberspace communication, and YouTube postings played a crucial role in spreading the uprisings. In what sense were they critically central, and how can their impact be weighed against the mass mobilizations on the ground?

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The Long-Term Impact of the Protests The global financial crisis, revelations about the exorbitant bonuses paid to bankers and CEOs, and neo-liberal policies of governments worldwide that are divesting themselves of their responsibilities to vulnerable citizens have been at the heart of many of the protests, as have the huge pay gaps and spectacular political corruption in some countries, which are often associated with unresponsive, non-democratic regimes. The goal of the rebellions was to bring about change by toppling regimes and increasing pressure on governments to effect reforms, including democratic reforms. But what was left when the protests died out? How can the ‘failure’ to achieve the aims, sometimes utopian, of the protests be understood and analyzed? Who was excluded from the protests? What impact have the protests had? What is their lasting legacy, if any? Centrally important to the debate is the aftermath of the protests: the sediments, memories, and openings up to the future. In the spring of 2012, there was evidence in the UK and US of a shareholders’ revolt against the remuneration of top executives (dubbed the ‘Shareholder Spring’ by the media). Conservative governments have toppled in France and Greece. Were these events energized and empowered by the popular protests? Can Pussy Riot, in revitalizing Russian protests with a spectacular aesthetic demonstration that was publicized across the world, make a difference to Russian politics? The first books on the Arab Spring, written primarily by journalists, were soon followed by other more scholarly works.6 Yet there is still a need to examine the North African uprisings comparatively from an anthropological and popular cultural perspective, as they are integrally related to protests elsewhere. We have proposed in this article a remarkable point of comparison, one that anthropologists

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are particularly well-equipped to interrogate—that is, the performative aesthetics so central to the protests. These illuminate the protests from a wide array of anthropological perspectives: political, media, visual, economic, and linguistic. The Arab Spring encompassed the anthropology of work, art, social organization, and social movements and was spread by the worldwide phenomenon of virtual social networking and new media technologies.

Notes 1. This article draws on a longer introduction to the co-authors’ forthcoming book on the global protests (Werbner et al., in press). 2. However, see Moosa (2011) on the arts and their ability to persuade and inspire, as well as the relationship between politics and aesthetics. 3. On 18 December 2013, even as Hazare was undertaking another indefinite hunger strike in his home village of Ralegan Siddhi, Maharashtra, in support of the legislation, the Lokpal bill was finally passed by India’s Parliament. 4. One of the arrested band members received a suspended sentence shortly after the guilty verdict, and the other two were imprisoned for almost two years before being released in December 2013 as part of an amnesty. 5. See Abufarha (2009) on the aesthetics of martyrdom in Palestine. 6. On the Arab Spring in Egypt, see Korany and El-Mahdi (2012) and Mehrez (2012).

References Abufarha, Nasser. 2009. The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alexander, Anne. 2011. “The Gravedigger of Dictatorship.” Socialist Review, March. http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article. php?articlenumber=11580.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helen Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Pp. 253–264 in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2011. “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.” Eipcp: Institut européen pour des politiques culturelles en devenir, September. http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en. Cohen, Abner. 1993. Masquerade Politics: Explorations in the Structure of Urban Cultural Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Jane. 2012. “Theorizing Wisconsin’s 2011 Protests: Community-Based Unionism Confronts Accumulation by Dispossession.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1: 6–20. Edelman, Marc. 2001. “Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 285–317. Gilroy, Paul. 1987. ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Unwin Hyman. Graeber, David. 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Haugerud, Angelique. 2013. No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Juris, Jeffery S. 2008. “Performing Politics: Image, Embodiment, and Affective Solidarity during Anti-corporate Globalization Protests.” Ethnography 9, no. 1: 61–97. Juris, Jeffery S. 2012. “Reflections on #Occupy Everywhere: Social Media, Public Space, and Emerging Logics of Aggregation.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2: 259–279. Korany, Bahgat, and Rabab El-Mahdi, eds. 2012. The Arab Spring in Egypt: Revolution and Beyond. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Manoukian, Setrag. 2011. “Two Forms of Temporality in Contemporary Iran.” Sociologica 3: 1–17. Mehrez, Samia, ed. 2012. Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. Melucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present. London: Hutchinson. Moosa, Ebrahim. 2011. “Aesthetics and Transcendence in the Arab Uprisings.” Middle East Law and Governance 3: 171–180.

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Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” Art and Research 1, no. 2: 1–5. Nugent, David. 2012. “Commentary: Democracy, Temporalities of Capitalism, and Dilemmas of Inclusion in Occupy Movements.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2: 280–283. Razsa, Maple, and Andrej Kurnik. 2012. “The Occupy Movement in Žižek’s Hometown: Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2: 238–258 Shiva, Vandana. 1988. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. New Delhi: Zed Books Tancons, Claire. 2012. “Occupy Wall Street: Carnival against Capital? Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility.” http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/occupy-wall-street-carnival-against-capital-carnivalesqueas-protest-sensibility (accessed 23 May 2012). Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. Webb, Martin. 2010. “Success Stories: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Right to Information Movement in North India.” Contemporary South Asia 18, no. 3: 293–304. Webb, Martin. 2012. “Activating Citizens, Remaking Brokerage: Transparency Activism, Ethical Scenes, and the Urban Poor in Delhi.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32, no. 2: 206–221. Werbner, Pnina. 2010. “Notes from a Small Place: Anthropological Blues in the Face of Global Terror.” Current Anthropology 51, no. 2: 193–221. Werbner, Pnina. In press. “‘The Mother of All Strikes’: Popular Protest Culture and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in the Botswana Public Service Unions’ Strike, 2011.” In Werbner et al., in press. Werbner, Pnina, Martin Webb, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots, eds. In press. The Political Aesthetics of Global Protest: The Arab Spring and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Emergency Law and Hypergovernance Human Rights and Regime Change in the Arab Spring

Z Michael Humphrey

The Arab Spring appeared �suddenly as a globally mediated event triggered by the tragic suicide in December 2010 by self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street trader in Tunis. The victim embodied the fate of a generation lacking economic opportunities, suffering humiliation at the hands of corrupt officials, experiencing repression in the name of the ‘war on terror’, and unable to escape through emigration to Europe because of racism (Islamophobia) and economic crisis. Bouazizi’s suicide symbolized an existential crisis that resonated with crowds first in Tunisia, then in Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and finally Syria. In all of these cases, the fate of local martyrs, activists, and human rights advocates became the galvanizing focus of the protests: in Egypt, it was the brutal death of Khaled Said at the hands of the police; in Libya, the arrest of Fathi Terbil, a human rights lawyer acting for the victims of the 1996 Abu Salim prison massacre; in Syria, the torture of teenagers for anti-regime graffiti; and in Bahrain, the police killing of four demonstrators (Roth 2012). In the Middle

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East, the Arab Spring was experienced as a cascading event in which the people rebelled against their authoritarian leaders because of their deep sense of social injustice and betrayal and because they no longer feared them. The naming of the political emergency as the ‘Arab Spring’ constructed/co-opted it as a ‘turning point’, another ‘color revolution’, the latest popular uprising against authoritarian rule by a politically subjugated and economically suffering population. These ‘color revolutions’ began with the People Power Revolution (Yellow Revolution) in the Philippines (1986) and over a decade later continued with Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution (2000), Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004). In the Middle East, the Arab Spring was preceded by Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution (2005), Kuwait’s Blue Revolution (2005), Iraq’s Purple Revolution (2005), Iran’s Green Revolution (2010), and Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution (2011). What was new in the case of the Arab uprising was that popular street protest against authoritarian leaders was seen as constitutive of ‘the people’. In this case, revolution did not refer to “a legitimate political regime born out of the violence of crowds” (Clemens 2007: 541) but to unarmed demonstrators denied their basic civil and political rights of free speech and assembly. The West viewed these peaceful crowd protests as legitimate expressions of progressive democratic movements resisting repressive regimes, which the West had, up to that point, seen as necessary allies in the war on terror against radical Islamists. Support for prodemocracy secular movements to end authoritarian rule dovetailed with the US neo-con project in post-invasion Iraq (starting in 2003) to create a Middle East on good terms with the US and Israel. As a global political emergency, the Arab Spring was not only ‘colored’ but also framed as a legal emergency, deploying the protection of human rights in the latest, more virile

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form of the ‘right to intervene’ endorsed by the convergence of the left’s moral universalism and the neo-con’s post-9/11 internationalism (Roy 2008). Legal emergency suspends sovereignty in the name of the rule of international law, thereby making exception the basis of legal rule (Schmitt 1985). Hence, sovereignty in the Arab world was made conditional based on the gravity of the human rights violations being committed by the state. The protection of individual safety and political rights (the right of citizens to determine who governs) was used to justify support for, and even intervention in, the uprisings. This latest version of muscularized human rights has its genealogy in ‘humanitarian intervention’, ‘human rights wars’, and the formalization of the ‘responsibility to protect’. It invokes the authority of international courts to investigate large-scale human rights violations in order to establish the seriousness of the crimes and to legitimate intervention—if necessary, militarily—to protect civilians and to bring the violations to an end. In the process, human rights protection is transformed into regime change as the last resort solution to realize protection. The translation of global political emergencies into global legal emergencies represents the judicialization of international relations, that is, the resort to international courts and law to manage political crises, what might be called international ‘lawfare’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). It expands law as an institution for transnational governance. Legal globalization has seen the emergence of the idea that the legitimacy of law is based no longer solely on state sovereignty but rather on universalized principles, concepts, and values. Law itself becomes a source of legitimacy by switching between registers of humanitarianism and security in a globalizing world where “sovereignties are found in multiple and layered forms” (Hansen and Stepputat 2006: 307). A new ‘international legalism’ has

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emerged from the growing institutionalization of international law and the outsourcing of state sovereignty through marketizing economies and security. In a bid to challenge legal impunity, international law and courts have expanded their reach to prosecute crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes. Motivated by an imperative to respond to ‘legal emergencies’, a new transnational juridical field has generated its own international law professionals, case law, and institutions, whereby investigators are rushed to the scene of unfolding mass crimes in ‘real time’ to bring international attention to atrocities and establish the evidentiary grounds for legal prosecutions. Emergency law puts human rights at the service of international politics through the humanitarian imperative to save lives. The ‘right to intervene’ asserts that when a state is unwilling or incapable of protecting its citizens, the international community has the duty to intervene to save lives. The merging of humanitarian and security perspectives has resulted in the imperative to intervene becoming the doctrine of R2P—the ‘responsibility to protect’ (Evans 2008). This doctrine “unites the benevolent responsibility to intervene in times of suffering with the unquestionable right to employ force in the protection of global citizens” (Pandolfi 2008: 158). The construction of global citizenship is also a product of neo-liberal restructuring of political agency that meshes with the individualizing and universalizing human rights discourse. R2P is based on ‘sovereignty-limiting’ doctrines advocated from a human rights perspective (protection of civilians) and a national security perspective (prevention of the export of terrorism) (Brooks 2012). Emergency law sets in motion legal processes for accountability for political crimes (war crimes and crimes against humanity) in order to intervene in ongoing mass crimes and to prosecute them when peace has been re-established.

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Emergency law is the sharp end of international criminal justice, a form of legal triage to manage critical political events. It deploys international law as a discourse in the hypergovernance of populations, “transnational processes of domination, regulation and resistance” (Bhatt 2007: 1075). Hypergovernance involves global projects, Western and Islamic, acting at the local level and articulated through global discourses—rule of law, human rights, humanitarianism, and Islamic radicalism. Western and Islamic discourses also converge in abstracting and polarizing the Sunni-Shi’a division as a unitary division (Roy 2008). The global discourses on the ‘responsibility to protect’ civilians and ‘counter-terrorism’ to prevent the export of terrorism converge as sovereignty-limiting discourse (Brooks 2012). Hence, the drone war, which has come to signify clandestine non-risk military intervention, can be deployed in the name of protection and punishment.

Emergency Law as Protection and Accountability In the Arab Spring, emergency law has been invoked with short- and long-term aims. In the short term, the aim is to protect human rights by alleviating the suffering of victims of human rights violations during conflicts/repression. In the long term, it aims to ensure accountability through the prosecution of those responsible. The protection of human rights is currently conceived as removing the perpetrators from power—that is, regime change. The innovation of the emergency law model in the Arab Spring is that regime change does not need to be realized by direct military intervention but by support for the popular opposition. The identification of demonstrators as deserving human rights protection confers legitimacy on them and their aspirations to become a democratic people.

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Accountability is applied as a post-conflict justice mechanism. Trials for past crimes and justice help confer legitimacy on the state, condemning the leaders of the previous regime and politically marginalizing (if not completely excluding) them. Democratic elections politically constitute the future accountability of the state. But while emergency law as protection is unifying as a means to alleviate suffering and to overthrow authoritarian leaders, emergency law as accountability does not produce the same consensus or cohesion locally. Post-conflict government, justice, and national reconciliation are all contested, and national unity has to be achieved. International demands for accountability and the struggle over whether trials should be national or international are an index of the divergence over what is regarded as accountability.

Protection In the Arab Spring, Libya became the new model for the deployment of emergency law to achieve regime change and democratic transformation based on protection and accountability. Because popular protest against authoritarian rule in Libya did not lead to its collapse, as it did in Tunisia and Egypt, international support for the uprising (especially that of France, the UK, and the US) saw emergency law deployed to protect civilians. In an effort to stop the violence and to facilitate access for humanitarian aid, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1970 (of 26 February 2011) condemned Gaddafi’s repression and referred Libya to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Gaddafi responded by escalating repression to crush the uprising. At the critical point when the opposition militias appeared on the brink of defeat,

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UNSC Resolution 1973 endorsed the international ‘responsibility to protect’: a ‘no-fly zone’ was declared, and NATO was authorized to defend the civilian population. In response to Resolution 1973, Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, declared: “Today the Security Council has responded to the Libyan people’s cry for help. This Council’s purpose is clear: to protect innocent civilians” (US Mission 2011). Emergency law framed the political crisis as an issue of human rights protection for unarmed civilians and accountability for atrocities. But while intervention to protect Libyan civilians supported an opposition that was unified in its goal of overthrowing Gaddafi’s regime, the post-conflict accountability agenda has not had the same results. Elections have not forged a national government or seen territorial sovereignty re-established. Nor have they led to cooperation with the ICC to extradite the dictator’s son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, for trial at The Hague. The use of emergency law to achieve international relations outcomes in response to popular uprisings in the Arab world did not begin in Libya but in Lebanon. The beginning of the Arab Spring can be backdated to February 2005, when grieving Lebanese supporters of the assassinated former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, led by his son Saad Hariri, demanded the withdrawal of Syria’s forces from Lebanon and the recovery of democratic control of the government. The crowd protests became known as the Cedar Revolution (also the 14 March Movement), while the not as acknowledged but equally large crowds that mobilized in support of Syria’s role in Lebanon were called the 8 March Movement. UNSC Resolution 1595 launched an international investigation into Hariri’s assassination and set up a commission to assist the Lebanese government in its own investigation. It was the first time that the UNSC had ever passed a resolution to instigate a murder investigation. UNSC Resolution 1595 reinforced

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the earlier UNSC Resolution 1559 (2 September 2004), which was designed to put pressure on Syria to withdraw its military forces from Lebanon and disband all armed militias (meaning Hezbollah). At that time, Hariri’s proSyria opponents believed that he had orchestrated UNSC Resolution 1559 with French and US help to prevent Syria from reinstalling President Lahoud for a third term, which would be legal only if the constitution could be amended to allow it. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon was subsequently established under UNSC Resolution 1757 (30 May 2007) to prosecute those responsible for the assassination of Hariri on 14 February 2005 and the deaths of 22 others, as well as the injury of 230 civilians. The failure to apply the new emergency law and intervention model in Bahrain highlights the limits of human rights protection when regime protection takes priority in order to uphold regional stability (see also Fibiger, this volume). In February 2011, the local uprising in Bahrain saw national security trump human rights protection and democratic reform. The synchronicity of the demonstrations with those in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya was not an expression of a human rights and democracy cascade so much as an opportunity to highlight a decade of failed democratic reforms. In 2001, a National Action Charter was endorsed by referendum, raising expectations that legislative democracy would be restored after its dissolution in 1975. The demonstrators hoped that the recovery of constitutional rights would help restrict the concentration of wealth in the hands of the ruling elite and would help stop corruption. After the Iraq invasion in 2003, even the neo-cons in Washington promoted Bahrain as a model of democratic reform for the Gulf ruling dynasties to help create a “peaceful Middle East on good terms with the US and Israel” (Pellas 2005: 5). But instead of supporting the Shi’a majority population (around 70 percent) on

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the grounds of human rights protection and democratic reform, the US and its regional allies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saw the demonstrations through a geopolitical lens of Saudi-Iranian rivalry. Regional security was invoked, Iran was implicated in the Shi’a demonstrations, the Saudi and UAE military intervened, the US Fifth Fleet was left undisturbed, and the Bahrain government declared martial law (Chulov 2011). The Bahrain government raised the protection of human rights as part of their political reconciliation exercise only after the Saudi and UAE military intervention had quelled the popular demonstrations. The introduction of human rights protection served as a strategic humanitarianizing move to transfer the political uprising to a therapeutic register. To demonstrate that it was open for business (order had been restored), the monarchy and the Bahrain government sought international endorsement by establishing the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), revived the democratic reform agenda originally launched in 2001 with the National Charter, and rescheduled the Formula 1 Grand Prix, which had been canceled during the unrest in 2011, to take place in April 2012. The BICI, chaired by the prominent international law professor M. Cherif Bassiouni, confirmed 35 deaths and received 9,000 complaints (Bassiouni et al. 2011). The commission’s report found that the violations were carried out mainly by security forces and included “arbitrary arrest, torture, illegal prosecutions, lack of accountability, sectarian attacks, illegal sackings of workers involved in the demonstrations and state media manipulation” (Rose 2012). The report of the BICI made recommendations and importantly found that the government had not committed any crimes against humanity. Politically, the BICI served to divide the opposition between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victims—those who accepted the report’s recommendations and those who

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rejected it. But from the outset, Bassiouni pointed out that the commission was not going to fix the endemic problems in the relationship between the Sunni ruling family and the majority Shi’a population (Logan 2011). The Libyan emergency law model was not invoked in Bahrain because regime protection trumped human rights protection. In Syria, the emergency law model for regime change failed because Russia and China vetoed UNSC resolutions that sought approval for intervention through sanctions or military intervention. The impotence of international diplomacy has been underlined by the vote (133–12) in the UN General Assembly (August 2012) condemning Syria’s use of heavy weapons in cities, the UN’s Human Rights Council report that denounced President Bashar al-Assad for his regime’s large-scale human rights violations (HRC 2011), the UN Security Council’s unanimous non-binding vote demanding humanitarian access (March 2012). Even the Arab League suspended Syria from membership (November 2011). UNSC efforts to implement ceasefires through the Kofi Annan peace plan and UN military observers were overwhelmed by the escalation of fighting and the unwillingness of either Assad or the opposition forces to abandon their respective political aims—the defeat of the other. Assad’s attempt at political reform by ending 48 years of emergency rule and reducing the length of compulsory military conscription did not prevent the polarization of the population along the lines of family, sectarian, regional, ethnic, and tribal grievances, as well as fear of chaos. Globally mediated massacres, such as the one in Houla, have not become tipping points, that is, pivotal events galvanizing support for international intervention to prevent further human rights outrages (Gourevitch 2012). The thwarting of the muscularized RP2 goal of regime change has defaulted to a proxy war financed largely by Saudi Arabia and Qatar in support of

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groups ranging from the Free Syrian Army to Salafist jihadists in order to achieve the same aim. The Syrian opposition forces, like those in Libya, are unified only in their aim of overthrowing the regime, not in their post-Assad goals. Proxy war is producing mounting casualties, population displacement, the gradual dismembering of the state, and the breakdown of civil order. The geopolitical significance of Syria has quickly internationalized the civil war, intensified the regional contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran, triggered confrontations in Lebanon between pro- and anti-Syria groups, and seen red-light warnings issued by Turkey and Israel. In this context, legal accountability for human rights violations has been reduced to an exercise of their documentation for possible future prosecutions in the ICC and as a legal resource to veto any political deals that offer Assad amnesty.

Accountability Both the UNSC and the demonstrators in the Arab Spring shared the demand for accountability, although they meant different things by it. For the demonstrators, accountability referred to the regime’s lack of responsiveness to address its citizens’ concerns, including corruption as well as prosecution for those responsible for inflicting suffering. For the UNSC and the ICC, it meant legal accountability for past crimes at the national level or, if justice could not be guaranteed, in international courts. But the unity that was forged with the goal of removing authoritarian leaders has not translated into a unified national, political, or justice project. In the discourse of transitional justice, accountability has not produced a break with the past. Emergency law espousing human rights protection has been overtaken by local expectations about justice. Elections have seen

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religious parties come to power even though they were not the public face of the Arab Spring. Transitional justice constructs political transition as a moment when the history of mass oppression and human rights violations is addressed, when victims receive recognition and justice, and when societies are healed. The methodologies of transitional justice—trials, truth commissions, reparations, memorials, lustration, amnesties— aim to counteract revolutionary justice, or victors’ justice, by trying to forge an inclusive and unifying national consensus about the past. But this is premised on the idea that truth and justice can produce a shared collective memory about the wrongs of the past. What distinguishes transitional justice in the post-uprising Arab world is that accountability is not backed up with a reconciliation agenda. Moreover, as the Special Tribunal on Lebanon (STL) and the ICC in Libya have found out, international trials can be very polarizing and contentious. There is widespread suspicion in the region about the instrumentalization of human rights protection as intervention because the Western states now advocating R2P, especially the United States, previously supported repression (i.e., sanctioned human rights abuse) in the name of the war on terror. Thus, human rights protection and counterterrorism can converge as sovereignty-limiting policies. A recent example is the expansion of the US Rewards for Justice (counter-terrorism) program, which puts a bounty on the head of the ‘most wanted’ international terrorists, including ICC indictees even though the US itself remains a non-member of the ICC (Kersten 2012). In the new democratic regimes in the Arab world, disagreements over justice reflect political divisions over the authority and legitimacy of the new state order. The accountability phase of emergency law dealing with past crimes has revealed considerable divergence about what

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justice means and who should be held responsible. In Lebanon, the reach of the STL has been blocked by the political opposition, which refuses to cooperate with the extradition of the indicted members of Hezbollah for trial at The Hague (Humphrey 2011). In Libya, justice has been decentralized, with the fragmentation of sovereignty and assertion of local power preventing the ICC from extraditing Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi (the head of intelligence) to The Hague for trial. This came to a head when the ICC defense lawyer was detained in Zintain on an official visit to discuss the ICC trial with her client Saif al-Islam Gaddafi (Mezrani 2012). In Bahrain, the government showcased its concern about accountability by installing an international commission to investigate human rights violations, on the one hand, while continuing the judicial repression of demonstrators and anyone who had helped them, on the other (Al Jazeera 2012; HRW 2012a; Stork 2011). In Egypt, justice has seen the prosecution of lesser crimes while the more serious ones—not counting the symbolic prosecution of Mubarak—have been ignored. In Yemen, the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh and his close aides were controversially granted immunity by the government as part of a negotiated transition of power (HRW 2012c). The victim-centered focus of transitional justice is problematic in the post-uprising Arab states. The metavalue of accountability that fueled the uprisings cannot easily be embodied in a single event or category of victims to become the unifying focus of a trial. There are the victims who suffered under the authoritarian regimes, the victims who suffered in the uprisings, and the losers—demonstrators as well as old regime beneficiaries—in the transition to a new democratic order. The attempt to make high-profile leaders the focus of symbolic justice through national or international trials has not turned out

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well. The prosecution of Mubarak, his sons, and other high officials in Egypt has been seen as too limited. The summary execution of Muammar Gaddafi on his capture has undermined international confidence in Libyan justice. The trial in absentia of former president Ben Ali in Tunisia is seen as a second-best outcome (HRW 2012b), while in Yemen the granting of immunity from prosecution to Saleh in order to facilitate the transition has prevented any accountability (Yates 2012). The international trials at The Hague conducted by the STL and ICC have been stymied by the lack of cooperation over the extradition of indictees.

Outcomes The political aims of the Arab uprisings—the rejection of authoritarian leaders and governments and the demand for accountability—were supported as regime change (freedom and democracy) by the Western powers. They backed oppositions as the means to achieve regime change and to support liberal, democratic aspirations against the extremist Islamic challenge that the war on terror had targeted. However, what has transpired is that support for regime change by backing oppositions has not been translated into the election of pro-Western governments, and human rights accountability has been very patchy. As a case study of transitional justice, the post-conflict Arab Spring regimes have not been exemplary models. Moreover, the legal emergency mechanism appears to have exhausted itself in the failure of the UNSC to prevent the escalation of war in Syria. But the way in which ‘responsibility to protect’ converges with counter-terrorism suggests the diversification of war and the way that it is currently legitimized. Both R2P and counter-terrorism are sovereignty-limiting doctrines that can be used alternatively or concurrently.

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In the case of Syria, the failure of the UNSC resolutions to activate R2P has justified proxy war in the sense that ‘at least we are doing something’. There will probably be another push for a ‘humanitarian crisis’ justification for intervention. In Yemen, we see another development— human rights protection being supported while conducting a secret counter-terrorism drone war against Islamists. A similar convergence has happened in Libya, where US drones helped enforce the no-fly zone under UNSC Resolution 1753 and stayed on in post-Gaddafi Libya as part of a counter-terrorism strategy to hunt for ex-regime figures and, no doubt, to strike those responsible for the 2012 assassination of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens (Ackerman 2012; Al Shalchi 2012). While the emergency law model that emerged to respond to the Libya uprising has been celebrated as an advance in human rights protection (Dunne and Gifkins 2011), it is in fact ‘lawfare’ coupled with new modes of war making. R2P becomes much more attractive if intervention by proxy or at a distance makes small wars more palatable to the public in the West by reducing casualties and costs. Hypergovernance, the managing of populations at a distance, deploys the sovereignty-limiting global discourses of human rights protection and counter-terrorism to support and enhance the militarization of international relations.

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References Ackerman, Spencer. 2012. “U.S. Drones Never Left Libya; Will Hunt Benghazi Thugs.” Wired, 12 September. http://www.wired.com/ dangerroom/2012/09/libya-drone-war (accessed 6 November 2012). Al Jazeera. 2012. “Bahrain Medics Jailed after Losing Appeal.” Al Jazeera, 2 October. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/ 2012/10/201210254756409870.html (accessed 2 November 2012). Al Shalchi, Hadeel. 2012. “Libya Attacks: U.S. Drones Fly Over Benghazi.” Reuters, 14 September. http://www.huffingtonpost. com/2012/09/14/libya-attacks-us-drones_n_1884058.html (accessed 1 November 2012). Bassiouni, M. Cherif, Nigel Rodley, Badria Al-Awadhi, Philippe Kirsch, and Mahnoush H. Arsanjani. 2011. Report of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry. http://www.bici.org.bh/ BICIreportEN.pdf (accessed 3 November 2012). Bhatt, Chetan. 2007. “Frontlines and Interstices in the Global War on Terror.” Development and Change 38, no. 6: 1073–1093. Brooks, Rosa E. 2012. “Lessons for International Law from the Arab Spring.” Georgetown Law Scholarly Commons. http://scholarship. law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1099 (accessed 28 October 2012). Chulov, Martin. 2011. “Bahrain Declares Martial Law as Protesters Clash with Troops.” Guardian, 15 March. http://www.guardian. co.uk/world/2011/mar/15/bahrain-martial-law-protesters-troops/ print (accessed 2 November 2012). Clemens, Elisabeth S. 2007. “Toward a Historicized Sociology: Theorizing Events, Processes, and Emergence.” Annual Review of Sociology 33: 527–549. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2006. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunne, Tim, and Jess Gifkins. 2001. “Libya and the State of Intervention.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 65, no. 5: 515–529. Evans, Gareth. 2008. The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. Gourevitch, Philip. 2012. “What Has the Houla Massacre Changed?” New Yorker, 29 May. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ newsdesk/2012/05/what-has-the-houla-massacre-changed.html (accessed 15 October 2012).

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Hansen, Thomas B., and Finn Stepputat. 2006. “Sovereignty Revisited.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 295–315. HRC (Human Rights Council). 2011. Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic. Human Rights Council, 17th Special Session, 23 November, A/ HRC/S-17/2/Add.1. http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/SY/A.HRC.S-17.2.Add.1_en.pdf (accessed 30 October 2012). HRW (Human Rights Watch). 2012a. “Bahrain: Act on UN Human Rights Commitments.” Human Rights Watch, 19 September. http://www.hrw.org/print/news/2012/09/19/bahrain-act-unhuman-rights-commitments (accessed 7 November 2012). HRW (Human Rights Watch). 2012b. “Tunisia: Q&A on the Trial of Ben Ali, Others for Killing Protesters.” Human Rights Watch, 11 June. http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/06/11/tunisia-qa-trialben-ali-others-killing-protesters#1 (accessed 5 November 2012). HRW (Human Rights Watch). 2012c. “Yemen: Amnesty for Saleh and Aides Unlawful.” Human Rights Watch, 23 January. http:// www.hrw.org/news/2012/01/23/yemen-amnesty-saleh-andaides-unlawful (accessed 5 November 2012). Humphrey, Michael. 2011. “The Special Tribunal for Lebanon: Emergency Law, Trauma and Justice.” Arab Studies Quarterly 33, no. 1: 4–22. Kersten, Mark. 2012. “Rewards for Justice: The US Takes a Step Closer to the ICC.” Justice in Conflict, 18 October. http://justiceinconflict.org/2012/10/18/rewards-for-justice-the-us-takes-astep-closer-to-the-icc (accessed 5 November 2012). Logan, Joseph. 2011. “Jurist: Bahrain Inquiry Serious, Political Split Grave.” Reuters, 5 August. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/05/us-bahrain-commission-idUSTRE77424H20110805 (accessed 3 October 2012). Mezrani, Leanne. 2012. “ALA: ICC Can’t Protect Melinda Taylor.” Lawyers Weekly, 15 June. http://www.lawyersweekly.com.au/ ala-icc-cant-protect-melinda-taylor (accessed 17 June 2012). Pandolfi, Mariella. 2008. “Laboratory of Intervention: The Humanitarian Governance of the Postcommunist Balkan Territories.” Pp. 157­–186 in Postcolonial Disorders, ed. Mary-Jo D. Good, Sandra T. Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron J. Good. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pellas, Marc. 2005. “Bahrain: The Royals Rule.” Le Monde diplomatique, March. http://mondediplo.com/2005/03/09bahrain (accessed 2 November 2012).

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Rose, James. 2012. “Bahrain: The Rebellion Continues.” Le Monde diplomatique, April. http://mondediplo.com/blogs/bahrain -the-rebellion-continues. Roth, Kenneth. 2012. “Time to Abandon the Autocrats and Embrace Rights.” Human Rights Watch. http://www.hrw.org/world-report -2012/time-abandon-autocrats-and-embrace-rights (accessed 2 November 2012). Roy, Olivier. 2008. The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stork, Joe. 2011. “Bahrain’s Medics Are the Targets of Retribution.” Guardian, 5 May. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ 2011/may/05/bahrain-medics-arrest-retribution (accessed 1 November 2012). US Mission (United States Mission to the United Nations). 2011. “Remarks by Ambassador Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, in an Explanation of Vote on UN Security Council Resolution 1973.” United States Mission to the United Nations, 17 March. http://usun.state.gov/briefing/ statements/2011/158559.htm (accessed 2 October 2012). Yates, Tyler. 2012. “Yemeni Protesters Demand Trial of Saleh.” Impunity Watch, 2 January. http://impunitywatch.com/yemeniprotesters-demand-trial-of-saleh (accessed 30 October 2012).

The Promises and Limitations of Economic Protests in the West Bank

Z Sobhi Samour

The revolutionary spark ignited in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010 spread like wildfire throughout the Arab world. Less than four weeks after sustained protests led to the overthrow of Tunisia’s president, Ben Ali, Egyptian protestors succeeded in forcing their own president, Mubarak, to resign. Accustomed to, in Lenin’s words, ‘decades where nothing happens’, the entire region was suddenly living through ‘weeks where decades happen’ and where everything seemed possible. For Palestinians in particular, these tumultuous weeks were like an echo of a dusty past that could now spell a more hopeful future. Even prior to the 1947–1948 Arab-Israeli war that led to the creation of the Israeli state, the emerging Arab national movements saw the fate of Palestine linked to, and organically part of, the pan-Arab struggle against Western colonialism, Arab absolutism and monarchism, and Zionism. With the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian national liberation movement—at least during its revolutionary peak in the 1960s to the mid-1970s—saw Palestinian liberation and

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revolutionary transformation in the region as both contributing to the Arab revolutions and being dependent on them to end Zionist colonization. The gradual retreat from this vision was due not only to Israel’s military strength and its enduring support from US imperialism, or to the Palestinians’ own tactical miscalculations and losses on the battlefield. It was also due to the failure to link political struggle with social emancipation. This resulted in the absence of revolutionary change in the Arab world and led to the consolidation of counter-revolutionary, socially conservative, US-backed Arab regimes and their increasing normalization with Israel (Kazziha 1975). While the current wave of political transformations across the region is a far cry from the call for socialist revolution that was prevalent during the previous decades, and while it is still unclear if, and with what, the old order will be replaced, this moment represents the beginning of a long-term historical process that could breathe new life into the dialectics of Arab revolution and Palestinian liberation. Yet at a time when people in much of the Arab world are writing their own history, there is a sense of frustration and puzzlement at the current stasis engulfing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who appear to be accommodating, rather than resisting, Israeli settler colonialism. This sense is heightened when one considers the peculiarities of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) and its neoliberal state-building agenda in the West Bank. Taking its cue from the dynamic interaction between economic and political demands that so dramatically disrupted the status quo of the region (see Abdelrahman 2012; Alexander 2011; Zemni et al. 2012), this article will examine whether recent signs of growing economic discontent with the PA have the potential to produce a similar dynamic and ‘grow over’ into a political strategy that challenges Palestinian neoliberalism and, ultimately, Israel’s occupation.

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Israeli Occupation, Palestinian Neo-liberalism The Oslo process has enabled Israel to institutionalize an apparatus of control that affects and interferes with every aspect of Palestinian life and economic activity. Under the watchful eyes of the international community, Israel has cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank and de facto annexed ‘Area C’—roughly 60 percent of the West Bank—limiting the remaining territory that is under the formal control of the PA to no more than a number of non-contiguous urban areas. This has allowed Israel to place stipulations on the easing of restrictions that affect the economy of the West Bank and its social fabric. The principal condition is the PA’s satisfactory performance in adhering to Israel’s demands, particularly those related to the ubiquitous notion of ‘security’. Knowing that Israel can bring the West Bank economy to a standstill, the PA has often complied with Israel’s dictates, earning it the widespread accusation of being no more than a junior partner in managing the Occupation. Linking Israel’s security demands with Palestinian economic growth has been a less emphasized but key pillar in the PA’s neo-liberal state-building program advanced by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Appointed as a caretaker prime minister in 2007, following the governmental split between the West Bank and Gaza, Fayyad has elevated institution building and good governance reforms, which are aimed at providing a conducive environment for private sector growth and efficient service delivery, to the ‘highest form of resistance’. This resistance, according to Fayyad, will finally deliver the state that Palestinians have been longing for. This strategy is based on the assumption that once the PA engages in effective security coordination with Israel and proves that it can manage Palestinian public and economic affairs according to international standards

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of neo-liberal governance, worldwide pressure on Israel to allow for a Palestinian state would increase (PNA 2008, 2009). It is in this sense that the PA has fully internalized the necessity to provide security for Israel in exchange for economic growth. As absurd as the neo-liberal statebuilding program may sound, it is important to emphasize that the Oslo process has always carried within it the seeds of creating and expanding domestic constituencies that would favor neo-liberalism and, with it, the incentive to co-exist with Israel’s occupation (Hanafi and Tabar 2005). While Bretton Woods institutions, bilateral donors, and international NGOs have always had a neo-liberal development agenda, neo-liberalism under the PA is neither a recent phenomenon linked to the Fayyad government, nor a top-down strategy imposed by the PA. What the PA under Fayyad managed to do, however, is to use neo-liberal ideology explicitly for packaging its (seemingly perpetual) statebuilding program to the approval—at least initially—of a wider and broader section of Palestinian society.1 As the state-building program pleased international donors, inducing a large influx of aid money and earning Fayyad plaudits in countless op-eds,2 Israel eased some restrictions on the economy, hoping to lure more Palestinians into ‘economic peace’ by promising economic prosperity in exchange for ‘normalizing’ the Occupation. Palestinian banks also played along by massively extending easy credit to consumers for real estate, cars, and basic goods and services. The results, at least for a while, seemed encouraging. After years of ‘anarchy’ on the streets and economic decline, economic growth in the West Bank averaged 9 percent between 2008 and 2010. The growth was driven largely by donor projects, government-funded activities, and expansion in high-value service sectors such as banking, insurance, and IT, but also in restaurants, hotels, and real estate. Economic activity in the agriculture

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and manufacturing sectors, meanwhile, declined or stagnated. The ‘economic miracle’ (or, rather, mirage) was best exemplified by the opening of boutiques and the first five-star hotel in Ramallah, a locally owned franchise of the Mövenpick hotel chain, which services an exclusive section of society, including expatriates and locals associated with the West Bank’s aid industry and the higher echelons of the PA bureaucracy. Economic growth delivered under Fayyad’s state-building program has therefore had no lasting effect on overcoming structural economic problems created by decades of occupation. Instead, it largely accommodated these structures and was fundamentally dependent on the PA’s policing of the occupied population on behalf of the occupier, Israel, which has continued and indeed accelerated its land grab in the meantime. Thus, in addition to transferring the function of day-today policing to the PA, Israel has also managed to absolve itself from most of the economic costs of the Occupation— that is, the losses caused to a population whose economy is suffocated and dismembered and whose means to sustain itself are, consequently, limited. In the past, some of these costs have been covered by ever-increasing international aid as well as the PA’s limited tax revenues. But unable, or unwilling, to remove Israel’s hold over the Palestinian economy and plagued by a chronic budget deficit—with donor fatigue resulting in waning financial support in 2011 and 2012 and in skyrocketing borrowing from domestic banks—the PA has attempted to transfer these costs to the population itself. This has been done in the form of higher taxes and user fees for public utilities (electricity and water), along with cuts in public sector employment and subsidies. These measures are accompanied by public advertisements rebuking those who do not pay their utility bills, often the socially marginalized living in refugee camps, as lacking in their ‘patriotic duties’ since

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their non-payment translates into an additional burden for the PA’s budget.3 In the PA’s logic, the credibility of the state-building program is undermined by its high budget deficit (implying the lack of economic viability), and it seeks to assert its political maturity by proving its ability to implement austerity measures. In other words, the more the Occupation consolidates its grip over the West Bank— thus increasing the costs of the Occupation—the more the PA tries to ‘recover’ the costs by shifting the burden onto its population using the neo-liberal state-building program as a justification. But the significance of the PA’s neo-liberalism—be it as an economic doctrine, discursive instrument, class project, or form of social engineering—consists not so much in its failure to build a state and its inability to deliver sustainable economic growth, or in the biting austerity measures that it has imposed and the rising number of indebted households. None of this is an aberration of neo-liberalism. Its significance, rather, lies in its political implication in a context of an objective reality that remains an anti-colonial struggle. Thus, on top of the Oslo Accords as a social, economic, and political regulatory framework, the outcome of the PA’s neo-liberalism is to erode further the basis of collective political power, the investment in and reliance on community resources, and the sense of solidarity among a people fighting for their freedom. Indebted households, which have rapidly increased in number in recent years, will prioritize debt servicing and become conservative in political decision making, opposing anything that could threaten their already fragile political and economic stability. In its ideal type version, the PA’s approach aims to transform society into atoms of citizen-consumers and to marketize their social identities and relations. The rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’, as used by donors and the PA, then, means nothing less than ‘empowering’

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individuals through debt-fueled consumption and building their capacity to find entrepreneurial solutions to their needs, while compelling them to ‘participate’ in sharing the costs of the Occupation.

Economic Protests and the Search for a Political Strategy This is, of course, not to say that the PA’s neo-liberal strategy, with its broader political and economic consequences, or its attempt to secure hegemony over notions that carry moral weight, such as ‘liberation’, ‘resistance’, or ‘patriotic duties’, are not contested—they are. But that contestation has yet to transcend its very own contradictions, as a brief account of the economic protests against rising living costs throughout the West Bank in early September 2012 will show. The immediate sparks that inspired Palestinians in large numbers to take to the streets across the West Bank were the self-immolation of a young man in Gaza (and an unsuccessful attempt in the West Bank) and the PA’s increase of the VAT rate and price of fuel, as well as its chronic inability to guarantee the payment of salaries to public sector workers. In addition, throughout much of 2011 and 2012, various youth groups had mobilized in support of the Arab revolutions, political reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, and Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli prisons, and they were met with a heavy-handed response by the PA’s security forces. There was, moreover, considerable pent-up frustration among the population due to earlier attempts by the PA to raise taxes, rising water and electricity prices, and increasing inflation amid declining rates of growth averaging 5 percent in 2011 and 2012.

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Led by a number of unions, among them the powerful government workers union, the ire of the protest was directed at the PA’s inability to reverse economic dependency on Israel, resulting in an economy with “the wages of Somalia and the prices of Paris,” as one protestor aptly put it. Through the economic appendix to the Oslo Accords—the 1994 Protocol on Economic Relations (Paris Protocol)—Israel institutionalized its total control over the Palestinian economy. The Paris Protocol gave Israel the right to collect monthly trade taxes on the PA’s behalf (thus seizing leverage over roughly two-thirds of the PA’s total revenues); to set the PA’s VAT rate at a level no less than two percentage points below that of Israel despite the enormous difference in the size of the two economies and personal incomes (so as not to threaten Israeli producers); and to force the PA to import fuel and electricity from Israel at Israeli consumer prices. The PA’s increase in the VAT rate and fuel prices, thus, followed identical increases made by the Israeli government. The immediate demands of the protestors were primarily economic. These included the reversal of the VAT rate and a reduction in gas and fuel prices, price controls on basic goods, public investment, the protection of local producers, a cap on top earners in the public sector, and the introduction of a minimum wage. Of course, economic and political demands cannot be separated or ranked in a static hierarchy with a fixed direction of causality. Thus, just as the soil for this economic protest was fertilized by the previous political demonstrations, the economic demands of the protestors quickly transformed into political demands: indeed, the demands fed into each other. By calling for the resignation of Fayyad and his government, attacking President Abbas’s feeble leadership, and demanding the PA to revoke the Paris Protocol, the protestors saw their wretched economic conditions as the outcome of the PA’s

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austerity measures and directly linked to the economic framework governing the relationship between the PA and Israel. Within just a few days, the protests helped to counter the ubiquitous feeling of collective apathy, created a vehicle for widespread public discussion around the political economy of the Oslo framework, and produced initial victories by forcing the PA to reverse tax and price increases and its decision to table a proposal for a minimum wage law. The opposition to sharing the everincreasing costs of the Occupation and growing accusations against Palestinian capitalists benefiting from Israel’s ‘economic peace’ laid bare the logic of the PA’s neo-liberal state-building program for all to see. However, the discursive fusion of economic and political demands does not, on its own, pull people into an economic and political struggle of a reciprocal nature that could effectively challenge, if not overcome, the oppressive conditions caused by the Occupation and the PA. For this to happen, the protests would have to aim, simultaneously, to take over the PA’s institutions and to reorganize radically the arguably limited means of economic production outside of Israel’s control. And if this were to happen, one would expect the PA to attempt to crush it by unleashing its new militia—the so-called Dayton Forces trained by the CIA and equipped with arms cleared by Israel.4 The difficulty of this task has less to do with the fear of repression than the pernicious effects wrought by the Oslo framework and the PA’s neo-liberal state-building program. With around 85,000 workers on the payroll of the PA in the West Bank, more than 500,000 people are dependent on PA employment (through family dependencies and the multiplier effect of household income) and therefore on the continuation of the Oslo process. For public sector workers who have played an active role in the protests, their primary objective is not to break away from the Oslo

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framework, since it ensures their economic survival, but to remind the PA of its perceived role as the guarantor of their socio-economic rights. It bears recalling, therefore, that the Oslo process has also produced a Palestinian bureaucratic class that, while demanding fairer wages or redistributive policies, will defend the PA project to secure funding and employment that come with the pretense of international aid for the peace process and state building. Thus, economic struggles, on their own, also have a powerful pullback into an existing system, affirming and reproducing its hegemony. The Israeli government’s hasty response to the economic protests shows that they, too, understood the importance of supporting the PA to keep Palestinians materially dependent on the Oslo process. Just days after the first protests started, the Israeli government ordered an advance payment of PA tax revenues collected by Israel. Anxious that the protest could turn into an intifada against the PA and Israel, it also lobbied the EU and the US to grant more funds to the PA. Caving in to popular pressure, the PA also half-heartedly announced a request to Israel to review some provisions of the Paris Protocol—which Israel immediately rejected. Still, in the same time period, the PA also reiterated its intentions to cement further the overall structural economic relationship with Israel by announcing its intention to build yet another industrial park near Jenin. Industrial parks, financed by foreign capital or Palestinian-Israeli partnerships and employing cheap local labor, have been an important blueprint in the PA’s neo-liberal growth strategy as their enclave-style geography fits neatly with Israel’s spatial control in the West Bank. Furthermore, it is also important to recognize that the persuasive power and the social engineering behind the neo-liberal state-building program has helped the PA to

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establish cultural hegemony. For instance, much of the public and media discourse perceived the demonstrations as the very act of ‘citizens’ who were ‘demanding’ socioeconomic ‘rights’ from the PA under occupation, as if it was a ‘state in the making’. Likewise, the PA’s concessions to some of the demands have been marketed as ‘responsible governance’, reaffirming the ‘democratic process’ and respecting the ‘will of the people’. Furthermore, higher taxes were rejected because the decision process lacked ‘transparency’ and would run counter to establishing a ‘conducive investment environment’, thus negatively impacting on building the Palestinian ‘state’. Protesting against rising costs for electricity and imported goods, demonstrators had demanded an end to the monopoly of regional Palestinian distribution and import companies. While the goal may have been to protect the Palestinian ‘consumer’ and drive down prices, in the end this demand would have effectively allowed unhindered market access for Israel companies. Accordingly, as a result of the legitimate outrage of the protestors, it is quite possible that some of the excesses of the neo-liberal state-building program will be stopped and more people will be able to participate in the Oslo process, even if—or rather especially because—it produces no meaningful political progress. This not only points toward the contradiction of Palestinian aspirations in the Oslo process but also explains a certain confusion within Palestinian society and the fear that the consequences of the protestors’ political and economic demands could spell the end of the PA project and the call for an independent Palestinian state. The concern is that any attempt by the PA to achieve meaningful economic sovereignty would undermine the entire Oslo framework, which has purposefully institutionalized the PA’s economic dependency on Israel. In turn, any political progress, no matter how limited, rests on Palestinians having to continue to do without

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economic sovereignty and thus largely depend on Israel to establish the pace and content of the indeterminate negotiation process. Perhaps most importantly, however, the confusion signifies the lack of any sustainable and viable political alternatives and of the confidence to attain political results by popular mobilization. And with no independent economy, there is also no working-class movement, depriving Palestinians of a historical agent of change. There is, in other words, no political opposition to either the PA’s rule in the West Bank or Hamas’s rule in Gaza, which in any case has started to resemble the political authoritarianism and economic liberalism of the PA in the West Bank. Leftist parties, meanwhile, remain in the loyal opposition, still grappling with their historical failure to challenge Fatah’s petit-bourgeois, pragmatic-nationalist dominance of the PLO, which has arguably led to Palestinian entrapment in the Oslo process.5

Overcoming the Oslo Trap The West Bank protests gradually fizzled out after two weeks and were largely co-opted by Fatah cadres interested in scapegoating Fayyad as the economic architect of the PA state-building program, thus containing the protests and distracting from the fact that Oslo has become, and still is, Fatah’s raison d’être.6 The government workers union continues to call periodically for partial strikes and sit-ins to protest the delayed payment of salaries, while explicitly reaffirming the political project of the PA and thereby further contributing to the artificial bifurcation between economic and political demands. Some independent youth activists, therefore, voiced frustration that the protest came too early and must be considered a failure. Palestinian society, while fully aware of the Oslo trap, was

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either too afraid to escape from it or, even worse, wanted to remain in it, with some improvement in the conditions of entrapment. In the absence of a political alternative that could have articulated itself through organizational structures, the economic protest and its political demands could not be sustained and transformed into a movement that was not limited to the confines of the Oslo structure. Taken on their own, then, the economic protests have not been able to challenge the status quo in the West Bank, and the structural factors that have given rise to them remain firmly in place. These factors are, to be sure, unlikely to be altered by either the largely symbolic victory of achieving non-member ‘observer state’ status at the United Nations in 2012 or increased talk of reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, which, despite rhetorical displays of national unity in the wake of Israel’s ‘Pillar of Cloud’ military operation against Gaza, remains elusive. Wide sections of Palestinian society, while trapped along the Fatah-Hamas divide, are increasingly seeing both movements as more concerned with securing their own privileges than organizing popular mobilization against the Occupation. Looking at the situation from within, then, does not lend itself to too much optimism. True, other spheres of the struggle, such as the international campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, have gained steam over the past few years. So too has the campaign to rejuvenate and democratize a PLO that could potentially put the PA on the backseat and radicalize the Palestinian national movement. There is also increasing political mobilization outside traditional institutions in the form of independent unions and youth groups, whose activities demystify the PA’s economic and political collaboration with Israel. Yet despite Israel’s increasing international isolation, the PA’s inability to halt the process of its own contradiction, and

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acts of everyday resistance by Palestinians, Israel’s settler colonialism continues unabated, swallowing up more land and dispossessing the indigenous population. The realization that Palestinians on the ground have very little leverage to confront Israel or to challenge their own political leadership, however, is not an admission of defeat. Rather, it is, first of all, a realistic and time-honored analysis that the solution to the ‘Palestine problem’ would never come solely from within. In light of the revolutionary spark in the region, it seems therefore prudent to remember the dialectics of Arab revolution and Palestinian liberation that understands social and economic emancipation to be an inseparable part of the political struggle in Palestine, the region, and beyond. Moreover, it is an urgent reminder of the need to engage in the long and patient political work at the level of organization and education on the ground, but also in Palestinian communities in exile, without which the revolutionary opening in the region will not be utilized. Such work has to start by rebuilding the communal capacity for popular mobilization and resistance, which has been destroyed by the logic of the Oslo process, the experience of defeat during the Second Intifada, political factionalism, and the PA’s neo-liberal agenda—and it will inevitably face local and regional setbacks along the way. The challenge to the Oslo framework and its structures of indigenous collaboration that seek to regulate and accommodate the Occupation through neo-liberal strategies will have to unleash a dynamic that brings about the unity of political and economic demands. That unity, as Rosa Luxemburg recognized in The Mass Strike, cannot come about “in any other way than through the school of a series of preparatory partial insurrections, which therefore meantime end in partial outward ‘defeats’ and, considered individually, may appear to be ‘premature’” (Scott 2008:

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139). Perhaps then, if situated in the wider historical moment of the region as a whole, the economic protests in the West Bank in September 2012, even if co-opted and aborted, can be considered a first step in that direction— one that was neither too early nor a failure.

Notes 1. For a more detailed discussion on neo-liberalism and state building in Palestinian society, see Khalidi and Samour (2011). 2. The most notorious of these pieces were probably two by Thomas Friedman that appeared in the New York Times: “Green Shoots in Palestine,” published on 4 August 2009 (http://www.nytimes. com/2009/08/05/opinion/05friedman.html?_r=0), and “Green Shoots in Palestine II,” published on 8 August 2009 (http://www. nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09friedman.html). 3. Israeli companies supply most of the West Bank’s electricity and water consumption, and payment is organized on the level of municipalities that transfer their collected fees to the PA central government, which in turn transfers the money to Israeli companies. When households fail to pay their bills, the PA has to step in and foot the bill, usually through Israel deducting the remaining amount from Palestinian tax revenues that it transfers to the PA. 4. It thus comes as no surprise that amid the talk and action of cutting back public expenditures, the PA’s security sector was significantly strengthened under Fayyad’s reign in terms of employment and donor support. 5. See “The Question of Palestine: An Interview with Bashir AbuManneh,” New Politics 11, no. 4 (2008), http://nova.wpunj.edu/ newpolitics/issue44/Abu-Manneh44.htm (accessed 10 September 2012). 6. With both public approval declining and political agitation against Fayyad by Fatah increasing, Fayyad eventually resigned in April 2013. He was replaced by Rami Hamdullah, a university professor with no party affiliation and little political experience and therefore, as some suspect, more responsive to the directives of Fatah and President Abbas. Unsurprisingly, this change in personnel did

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little to improve the economic conditions in the West Bank and did not alter the neo-liberal outlook of the PA. Events since then have not only firmly confirmed the PA’s belief in the neo-liberal state-building program, but also undermined an industry of expert analyses that reduced the PA’s neo-liberalism to, and personalized it in, Salam Fayyad (hence ‘Fayyadism’) at the expense of a range of structural factors located in the political economy of the region and the Oslo process.

References Abdelrahman, Maha. 2012. “A Hierarchy of Struggles? The ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ in Egypt’s Revolution.” Review of African Political Economy 39, no. 134: 614–628. Alexander, Anne. 2011. “The Growing Social Soul of Egypt’s Democratic Revolution.” International Socialism 131 (June). http:// www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=741&issue=131 (accessed 10 December 2012). Hanafi, Sari, and Linda Tabar. 2005. The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalized Elite: Donors, International Organizations and Local NGOs. Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies. Kazziha, Walid W. 1975. Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World: Habash and His Comrades from Nationalism to Marxism. London: Charles Knight. Khalidi, Raja, and Sobhi Samour. 2011. “Neoliberalism as Liberation: The Statehood Program and the Remaking of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.” Journal of Palestine Studies 40, no. 2: 6–25. PNA (Palestinian National Authority). 2008. “Palestinian Reform and Development Plan, 2008–2010.” http://www.mdtf.undp.org/ document/download/4655. PNA (Palestinian National Authority). 2009. “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.” http://www.jmcc.org/documents/Fayyadplan.pdf. Scott, Helen, ed. 2008. The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: ‘Reform or Revolution’ and ‘The Mass Strike.’ Chicago: Haymarket Books. Zemni, Sami, Brecht De Smet, and Koenraad Bogaert. 2012. “Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg’s The Mass Strike.” Antipode 45, no. 4: 888–907.

Stability or Democracy? The Failed Uprising in Bahrain and the Battle for the International Agenda

Z Thomas Fibiger

Among the unsuccessful uprisings for political reform in the so-called Arab Spring is that of Bahrain. At the same time, the outside world has heard relatively little of what is going on in Bahrain when compared with other Arab countries such as Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia. These two aspects—the lack of success and the lack of international press—are interlinked. Judged by media coverage, it may seem that Bahrain has been neglected by the international community. Yet seen from the perspective of international power politics, there is a lot of interest in Bahrain. This interest, however, prioritizes stability over democracy. As I discuss in this article, both the regime and the opposition are very much aware of the different potential international understandings of the conflict, and they both work on how to push the international agenda in order to frame the events in different political and moral discourses. The regime has argued that it secures the stability of the Gulf region, while the opposition has called for support of its struggle for democratic reforms. As acknowledged by both parties in Bahrain, outside interests are decisive for the political development in the country, and this battle for

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the international agenda is still ongoing three years after the uprising was crushed.

An Uprising Crushed The Bahraini opposition took to the streets on 14 February 2011, only three days after the fall of Mubarak in Egypt. The movement in Bahrain was clearly inspired by events in Egypt and Tunisia, but 14 February was also significant in that it marked the tenth anniversary of the current constitution and of the reform program initiated in 2001 by the country’s king, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, whose dynasty has ruled for more than two centuries. As I will discuss later, it is part of the political discourse that this dynasty is Sunni and hails from the Arab mainland, while the majority of Bahrain’s citizens are Shi‘a Muslims. Throughout the decade, Bahrain’s opposition groups had protested against what they saw as reforms that were too limited, even though the regime itself spoke of a ‘democratic experiment’ (Fibiger 2011; Wright 2008). While the government designated 14 February as a celebration of this experiment, opposition groups gathered to protest. They surely would have in any case, but with the wave of demonstrations taking place throughout the Arab world, those in Bahrain also grew in spirit and popular support. Inspired by Tahrir Square in Cairo, and as a novel protest strategy in Bahrain, the demonstrators took control of the central Pearl Roundabout in the capital Manama and established a camp there. After an initial attempt to remove the camp, during which the first Bahraini victims of this uprising died, authorities allowed the demonstrators to settle in before finally destroying the camp and the roundabout and crushing the uprising by brute force one month later. While that month had seen hopes grow for

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a new reform path in Bahrain, the removal of the camp seemed to end the short-lived Arab Spring in Bahrain. The decision to quash the uprising by mid-March 2011 coincided with significant changes in Bahrain’s international context. First of all, on 14 March, troops from the so-called Peninsula Shield, representing the regional Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and formed primarily of Saudi armed forces, crossed the bridge connecting Bahrain with Saudi Arabia in order to assist Bahrain’s security forces in controlling the country. This move, which was seen by Bahrain’s regime as friendly support, immediately followed a visit from the US minister of defense, Robert Gates, who had been sent to Bahrain to find a solution to the political conflict. In addition to the intervention of the Saudis and the US, the situation in Libya also played a role: that country’s emerging uprising had drawn attention away from what was going on in Bahrain, and most of the international media correspondents now left to focus their reports on Libya. In the Libyan case, Gulf countries such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates supported NATO’s call to protect civilians against Gaddafi’s army. While the US-allied Gulf monarchies could thus take part in the highly publicized effort to support the uprising in Libya, they could with much less international attention ensure that an uprising in a country neighboring their own was obliterated. This brief account of the fate of Bahrain’s uprising shows that regional and international agendas play a significant role in the local affairs of Bahrain, and that this is recognized by both the regime and the opposition. Three countries—Saudi Arabia, the US, and Iran—stand out in this matter, and I will focus here on their involvement as seen from Bahrain. This opens the important discussion on how both sides in Bahrain appeal for international support for two different causes that are described by each side as ‘reform’. I will then end this article with some remarks on

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the meaning of ‘reform’ that may enable a better understanding of the variety of political scenarios that exist in countries such as Bahrain.

The Rise of the Gulf Cooperation Council While Gates left Bahrain without clear results, the GCC took the lead in resolving the political crisis in March 2011. The situation testifies to the specific relationship between the US and the members of the GCC, in particular Saudi Arabia, which, even if challenged by the wave of reforms, has emerged as a strong power above other international actors. The GCC appears to have entered a new era with the Arab Spring in which this group of oil-rich countries has played a decisive role in both Bahrain and Yemen and is apparently important to the circumstances in countries such as Libya, Syria, and Egypt. An important regional side effect of the Arab Spring has been this strengthening of the GCC as a power assemblage within the new order of US-corporate state power (see Kapferer 2010). Secure that Yemen will not challenge its regional dominance, the Gulf group may favor regime change in some countries, such as Libya and Syria, and at the same time ensure stability and a loyal regime in Bahrain.1 This supports the Western framing discourses on humanitarian interventions against despots, on the one hand, and upheavals threatening security, on the other. In the case of Bahrain, furthermore, this rationale also allowed the government to articulate the conflict as religious-sectarian, thus further increasing the polarization of a Shi‘a-Sunni divide and suggesting to the international community that the only alternative to the current regime would be a Shi‘a Islamic regime.2 Bahrain is important to both the US and the GCC. The country is home to the 5th Fleet of the US Navy, which

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plays a key role in maintaining US strategic interests and providing stability in the Gulf region in relation to Iraq, Iran, and the free flow of oil from the GCC countries to the outside world. Oil is a principal factor for the GCC countries, even if Bahrain does not produce much itself. The small island country is situated next to Saudi Arabia’s main oil fields, and thus an unstable or hostile Bahrain could disrupt oil production and shipping in the area. This is not so much because democracy may lead to instability, but because of the demographic make-up of Bahrain, where Shi‘a Muslims are the majority. Like the Bahraini authorities, Saudi Arabia fears that reforms in Bahrain would open the country to influence from the Shi‘a Islamic Republic of Iran and that this could spread to the Shi‘a in Saudi, who inhabit the oil-rich eastern province. The GCC was originally formed to counter the challenge of Iran’s 1979 Revolution, in line with US policies, and it has served to strengthen economic, political, and cultural bonds between the Arab countries of the Gulf region.3 During the Arab Spring, it has also shown its military capability, and it has come to be a significant political player in the overall Arab region as well. The monarchies of the GCC have no interest in democracy; rather, their goals are regional stability and a strong alliance among the GCC’s six member states.4 The US styles itself as a promoter of democracy, but at the same time it has a strong interest in stability among its allies. In the case of Bahrain, this means that stability is more important than the democratic aspirations of the opposition and that the objectives of the GCC have been decisive. Thus, the US and other proponents of democracy do not act alone in forming the international agenda in this part of the world where regional actors have become strong enough to counter both local and international political challenges. The rise of the GCC and the political situations that it has faced

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have generated ideas of a closer union of the Arab Gulf countries, even leading in 2012 to a proposal for a formal union between Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The Arab Spring might thus have become the pretext for fusing the Bahraini state with an anti-democratic and stable state that is crucial for the US’s Middle East project. In any event, the discourse of democracy is heavily framed within regional power politics, where both US and GCC interests may run counter to democratic aspirations, focusing instead on security and stability.

Playing the ‘Iran Card’ The common enemy of Bahrain, the GCC, and the US is Iran. Among the Arab Gulf countries, a wise strategy is to blame Iran for causing troubles, since Iran is also mistrusted in the larger international community. This strategy has been used effectively by Bahraini authorities during and after the uprising. Iran was accused of meddling with Bahrain’s national affairs (while the military assistance of the GCC countries was seen as friendly support), and it was blamed for inspiring or even instigating the uprising. Since the majority of Bahrain’s population, and not least the vast majority of the Arab Spring protesters, are Shi‘a Muslims, they are accused of aiming for an Iranian-style theocracy rather than a democracy. These arguments have been used to secure regional and international support for Bahrain’s present regime. Neither the GCC nor the West would want Iran to grow stronger in the region, nor would they support the spread of Shi‘a theocracies. This questioning of the true intentions of Bahrain’s opposition resulted in the lack of support from the international community, since it raised fears that the outcome of a regime change in Bahrain would be a theocracy and not a democracy.

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Bahrain’s opposition has worked hard to deny any relationship with Iran. The argument of the opposition was—and is—that the uprising was not a matter of Shi‘a versus Sunni but of a deprived population against a totalitarian regime, and that the reforms would be for all Bahrainis, both Shi‘a and Sunni. It was pointed out that Sunni political activists took part in the uprising, too. It is true that most of the demonstrators were Shi‘a, but this was because they form the majority of the population and have been systematically marginalized by the Sunni regime. The idea of a Shi‘a Islamic republic would not work in Bahrain, opposition leaders argued, because the social and ethno-religious set-up in Bahrain is very different from that of Iran, and in Bahrain the democratic principle of equal representation would work much better. Moreover, most Shi‘a in Bahrain are ethnically Arab and have emphasized that they are not particularly affiliated with Iran. While Shi‘a political groups would seek to normalize relations with their Iranian neighbor, they have no interest in the pre-1970 Iranian claims to Bahrain. The quest of Bahrain’s Shi‘a and the overall opposition, it was argued, is to allow the people to rule themselves and to base this rule on neither a Sunni Arab monarchy nor a Shi‘a Persian theocracy. The fact that the movement for reform was a national and not a sectarian movement was signified by the widespread use of Bahrain’s national flag in the demonstrations. This flag had hitherto signaled loyalty to the Al Khalifa dynasty, who originally had used the flag as a tribal symbol. During the last decade, however, and in particular in the 2011 uprising, it has become a symbol for the opposition as well, intended to show the national allegiance of the reform movement against the accusations of Iranian interference. Despite these assurances from the opposition, in playing the ‘Iran card’, the regime achieved

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its goal of turning the democratic protest into a security threat by framing it within the international discourse of a pan-Shi‘a conspiracy.

International Appeals: A Commission, a Hunger Strike, and a Formula 1 Grand Prix Appealing for international recognition and support is crucial to both the regime and the opposition. While the government argues that it ensures stability and counters growing Iranian influence in the region, the opposition claims to have nothing to do with Iran and that its goal is to have the support of Western democracy promoters. In the aftermath of the uprising and the removal of the protesters’ camp, both sides have continued to vie for international support. For example, the regime commissioned an international group of lawyers to investigate any abuses to human rights and jurisprudence on both sides during the uprising, to show to the outside world that it took allegations of such abuses seriously. While the opposition did not find this commission trustworthy and sufficiently independent, it published a lengthy report in November 2011 that actually did conclude that the regime had used excessive force to stop the demonstrations and that the many trials in military courts, resulting in more than a thousand prisoners after the uprising, should be transferred to civilian courts for retrial. Since the government had initiated this report, it had to act upon the commission’s recommendations, which it used as the platform for a new ‘reform’ program aimed at reforming security forces, transferring trials from military to civilian courts, and putting particular personnel accused of torturing prisoners on trial. This, however, was not enough to satisfy the opposition, which saw grounds for

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much wider reforms in the report5 and in the aspirations of the uprising itself. During the spring of 2012, two incidents in particular triggered new international interest in Bahrain and made it clear that the uprising was not completely over. In February, the highly profiled human rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who, along with 13 other activists, had received a life sentence from a military court in April 2011, began a hunger strike. This was openly an attempt to raise international awareness of the situation in Bahrain, and alKhawaja was able to do so partly because of his extensive involvement with international human rights agencies, which followed his situation and attracted international media attention, and partly because he held dual citizenship, having obtained Danish citizenship during his longterm political exile in Denmark before the 2001 reforms. He was therefore in close contact with Danish diplomats, who tried to convince Bahrain’s government to retry al-Khawaja in a civilian court, to release him, or to exile him once again to Denmark. During the hunger strike (which ended in May after 110 days), the UN secretary-general, the US president, and the EU appealed to Bahrain’s government to reconsider al-Khawaja’s case. The Bahraini authorities firmly countered that foreign countries should not interfere in Bahraini affairs. In April, al-Khawaja’s case was transferred to a civilian court, following the recommendations of the earlier commission, and although few believed that this would change the verdict significantly, international attention to the matter diminished and the hunger strike was ended.6 At the outset, al-Khawaja’s hunger strike had received additional attention because it coincided with another highly international event—the Formula 1 Grand Prix championship race in Bahrain, which was held on 22 April. In 2004, Bahrain had become the first country in the Middle East to host this event, a gigantic achievement for

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the small country. In 2011, the race in Bahrain had been canceled due to the uprising, so both F1 organizers and Bahraini authorities were eager to put it back on track in 2012. This was also intended to show to the world that the situation in Bahrain had returned to normal and that everything was under control. Because of al-Khawaja’s hunger strike, tensions rose in Bahrain leading up to the race, and the international coverage of Bahrain was focused more on human rights abuses and the ongoing struggle for reform. Bahraini activists argued that the drivers would be “racing in our blood,” and there was much international talk about canceling the race again. In the end, however, the race was carried out, although it seemed just as much an embarrassment as a triumph for the regime. Immediately after the race, however, international pressure and focus on Bahrain eased, and government authorities could once again handle the protests away from the international spotlight. Al-Khawaja’s hunger strike and the debate over Formula 1 demonstrate how both the regime and the opposition are aware of the importance of international appeal and attention. Without the Formula 1 race and without al-Khawaja’s international affiliations, the opposition would probably not have gained the same access to the international agenda. Even if Formula 1 to a large extent was launched as a media (and economic) campaign for the regime, it also presented an opportunity for the opposition to turn a critical international eye on the situation in the country. It was perhaps a victory for the government that Formula 1 was carried through, just as it was a victory that al-Khawaja stayed alive and in his Bahraini prison cell. But the international discussions of these matters did little to enhance Bahrain’s overall reputation. In order to attract Western support, and not least investments, the regime is very concerned with its reputation—but reputation is not

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everything. Regime security is firmly in the hands of Bahrain’s GCC allies, and this fact also seems to frame how the West approaches the situation in Bahrain.

What Counts as ‘Reform’? The events indicate that the situation in Bahrain was not settled with the brutal crushing of the uprising during the spring of 2011. The opposition still uses the few options it has to raise international support in order to put pressure on the regime. Solidly backed by its Arab Gulf neighbors and largely successful in quieting international critique, the regime has suggested its own reform process, focused on civil measures in tune with contemporary forms of state power, but all with the intention of strengthening regime control. Security forces have been ‘reformed’, which means that they have been both strengthened and controlled. New laws have been implemented, including those that reduce freedom of speech and public gatherings. The existing Parliament has allegedly been strengthened, but this only serves the regime since the Bahraini Parliament is now fully boycotted by the opposition. The opposition group within Parliament withdrew as a reaction to the violence in 2011, joining the rest of the opposition that had already boycotted the limited reforms. Nonetheless, two positions within the opposition continue to exist: one aims to overthrow the regime and monarchy, and the other aims to negotiate for meaningful reforms while keeping a constitutional monarchy. During the month of uprising in 2011, this latter group seemed to gain the attention of more liberal segments of the Al Khalifa regime, represented by the crown prince, but it was the conservative group, supported by Saudi Arabia, that came out as the decision maker when the uprising

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was crushed. Still, the various positions show that there are several scenarios for future political developments in Bahrain and that it is not only a question of regime control or regime change. What counts as ‘reform’ is still an open question, but as I have suggested here it is dependent on international attention. The regime and opposition continue to frame the conflict within international discourses where dreams of democracy compete with the objectives of stability and security, and where an assemblage of interests—those of Bahrain’s regime, the GCC, and the US—makes stability and security the most important aim. Events in late 2013 show that both the opposition and the regime continue to reach out to the international community for support. Allied with international human rights agencies, the opposition succeeded in calling attention to and finally preventing a large shipment of tear gas from South Korea to Bahrain. At the same time, the regime and its GCC allies observed international power assemblages changing, as Western countries began to renew dialogue with Iran over nuclear issues. However, and arguably as a sign of compensation and goodwill after the Iran talks, the US decided to expand its naval base in Bahrain, a move that bolsters the security, economy, and self-confidence of the Bahraini regime. Within Bahrain, Ali Salman, the leader of the main and dialogue-oriented opposition group al-Wifaq, was arrested in December 2013, accused of inciting violence and sectarianism. However, he was seen only three weeks later at an official meeting with the crown prince. As noted by Justin Gengler (2014), the two had last met just before the crackdown in March 2011. What kind of reforms such new meetings may imply is uncertain. The battle between various positions within the regime, the opposition, and the international community continues.

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Notes 1. In the case of Egypt, a significant rift between Saudi Arabia and Qatar has transpired, the former supporting the military and the latter the Muslim Brotherhood. 2. For more on Shi‘a-Sunni politics in the region, see Gengler (2011), Nakash (2006), Nasr (2006), and Valbjørn and Bank (2007). 3. See Herb (1999) for an introduction to the Gulf monarchies and their political trajectories. 4. The member states of the GCC are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. 5. For the full report, see Bassiouni et al. (2011). 6. In January 2013, Bahrain’s highest court of appeals upheld alKhawaja’s conviction and life sentence.

References Bassiouni, M. Cherif, Nigel Rodley, Badria Al-Awadhi, Philippe Kirsch, and Mahnoush H. Arsanjani. 2011. Report of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry. http://www.bici.org.bh/ BICIreportEN.pdf. Fibiger, Thomas. 2011. “Sectarian Secularism: The Role of Secularities in Bahrain.” Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual, ed. Nils Bubandt and Martijn van Beek. Oxford: Taylor & Francis. Gengler, Justin. 2011. “Ethnic Conflict and Political Mobilization in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Gengler, Justin. 2014. “Bahrain’s Crown Prince Makes His Move.” Foreign Policy. http://mideastafrica.foreignpolicy.com/posts/ 2014/01/20/bahrains_crown_prince_makes_his_move. Herb, Michael. 1999. All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “The Aporia of Power: Crisis and the Emergence of the Corporate State.” Social Analysis 54, no. 1: 125–151. Nakash, Yitzhak. 2006. Reaching for Power: The Shi‘a in the Modern Arab World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Nasr, Vali. 2006. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future. New York: W.W. Norton. Valbjørn, Morten, and André Bank. 2007. “Signs of a New Arab Cold War: The 2006 Lebanon War and the Sunni-Shi‘i Divide.” Middle East Report 242 (Spring): 6–11. Wright, Stephen. 2008. “Fixing the Kingdom: Political Evolution and Socio-Economic Challenges in Bahrain.” Occasional Paper No. 3. Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar.

The Turkish Model for the Arab Spring The Corporate Moralist State

Z Kjetil Fosshagen

Despite recent protests and clashes in Turkey, which were compared by some commentators to Arab Spring uprisings, Turkey has been proposed as the ideal model for future democratic Arab states. This suggestion has come from both Arab and Western liberal commentators and politicians, and most notably from the US administration. To understand why, we need to go beneath the rhetoric of liberal democratic values to look at how it conceals a deeper reconfiguration of global power dynamics that is currently creating certain kinds of idealizations of good governance, with Turkey in particular being promoted as a model. The emergence of this model for society articulates in many respects the present reconfiguration of Arab states as they become tied in new ways to global financial institutions, diasporas, international democratic cultures, and international agencies of regulation. The idealization of the Turkish model may seem surprising, given that there has been in Turkey a shift away from secularist, military influence and increasingly toward more Islamic forms of popularism. But according to Western proponents of the Turkish model, the country’s long

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experience with democracy demonstrates a desirable reconciliation of Islam and democracy that has been able to hold in check more fundamentalist Islamist movements. Turkey is furthermore presented as a successful integration of democracy and Islam with ‘vibrant economics’ (Thomas 2011). This article points to a broader conflation of liberal democracy with neo-liberal economic policies, which is at the core of the US’s Greater Middle East project endorsed by President Obama. In Arab popular opinion, Turkey has also been seen as a leading Muslim state, a view that was strengthened when Prime Minister Erdog˘an voiced moral outrage at Israel’s 2008 Gaza offensive and the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid. These events allow Turkey and its president to appear as the new true defenders of the Islamic world and of downtrodden Arab populations. These moral outbursts only apparently signal only a distancing from the West, as the Turkish government continues to act as a crucial US ally and to cooperate militarily with Israel. Turkey has supported the US-led military interventions in the region and implemented Western-dictated economic policies that have opened the Turkish market to Western capital. Turkey is the perfect model of the reconstitution of the state’s enterprises, financial regulations, tariffs, and taxes in a way that implies a further embedding of the social within the economic, in a kind of decentralized empire (Hardt and Negri 2000) working from within. This strategy seems to have achieved a new stability within global capitalist-democratic formations as the country moves away from its former reliance on military regimes and military economic activities. This has promoted a more decentralized configuration of the relation between the state and non-state institutions, as well as between the state and its subjects. The celebrated growth of civil society in Turkey has produced a unique experiment in liberal government. The move toward popular Islamic conservatism

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occurs alongside a mixture of liberal democracy, neo-liberal economic forms, and a global empire of securitization and regulation, which together can be viewed as a system of hypergovernance. In line with recent arguments against universalist models of neo-liberalism (see Hilgers 2010; Ong 2006), this article will show how Turkey’s neo-liberal regime constitutes a particular way of positioning national society within a framework of globalized forces.

Turkey as a Strategic Military Bridgehead Turkey’s emergence as a model Muslim state has not been straightforward, although the country has been a NATO member since 1952. After World War II, the US supported a militarily strong and democratically weak Turkey as an outpost against socialism. This line of support continued through military coups, including the ‘post-modern’ coup against the ‘Islamic party’ government of Erbakan in 1997, which was not condemned by the US. Thus, the US has for a long time viewed the Turkish military as a necessary and fully acceptable vehicle to ‘stabilize’ Turkey, as it has military institutions in other Arab states, most notably Egypt. Bush’s post-9/11 ‘war on terror’—renamed ‘overseas contingency operations’ under the Obama administration starting in 2009—reconstituted the rationale for US support of strong allies in the region. A gradual shift in US policy had come about with a change in developmental philosophy by the neo-conservatives in the US toward supporting democracy, civil society, and neo-liberal capitalism within a vision of creating a new Greater Middle East (Roy 2008). The US invasion of Iraq was a central part of this vision. The Turkish election victory of Erdog˘an’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 was initially met with caution by the Bush administration, which warned about

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the threat of ‘Islamofascism’. However, the new Turkish government was gradually recognized as a moderate and stabilizing factor, not least in the field of foreign policy. In 2003, it managed, against strong public opinion, to secure a parliamentary majority for assisting the US-led invasion of Iraq. The first parliamentary vote had turned down the US request to use Turkish territory, causing the US deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, to criticize sharply the Turkish Army for not putting the government into place and resulting in a US threat to withdraw military aid. Later the same year, Turkey agreed to contribute troops to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and even to Iraq, although this never materialized. Relations with the US later soured due to Turkish anger over attacks by troops of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq. Turkey opposes an independent Kurdish state in northern Iraq, and it wanted access to this territory for military strikes. A group of clandestine Turkish soldiers were humiliatingly arrested, cuffed, and hooded by US troops inside northern Iraq in 2003, causing a popular uproar in Turkey. Tensions rose further in 2007 when the Turkish Parliament approved a motion allowing Turkish troops to enter and attack targets within Iraqi territory. The US rejected this option, which it viewed as threatening to destabilize the region, but in December of the same year the US shifted its policy and supported the Turkish military logistically. The PKK was put on the US (and EU) list of terrorist organizations, and this provided the legal emergency that enabled Turkey to attack them inside Iraq, causing angry reactions from Iraqi and Kurdish authorities. The 2007 shift in US policy, which gave Turkey access to Iraqi territory, signaled a change in Turkey’s role: it now became a major factor in the US’s project of ‘stabilizing’ the Greater Middle East region. The US’s support

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for Turkey emphasized its importance as a balancing and moderating factor and also eased the worry that Turkey might not continue to cooperate militarily with Israel. Instead, Turkey doubled its Israeli weapon purchases. During his visit to Turkey in 2009, President Obama declared strong support for Turkey’s fight against the PKK, praising Turkey’s secularism and democracy. The fact that it plays a significant part in US foreign policy has contributed to Turkey’s rise as a regional power. The reliance on the army as the pillar of stability has been replaced to some extent by a reconfiguration of Turkey’s political and economic space within new global power formations. A democratic state—one that is allied with the US and committed to privatization and open market capitalism—validates and legitimizes the vision of creating a new democratic Middle East, which is partly a code for creating a neo-liberal economy. The new and more democratic Turkey assisted US military interventions through a shared and explicit rhetoric of common humanitarian responsibility. In the same vein, Turkey cooperated with the US and the Saudis to support both the Free Syrian Army (Tug˘al 2012) and, later, allegedly moderate Islamist forces to counter the radical Islamists in the Syrian proxy war. At the same time, it closed its eyes to the crushed uprisings in Bahrain. The humanitarianism-securitization discursive nexus is emblematic and coincides with new Turkish policies in the field of economic reforms and military initiatives that are often deeply unpopular.

Reconfiguration through Crisis Deep structural dynamics lie beneath the US shift to support the ‘economistic civilianizing’ of Turkish politics. This had begun in the early 1980s when the military junta was used

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as a facilitator of social change. The military coup in 1980 roughly coincided with a new International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment program that became operative under emergency law conditions. The coup created the perfect conditions for executing a socio-economic restructuring because it removed domestic opposition and union resistance. The military outlawed all existing political parties and allowed only three parties (two of which it had constructed itself) to run in the parliamentary election in 1983. Many authoritarian regimes around the world received loans and adjustment packages in that decade, demonstrating that a crisis of the state was instrumental to introducing this radical restructuring of power (see Harvey 2005; Ong 2006). Several authors have argued that authoritarian regimes (and in particular personalized dictatorships) are more likely to attain IMF loans than democracies (see, e.g., Vreeland 2003: 102), probably based on donor estimates of their ‘efficiency’. The 1980 Turkish program was “the test case for the newly implemented World Bank (WB)–International Monetary Fund (IMF) joint program involving cross conditionality” (Kirkpatrick and Onis 1991), comprising five large structural adjustment loans. The first prime minister elected after the reintroduction of elections in 1983 was the right-wing and US-trained Turgut Özal, who had drafted the deal with the IMF while serving in Turkey’s State Planning Organization and was undersecretary of the prime minister before the coup. This former World Bank official led the technocrat cabinet under the junta. The majority of ministers in his post-coup cabinet came from the private sector, a clear shift from previous governments that had been dominated by the bureaucratic state elite. In Özal’s period as prime minister (1983–1989) and then as president (1989–1993), neo-liberal policies had yet to gain ascendancy so as to deregulate further the economy by implementing a package of technical measures. This is

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too often a universalistic assumption in writings about neoliberalism. In Turkey, the finance sector was, for instance, only partly deregulated and continued to be used by political parties to create patronage relations. The deregulation of finance, however, attracted flows of foreign capital seeking short-term profit, and this resulted in financial instability and inflation. Özal ended the era of Turkish import-substitution programs and the model of state-led development and introduced a process of privatization. This type of reconstitution of the state is a central factor behind the Arab Spring uprisings. In Turkey, this privatization of state assets involved the growth of new personal relations between business and the state in directions that reconstituted the state’s power and remediated it through informal, personalized mediating links. The configuration of political crisis, military rule, and economic liberalization in the 1980s was a historical particularity that produced the basis in Turkey for what Karadag (2010) has termed ‘oligarchic capitalism’ in place of its earlier developmental state capitalism. All trade unions and civil society organizations were banned except for the �Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSI˙AD), a “family holdings’ business organization” (Karadag 2010: 13). This implied the strengthening of a closed elite of a few wealthy families that had arisen in the early republican period as part of the bureaucracy’s plan to create an ethnic Turkish bourgeoisie (ibid.: 10). This elite was already linked to, and supported by, state-controlled capitalism, but it now expanded to become an oligarchic capitalist class, which used its personalized relations and influence within the state apparatus to expand further. In the earlier state-driven capitalism, most economic entrepreneurs had been state bureaucrats (ibid.: 11). Under Özal, this oligarchic class gained personalized access to the enormously profitable realm of state export licenses in the new

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IMF-directed export-oriented economy (ibid.: 13), whereby the state favored large corporations that were considered to be most efficient. Neo-liberal policies thus not only ‘rolled back’ the state but also established crucial links between particular agents of global capitalism and new state regulatory regimes, institutions, policies, and practices. The dynamics of state power was thus reconstituted by its realignment with the global market and through increasing networks of access and influence, which was how the state incorporated private entities external to itself. In the 1980s, the Turkish Army established one of the country’s largest export fleets, OMSAN, through special IMF credits (Cam 2007: 9). The army also received IMF credits for other ventures and has been described as a major beneficiary of the IMF (ibid.). The army gradually built up OYAK, one of Turkey’s three largest holding companies, with majority ownership shares in major civilian industries. What is more, this entrepreneurial activity accelerated with the increasing privatization in the 1990s, based on the army’s fortunate position in relation to patronage networks, legal privileges, and access to information. OYAK’s corporate connections and the network structure of the state produced many lucrative rescue, takeover, and privatization deals with the state (Akça 2010). OYAK today owns about 30 companies and is also joint holders with major foreign corporations. It never spends its profits for military purposes but instead invests in civilian industry, finance, and services. This core element of the state—the army—thus found a new grounding outside the bureaucratic space of the state, in economic forces that extend beyond the nation-state. Despite its centralized organization, the military thus contributed to the decentralization and fragmentation of the earlier striated state space and power. As in many Arab states, the army benefited greatly from the privatization

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of the economy, attesting to the way that neo-liberalism is always historically specific and woven into other forms of power (Elyachar 2012; Hilgers 2010: 359). Turkey fits into Aihwa Ong’s (2000) model in which neo-liberalism is tied to forms of exceptionality that produce new forms of citizenship and sovereignty. The IMF programs thus produced neither a pure, neoliberal unregulated market capitalism nor a linear and simple progress of deregulation in the first phase of liberalization (see Pamuk 2012). Public sector employment and wages often increased, and state banks continued to be used as political patronage vehicles. The privatization of state companies initially progressed slowly, and agriculture subsidies, regulations, and public investments continued up until the economic crisis of 2001. However, the private sector expanded in ways that began to transform politics and the state. The ideological affirmation of the virtues of an enlarged private sector implied a critique of the state in favor of civil society. Özal’s style of government had involved more than just local-scale forms of corruption in that its business networks had reached into the core of state power (Karadag 2010). State power now came to be constituted through its links to forces outside the state, and its core dynamics became more personalized. Since the 1990s, military coups have been declining globally, and power has shifted to more democratic institutions, which are being relied on to implement the neo-liberal reforms demanded by foreign governments and international financial institutions. The structural dynamics of neo-liberal socio-economic programs and the movement of the military out of political institutions are reconfiguring the nature of the state, and this trend is praised as producing more stable administrations than those of military regimes. But this remains to be seen, for the burden of these neo-liberal reforms is being imposed

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on democratic political parties. The new socio-economic programs have not demolished the power of the state but have instead reconfigured it, even allowing the military to strengthen its position through capitalist enterprises. While military power exists in the political field at an overt level, it is not as readily recognized in the economy, where it has been displaced and reconsolidated. The military’s influence on the government has apparently moved from direct rule to more indirect forms of rule that rely on patronage, influence, family connections, and corruption.

‘Islamic’ Economic Policies: Reconstituting the Social The real breakthrough of neo-liberal economic reforms in Turkey came with the reform program following the 2001 economic crisis. The rapid implementation of these reforms was conditioned by the urgency of the economic crisis, the AKP government’s relative independence from the traditional Turkish capitalists, and the party’s own ideological policy orientation. Prominent party members were explicitly committed to good governance and market-oriented policies. During this period, large-scale privatization occurred, often consolidating and expanding pre-existing patronage and oligarchic networks. The finance sector became privatized according to market principles, moving it beyond and against the previous patronage networks that had used them. Despite its antagonism with the AKP, the older power group of oligarchic capitalists remained strong in Turkey and found a new balance with the government. The AKP government has privileged a more recent network of rural Anatolian businessmen and large corporations that aim to challenge the entrenched oligarchs. This new group of capitalists also includes big

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media owners who repay the government for its licensing and other regulative support by supplying helpful pro-government media coverage. Turkey has not become a ‘purely’ neo-liberal deregulated space of economic rationalism following the supposed ‘roll back’ of the state. Rather, the oligarchic structures have continued to operate, with the state elite now relying as well on support from new economic power groups to carry out their policies. Alongside privatization, a more ‘flexible’ labor market has been created. Despite the macro-economic success of Turkey, with its high growth rate since 2002, the real wages of most industrial workers have never recovered to the pre-2001 level (Ikinci 2009). Both industrial productivity and profits have increased, but the working population has borne the burden of the 2001 and 2008 economic crises due to radical cuts in real wages. In addition to cutting public sector jobs and jobs with social security, Erdog˘an’s government has kept in force labor laws that make it difficult to register unions and hinder workers’ collective bargaining rights and striking rights.1 There have been police attacks on strikers and legal prosecution of striking workers. This appears to reproduce within the neo-liberal space of freedom an element of power central to the old Kemalist state. All of this has increased class inequality and created a large ‘informal sector’ of poverty. The Arab Spring is intimately related to such transformations of the state and unequal distribution of economic wealth. Privatization in the health sector has been accompanied by policies to secure only a minimum of health service for the poorest. Under the auspices of institutions such as the IMF, neo-liberal strategies have not totally swept away welfare policies but rather have produced an individualizing and moralizing turn. The AKP has presented its proposed social reforms as a just universalization of social security beyond the privileged group of public employees,

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and this has been a central populist device in translating neo-liberal economic policy into moral and social terms. The government pursues a conservative-liberal tendency to privatize, moralize, and remove welfare from the state bureaucracy.2 A universalist model has also been discussed (Bug˘ra and Keyder 2006), but this model makes support conditional on efforts of the beneficiary, who is expected to seek employment, volunteer in the public sector, have regular health check-ups, and get an education (Alnıaçık and Üstübici 2012: 177). Such measures push poor people into the ‘flexible’ labor market, thereby increasing the growing class of working poor and lowering the conditions that they must accept (ibid.). This approach can be seen as a “micropolitics of insecurity” (Hilgers 2010: 358)—one that is common to neo-liberal formations. In the new social policy regime, poverty is exceptionalized and made an object for risk management, ‘empowerment’, micro-credit, and entrepreneurial incentives, and dealing with it is increasingly being left to NGOs, a great number of which are Islamic charities. Within this framework, the individual is made to feel morally responsible for his or her problems, while persons with special needs are also channeled to their families for support since their problems are seen as symptoms of moral defects (Yazıcı 2012). These practices can be seen as assigning social responsibility to outside or non-state private institutions and individuals. This attempt to problematize the social space of the state and simultaneously to empower existing customary institutions, such as family and kin, exposes moral conservatism as the other side of neo-liberalism: the reconstitution of existing dynamics and the morality of kinship is made to serve neo-liberal governance technologies. What emerges is a hybrid system where the individual’s productivity, poverty, education, housing, health, and sustenance are seen as moral issues that community and kin are rightly responsible

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for. These practices thus appear as instances of what Rose (1996) calls ‘governing through community’. The erosion of both formal sector rights and informal social support systems (Bug˘ra and Keyder 2006) can be seen as indirectly caused by economic liberalization and by the problematization of state intervention in welfare. This embedment of the political within the economic is, however, moderated and remediated by the re-embedding of both politics and economics within conservative Islamic interpretations of modernity. This mixture of conservative moralism and governmental practices, in which the socio-political space is restructured within a field of individual opportunities and options, works as an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson 1994).3 Paradoxically, the state engages in a critique of itself by promoting the growth of civil society as the basis of democracy, freedom, and prosperity. Turkey’s political and economic space has been de- and reterritorialized within a global field of power assemblages, with the overall effect of reconfiguring the idea of the social within the economic, but also within the religious. This is what makes neo-liberalism different in Turkey and, to some extent, in Egypt. There is a reconfiguring of religion such that it becomes redeployed into a vehicle sponsoring the growth of new forms of capitalism, a new kind of state structure, rising inequalities, and a renewed emphasis on individualism and family-kinship responsibilities. With the AKP in power, the dominant strain of the Turkish Islamic movement has turned ideologically toward market capitalism. It has painted economic neo-liberalism with a conservative, religious gloss. Under IMF tutelage, the AKP has reduced the public sector and public spending while emphasizing moral values of social responsibility and justice. The AKP has translated Islamic values into neo-liberal policies that imply the use of an array of governmental practices related to religion—such as the

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disciplining and pastoral control of the self—that are considered a way to contain and control political unrest. There is an ongoing reconfiguration of Turkey’s political space that involves transforming and redeploying the terrain of governance and of the citizen, with religious fundamentalism being used and appealed to as a means to discipline citizens and contain the new forms of social suffering that are emerging (Rose 1996).

The Corporate Moralist State The US and the West have touted Turkey not only as a model of Islam and democracy, but even more as a model which proves that neo-liberal policies promote forms of democracy, bringing social and political benefits to everyone. In the midst of revolts against deteriorating living conditions across the Arab world, Turkey is presented as a model of a successful Muslim neo-liberal state that has friendly relations with the West. It is possible to see Turkey as manifesting the merits of capitalism that have generated Arab Springs everywhere. However, the recent demonstrations and ongoing protests in Turkey, which began in May 2013 in Gezi Park, also highlight the precarious hold on power of this new model of governance as well as its limitations.4 In reality, Turkey articulates a blueprint for reterritorializing local forms of capitalism, state structures, and religious orders within global power configurations that celebrate these as no longer secured by, or dependent upon, an authoritarian military regime. This model relies instead on morally conservative religious orders, the intimidation of workers, legislative restrictions on unions, and personal patronage connections. The reconfiguration of Turkish political space within a global dynamics of economic forces and political regulations is

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stabilizing up to a certain point because it taps into the power of religious disciplining forces and marries these to the individualizing and atomizing powers of the state. Yet these religious fundamentalist forces do not embrace all of Turkish society and indeed can antagonize many secularist, Christian, and Muslim minority sects. The AKP is firmly entrenched in secularist politics through its separation of religious principles from politics and its promotion of Islam as a private lifestyle. This privatization of religion is an aspect of Western modernity that the government seeks to emulate, although it is subject to the same contradictions that emerge in the US when trying to separate God and religion completely in the public sphere. Turkish Islamic political movements have gone through a change. In the early years, social demands were linked to working-class concerns. In the present day, the AKP has managed to make a neo-liberal economy resonate with traditional communitarian ideology and to make a conservative Islamic lifestyle (wearing headscarves, avoiding alcohol) a rallying point against secularist elites. Islam is no longer proposed as a political, legal, or economic organizational principle in the public sphere, but as a moral and cultural lifestyle in the private sphere that guarantees social order through its disciplining and ethical guidance over individuals. Turkey has been presented as a desirable model by large populations in many Arab countries due to its democratic government, its perceived stable and successful economy, and its moral leadership as the defender of the Muslim world against Israel and the US. As argued above, the image of Turkey as a guardian of the Muslim community is the moralist icing on the liberal-conservative cake, camouflaging the country’s close alliance with the US and its cooperation with Israel. Also hidden under this icing is the AKP government’s increasingly authoritarian stance toward

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unions and social protesters of various camps. Large-scale privatization has often benefited oligarchic circles, and a flexible labor market has been allowed to emerge as a result of labor laws that restrict unions. Rising unemployment, lower income, and worsened working conditions have been the outcome for many, and they are now testing the limits of this experiment in governance. The corporate moralist state’s configuration of authoritarian liberalism and morality provoked fierce protests by an amorphous coalition of socialists, secularist liberals, and nationalists in 2013. And it is likely that more protests will follow.

Notes 1. See “Global Unions Urge Turkish President to Veto New Trade Union Law,” Public Services International, 25 October 2012, http://www.world-psi.org/en/global-unions-urge-turkish -president-veto-new-trade-union-law. 2. See Bugra and Candas (2011: 517) for an analysis of how the current Turkish solidarity regime blurs “the boundaries between the state, the private sector and civil society” in its mixing of universalism, corporatism, and privatization. Micro-credit and charity are increasingly promoted as solutions to poverty. 3. See also Rose (1996) on anti-political motifs. 4. The wave of protests against the Erdog˘an government that started with the Gezi Park demonstrations has united highly diverse social forces in a critique of the current blend of neoliberal restructuring, privatization, corruption, and Erdog˘an’s increasingly authoritarian mode of governance. This mode is based on indirect control over the media through links to media owners, limitations on unions and demonstrations, a rhetoric of anti-military and anti-elitist justice, and a legal framework that enables the criminalization of journalists. This was the dynamic before his latest attempt to gain political control of the judiciary.

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Case Studies, ed. Paul Mosley, Jane Harrigan, and John Toye. London: Routledge. Ong, Aihwa. 2000. “Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia.” Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 4: 55–75. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pamuk, S¸evket. 2012. “Editor’s Introduction: Turkey’s Experience with Neoliberal Policies and Globalization since 1980. New Perspectives on Turkey 47 (Autumn): 5–10. Rose, Nikolas. 1996. “The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government.” Economy and Society 25, no. 3: 327–356. Roy, Olivier. 2008. The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press, in association with the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, Paris. Thomas, Landon, Jr. 2011. “In Turkey’s Example, Some See Map for Egypt.” New York Times, 5 February. http://www.nytimes.com/ 2011/02/06/world/middleeast/06turkey.html?_r=0. Tug˘al, Cihan. 2012. “Democratic Janissaries? Turkey’s Role in the Arab Spring.” New Left Review 76 (July–August). http://newleftreview. org/II/76/cihan-tugal-democratic-janissaries. Vreeland, James R. 2003. The IMF and Economic Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yazıcı, Berna. 2012. �“The Return to the Family: Welfare, State, and Politics of the Family in Turkey.” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 1: 103–140.

Contributors

Z Paola Abenante is a postdoctoral student at the University of Milano-Bicocca and a Visiting Professor in Anthropology of the Middle East at Johns Hopkins University (2013–2014). She graduated from La Sapienza University in Rome and received her master’s degree in Anthropology and Ethnography at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She received her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2010 with a thesis on Sufism and religious subjectivity in contemporary Egypt Thomas Fibiger is a postdoctoral student at Aarhus University and since 2013 has been part of a Nordic research group studying Shi‘a Islam. He received a PhD in Anthropology from Aarhus University in 2010. His thesis concerns historicity and political imagination among various social, religious, and ethnic groups in Bahrain and how they engage different pasts to address and develop issues and structures in the present. He is the co-editor (along with Mads Daugbjerg) of a special issue of the journal History and Anthropology, titled “Globalized Heritage” (2011). He has carried out fieldwork in Bahrain for several periods in 2003–2010. Kjetil Fosshagen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His PhD thesis was on the historical trajectories of the two communities in Cyprus from the Ottoman period. He is currently doing research on Islamic animal sacrifice in Turkey and how it is

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the object of secularist-religious conflict. Recent publications include “The Perfect Sovereign: The Sacralized Power of the Ottoman Sultan” (2008) and “The Apotheosis of the Individual: Unni Wikan’s Anthropology” (2012). Michael Humphrey holds the Chair in Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. He has previously held academic appointments at the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, and the University of Western Sydney in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and politics. He has published widely on the themes of Islam in the West; the Lebanese diaspora; social relations of globalization; war, political violence, and terrorism; human rights, reconciliation, and transitional justice. His main publications are Islam, Multiculturalism and Transnationalism: From the Lebanese Diaspora (1998) and The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma, (2002). He is currently working with Estela Valverde on a book entitled Amnesty and Transitional Justice: The Judicialisation of Politics (forthcoming). Sobhi Samour is completing his PhD in the Department of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His thesis is on settler-colonial responses to the forces and relations of production in indigenous societies, with particular reference to the Palestinian economy. He has worked with the United Nations Development Programme in TimorLeste, the Palestinian Economic Policy Research Institute, and the Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Kathryn Spellman-Poots is an Associate Professor at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. Her areas of interest include Muslims in Europe, the Iranian diaspora, transnational migration networks, and gender and religious practices in the Middle East and North Africa. Her publications include the monograph Religion and Nation:

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Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain (2005) and the co-edited volume Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices (2012). Martin Webb is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests cross anthropology and development studies, with a particular focus on citizenship, transparency, accountability, and urban anti-corruption activism. His doctoral research in Delhi focused on the role of class, social connection, and the politics of urban space. Recent publications include “Activating Citizens, Remaking Brokerage: Transparency Activism, Ethical Scenes, and the Urban Poor in Delhi” (2012) and “Disciplining the Everyday State and Society? Anti-corruption and Right to Information Activism in Delhi” (2013). Pnina Werbner is a Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University. She is the author of “The Manchester Migration Trilogy”—The Migration Process ([1990] 2002), Imagined Diasporas (2002), and Pilgrims of Love (2003)—and the editor of several theoretical collections on hybridity, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, migration, and citizenship, including Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism (2008). Her forthcoming monograph is The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers Union of Botswana (in press).