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Of course, African protest movements do not face an easy route. Confronted with the deregulatory pressures of global development frameworks these movements must contend with mushrooming food and utility prices, and the violence meted out by states when faced with meaningful opposition to neo-liberal economic programmes. Indeed, the negativity questioned by the audience member in London referred to the state-sponsored violence visited upon African protestors which the different protestors repeatedly referred to.

social change takes time, and requires a broader social base than just the urban middle class elite which characterised the Tahrir Square phenomenon.

Calls for greater democracy in Africa are not framed purely within the actions of specific corrupt ruling elites. Rather it is the relationships between these ruling elites and the agents of global free-market capitalism which are the source of much public anger. It is these relationships which have amongst other things shrunk public services and robbed the continent of the bulk of the profits from its most valuable natural resources. And these relationships have been enabled by international donor policies which have shrunk the state in Africa in the belief that it is the state which has been the source of African’s problems. 

And so, if we search for images of recent African protests what we will find is not an overwhelming number of crowds with placards calling for greater openness in government, but a set of explicitly socio-economic demands relating to price rises and unemployment, or the withdrawal of affordable public services and utilities, all brought on by the skewed position of Africa in the global economy, and the enforced privatisation of land, energy and other resources which have largely fallen into the hands of foreign profit-extractive companies and their collaborators in the ruling elites of African countries. 

African elites are not uniquely corrupt, nor do they exist in a vacuum of African corruption, but neither is Africa a pure victim of contemporary economic imperialism.  African elites are as complicit in processes of resource and profit extraction as the multinational corporations such as Shell Oil who so often come in for the vitriol of social justice and anti-corporate activists.

It is not enough for international donors to call for ‘free and fair’ elections, only for them to enforce, by dint of the implicit threat of aid withdrawal, a complicity amongst all the candidates with neoliberal economic orthodoxy. This is what we find repeatedly in African elections, and in this respect at least it would be fair to say that African elections differ very little from elections in many other parts of the world, including the UK. 

African activists have much to teach the rest of the world in resisting austerity, and the many obstacles that lie in the path of such resistance, and it is about time more of us started to listen.

Revolution became unimaginable without the imagery of a model demonstrator who protected you from the potential of being faced with the unknown: a collectivist uprising against a global system of domination within which there is no place for an onlooker.

There was no ideology but the ideology of desperation, the unbearable weight of hypocrisy and the limits of a people living in denial of it. The rising militancy amongst organized workers, and the growing opposition through small middle class movements like Kefaya — “Enough”– and the 6th of April movement, as well as through internet-based groups like Kolina Khaled Said (“We are all Khaled Said”) came about in direct reaction to the political ruling class’ ongoing repression of an entire population.

Similar to the uprising in Argentina in 2001, street protests in Egypt were marked by widespread participation across class, generational and gender lines. Like in 1968, students and workers both participated but in Egypt never as workers and students, but rather, and simply, as part of a collective and popular movement.

A significant moment that made the January 25 revolution thinkable was the rising wave of worker protests that started in 2004. The 27,000 textile workers that went on strike in the industrial city of Mahalla al-Kobra in Egypt’s Nile Delta in December 2006 enabled countless Egyptians that caught a glimpse of that mighty act, or of the multitude of protests that followed, to begin to imagine revolution.

The insults of a police officer towards an elderly woman on the street sparked an uprising. April 6 was significant in that the protest moved beyond the geographical lines of one industrial site and was carried out by an entire community. In 2006 workers had broken the social rules of conduct through their public protest.

1968 would have been impossible without the waves of worker strikes and factory occupations in parallel with student protests. In the case of the January 25 revolution, while participants spanned all social classes, bringing together the middle class, the unemployed, workers and farmers, it was precarious workers and not Egypt’s traditional working class that acted as the radicalizing factor of the revolution. This may sound like a trivial differentiation but it is at the crux of the distinction between 2011 and 1968.

Workers reacted directly — even if rarely specifically articulated in these terms — to the implementation of the Western economic paradigm of neoliberalism. This meant the government eased the entry of foreign capitalists into Egyptian industry, they privatized factories and public sector enterprises, reduced subsidies while strongly encouraging production for export markets.

Precarious workers often maintain two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. Compared to them, Egypt’s traditional working class lives in more secure conditions. Though for usually pitiful pay, outrageous hours in the private sector, poor working conditions and minimal benefits, the traditional working class has fixed contracts and steady incomes which gives them a luxury standing within a working class milieu with few guarantees. Consequently, the working class begin to mimic the middle class’ cautious life style unwilling to risk losing their jobs.

‘They wanted to stop us from protesting, we protested. We have a non-violent philosophy, which we maintained in the face of extreme violence. An incredible force of young Cameroonians. We started out almost 300 and ended up less than 50 but (being a) nugget has banished fear, for ourselves and for many other Cameroonians. The population did not join us in droves, but: not one person out of hundreds complained about the blocking on the road; If we ever doubted it, we now have extreme clarity on the absolute need for change and the absolute need for unwavering determination in bringing it about in our country.’ Six members of Cameroon O’Bosso have been arrested and remain in detention.

I am sure global corporate media are aware of what is happening and it’s clear that choices are made on which conflicts and revolutions are covered.

The mistake the media and activists in the West make is to believe that the voice of revolution has to be highly vocal and visible to their world. On the contrary, there are thousands of activists and social justice movements from across Africa and the diaspora who are totally committed to achieving political and social change in their respective countries. It just takes a little effort and time to know what is happening.

As informed citizens and if we are to see ourselves as part of the revolutionary process, then we need to try and grasp an understanding of the layers of narrative and actions which are taking place, not just across Africa but on a global level.

Surrounded by the pressure of Islamists and civil activists, Tunisia’s deputies have managed to achieve something unique in the Arab world: making the parliament the centrepiece of political discourse and power. 

Tunisia is back on track. The last days saw the enactment of a new constitution, the successful instalment of a caretaker government, hence ending the political crisis that lamed the country in the second half of 2013. Many observers like Michael Meyer-Resende and Geoffrey Weichselbaum have analysed the constitution's content and next necessary steps.

The failure of Egypt – as perverse as it might sound – was another factor that strongly contributed to the Tunisian success. The events around Mohamed Morsi in June/July 2013 were a strong warning sign for Tunisia’s Islamists not to overplay their attempted influence on society. Clearly the Tunisian army does not hold similar political ambitions as the Egyptian military, but the scenario as in Egypt was also not fully plucked out of the air.

The successful work of the constitutional assembly in Tunisia is pretty respectable, especially in view of the fact that the country concedes that it has almost no parliamentary tradition.

Hamdeen Sabahy is the most famous Nasserist politician in Egypt today. Joining forces with Sisi, Sabahy has hailed the military position in the succession to Brotherhood rule in Egypt, the dispersal of the sit-ins, and the transitional programme. Given his broad popularity within the moderate left, plenty of roadmap confirmations and condemnations of the Muslim Brotherhood duly followed. Hamdeen’s position as centre left – somewhere between worker activists (Kamal Abu Eitta) and social democrats (Mohamed Abul-Ghar) is questionable. Yet proof for such claim is that they were all gathered around him in past elections in which he was the third runner up with 5 million votes. Another response might be, “If not Hamdeen, who?” 

Similarly, showing up in a group of young people meeting with El Sisi before the coup, then meeting with international actors before the dispersal of the MB protesters, not only gives a sense of legitimacy to those actions, but also make the floor seem open to other youth movements who might wish to be embraced by the new regime (an offer the MB failed to make).

Recommended by Abdelfatah al-Sisi personally, Ganzoury was appointed once again as a Prime Minister by the SCAF during the interim government that followed the revolution. Protesters rejected Ganzoury's appointment, arguing that he was far too old.

The initial demand was for the end of the Mubarak dictatorship and the creation of a democratic system that respected democratic rights -- the essential component of an authentic national democratic revolutionary process. However, the maturation of this process was arrested due to three factors: (i) the seizure of power by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) on 11 February, (ii) the channeling of mass dissent primarily into the electoral process, and (iii) the failure of the oppositional forces to organize sustainable mass structures to safeguard and consolidate the developing revolutionary situation.

This is important because the liberal appropriation of the term ‘revolution’ to describe everything from the events in Libya and Syria to the Green movement in Iran not only distorts social reality but also advances a dangerous narrative. That narrative suggests that revolutionary change takes place as a result of spectacle. It devalues organizing and building structures from the bottom up as unnecessary because it is the theater that is important; the episodic show; the display that refutes Gil Scott Heron’s admonition that ‘the revolution will not be televised!’

In fact, under President Morsi, the military never really went away. It maintained an independent space in the Egyptian state and economy.

For US policy-makers, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Morsi government were never seen as an alternative to Hosni Mubarak. Despite the repression meted out to members of the Muslim Brotherhood by the Mubarak regime, it was well understood that the Brotherhood was part of the Egyptian economic elite and open to doing business with the West. Therefore, Morsi was seen as an acceptable and safe civilian face to replace Mubarak while the US continued its influence behind the scenes through the military.

The class-based, social and economic interests of the military mean that it will oppose any fundamental transformation of the Egyptian economy and society, the ostensible aim of the ‘revolution.’ Significantly, this means that the power of the military is going to have to be broken if there is to be any prospect of revolutionary change in Egypt.

The demand for the end of the dictatorship was an awesome demonstration of people-power that created the potential for revolutionary change. The problem was that the dictatorship had severely undermined the ability of alternative popular forces to develop and acquire the political experience and institutional foundations that would have positioned them to better push for progressive change and curtail the power of the military. Unfortunately for Egypt, the force that had the longest experience in political opposition and organizational development was the Muslim Brotherhood.

when the Egyptian military -- a military that has not demonstrated any propensity for supporting democratic reforms -- intimated that it would step in, the mass position should have been ‘no to military intervention, change only by democratic means’ -- a position that a more mature and authentically independent movement might have assumed if it was not being manipulated by powerful elite forces internally and externally. It was wishful thinking that bordered on the psychotic for liberal and radical forces in the country and their allies outside to believe that a democratic process could be developed that reflected the interests of the broad sectors of Egyptian society while disenfranchising the Muslim Brotherhood, a social force that many conservatively suggest still commands the support of at least a third of the Egyptian population, and is the largest political organization in the country.

The powerful national elites that bankrolled the anti-Morsi campaign and their external allies, including Saudi Arabia and the US, have successfully set in motion a counter-revolutionary process that will fragment the opposition and marginalize any radical elements.

We will not protest at the whim and convenience of a counterrevolutionary regime and its armed enforcers. After the generals’ latest attempt to co-opt the revolution by kidnapping the June 30 protests for their own desire for power, the January 25 Revolution has returned to the streets. We will oppose the system everywhere we can. Stand by our side. This system must fall.

We will not protest at the whim and convenience of a counterrevolutionary regime and its armed enforcers. After the generals’ latest attempt to co-opt the revolution by kidnapping the June 30 protests for their own desire for power, the January 25 Revolution has returned to the streets. We will oppose the system everywhere we can. Stand by our side. This system must fall.

these responses are the latest manifestation of a silent yet powerful recalibration of the terms democracy and revolution within our collective imaginations, a recalibration that has been ongoing since 1989. The revolutions of 1989 and their afterlives inaugurated a historical taming of the term, a taming that has carried over into the 21st century. This historical taming consists of two interrelated “police operations” conducted by Western liberal democracies: the first involving a particular way of talking about non-democratic revolutions, the second consisting of a conservative periodization of their own foundational pasts.

From a 21st century perspective, these revolutions are increasingly being judged not by what they achieved (the overthrow of the previous socio-political order) but by the new regime’s convergence or divergence from a free-market liberal democratic state.

The mass political uprisings that occurred after the establishment of democracy have, by this same narrative, been interpreted in a markedly different light. In the new American Republic, the crushing of the Whiskey and Shay’s Rebellions have been seen as the (necessary) assertion of federal power and sovereignty, while in France the continued intrusions of the will of the French people into the National Assembly after 1789 are commonly cited as causes of the descent of the French Revolution into demagoguery and terror.

To get an idea of what differentiates the 2011 uprisings from previous forms of popular political struggle, let’s start with a short vignette from a protest action that typified the expression of extra-parliamentary discontent with governments before the 2011 uprisings.

Althusser’s image of the hailing of the police officer speaks of a state apparatus (and a correlative subjectivity) that is premised on the idea of arrest. The policeman’s shout essentially stops whoever hears it in his/her tracks, freezes the comings and goings of people.

But this anecdote underscores, albeit in hyperbolic fashion, the effective crisis in the theory and practice of social movements that defined the closing decades of the 20th century — a crisis linked to the very category of motion itself. It was the death rattle of a type of politics which — from the calls to abolish world slavery to the struggle for gender equality, from communism to civil rights — has defined contentious political struggle over the past 200 years through the category of movement. Instead of asking what kind of movement the new uprisings of the 21st century represent, the time has come to review the relevance and efficacy of the term itself. To do so we need to reconsider, both epistemologically and in praxis, the kinetics of contentious political struggle.

In its place, as another French political theorist, Jacques Rancière, has pointed out, has come an altogether different policing function, one encapsulated by the police officer urging bystanders to “move along!”, that “there is nothing to see here.” While the former is predicated on disruption, the latter above all ensures the constant circulation of people, goods, and services: “The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation.”

all of these sites and banners of contentious politics are directed not at a static state structure that arrests movement but are themselves in fact about stopping or arresting an unbridled and accelerating capitalist system. In this light, the very names given to struggle — the environmental movement, the anti-globalization movement, the slow food movement — become at best oxymoronic and at worst open to co-optation by the very forces they oppose (green-washing, the fair trade industry, etc.). We need to ask ourselves: why do we — and should we — still use the term movement to characterize contentious politics? What political conceptions and practices does this term privilege? What forms and histories of resistance has it obfuscated?

It became, through the life of the occupation, the stage on which the new Egyptian society was performed and presented. In their generosity, their tolerance, their humor, camaraderie, and song, the Egyptian people asserted their values and boundaries both to themselves and the whole world.

Alain Badiou once wrote, “In the midst of a revolutionary event, the people is made up of those who know how to solve the problems that the event imposes on them.” The people of Tahrir organized and orchestrated their own security, dealt with human and regular waste, and opened and operated a kindergarten so that mothers with small children could come to the square. They converted a Hardees restaurant into a free kitchen, a Kentucky Fried Chicken into a free clinic, organized networks for digital and print information, set up a pharmacy, handled hired agitators, and protected each other’s religious practices.

n the first week of June 2013, the actions taken by a coalition of activists against the destruction of a public park in central Istanbul spread to more than 60 cities and provinces, bringing several million people onto the streets. By June 8, the police had withdrawn from Taksim Square, leaving it at least temporarily in the hands of protesters. The protesters erected networks of makeshift barricades at 50 meter intervals along all major routes leading to the square. Within a week, Taksim and the adjacent Gezi Park became a “liberated zone”, a fragile oasis amidst the ongoing and increasingly violent clashes with police forces throughout much of Turkey.

There is as much attention devoted to how political and social life should be structured in the square — the ban on party and union insignia, the drawing of lots and time limits governing speech in the assembly, the coordination of meetings with public transit to assure greater participation, etc. — as there is to the what: articulating political manifestos and the position of the Assembly to its outside (whether in relation to the protests in the upper square or to Greek society more broadly).

The police conception of revolution and the crisis in the theory and practice of social “movements” form the dual backdrops for the global uprisings of 2011. Beginning in January of that year, a new form of revolt emerged in North Africa and spread, within months, around many parts of the globe. What actually took place at the sites of these revolts, in Zuccotti and Gezi Park, in the squares of Tahrir, Puerta del Sol and Syntagma, offered a seismic challenge to both the police conception of revolution and the theory and practice of political struggle. What happened in these squares was not movement but arrest, not dispersal but permanent occupation.

There is no doubt that the Greeks, Egyptians, Americans, Spaniards, Tunisians, and Turks first occupied the public spaces of their urban centers to voice political opposition. They came, as Stathis Gourgouris has pointed out, to “withdraw their consent” from the forces governing their lives. As the days passed, however, people had to figure out how to live and act together inside a square in order to sustain a revolt outside of it. In these sometimes very quotidian decisions, they came to define themselves by how they occupied and existed together.

The 800+ plus murders committed by the Egyptian security forces unfortunately paled in comparison to the atrocities later carried out in Libya and Syria, respectively, by Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad. Overt police brutality, by contrast, is usually the last resort of well-functioning liberal democratic regimes. It appears when the movies, the football rivalries, and the soul-deadening holiday music no longer suffice. Its entrance into the mainstream spotlight, in the United States, in Turkey, Greece, and Spain, is an indication that the urban occupations pose a fundamental challenge to representative democratic states and the clearest signal that its “soft” ideological apparatus is malfunctioning.

Yet, within two months of the birth of OWS and over 1.000 sister occupations throughout the US, the federal government coordinated a collective assault on these democratic spaces. The FBI and the Bureau of Homeland Security, in conjunction with the mayors and police departments of over 18 cities, forcibly evicted every major occupation throughout the US.

That the monitoring and entrapment of non-violent dissidents has been funded and conducted under the banner of counter-terrorism task forces is an even greater cause for alarm. These signs of an emergent police state within liberal democratic regimes (or more aptly: its passage from shadowed ghettos to front-page visibility) are the strongest testament to the novelty and latent strength of the 2011 uprisings.

Yet there is also no denying that almost all of these uprisings have ended in failure. The urban occupations have been dismantled and the aims of the occupiers have either been largely ignored (representative democracies), brutally suppressed (Libya, Syria), or their victories shown to be premature (Egypt).

Contacts between the global occupations, formed during the height of the uprisings, have persisted after their evictions. The common form of these occupations has allowed participants not only the opportunity to escape their individual isolation by talking and acting collectively, but more importantly, to draw connections across national grammars of discontent.

When the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood unexpectedly did well in the 2006 Egyptian parliamentary elections, he implied, Washington pressure on Mubarak to democratize vanished. Ibrahim warned that the future of the Arab world was democratic, and that the opinion polling done by his Ibn Khaldoun Institute demonstrated that the democracy would have a strong Islamic coloration.