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Ed Webb

Death metal rockers raise eyebrows in sedate Bahrain - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...bahrain.metal.music

death metal Bahrain middleeast music censorship socialnetworking

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Mar 10 - Cached
  • "People don't accept the fact of metal being music and having fun. It's always in conflict with religion,"
  • In Bahrain, metal bands and their followers are often branded as Satan worshippers. Gigs are regularly shut down, and the movement largely stays underground to avoid public attention. Many groups rely on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to stay connected.
  • the rock and metal movement, which is mostly an expression of freedom
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  • A melting pot of different cultures, Bahrain boasts a diverse cultural scene. But partly because of small size of the country, it is often overlooked, said Al Shafei. "Noone looks at Bahrain as a place where talented musicians are emerging," she said. In fact, overall there's been little attention placed on the underground musical scene in the Middle East, which is one of the reasons why she's launching Web site Mideast Tunes.
Ed Webb

Tunisia and the authoritarian upgrading and democratization paradigms - 1 views

Tunisia authoritarianism democratization economy religion Islamism ennahda politics

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • thisarticle highlights three distinct mythologies (economic miracle, democraticgradualism and secularism) about Tunisia that prevented a clearer understandingof the political and socio-economic situation
  • studies of Arab politics haveswung between the democratization paradigm and the authoritarian resilience one.Both certainly captured important aspects of the political developments taking placein the Arab world over the last two decades and to an extent still do, but, at the sametime, missed equally significant changes that, if identified earlier, might havecontributed to lessen the surprise of the Arab Spring. Specifically, the contentionhere is that both paradigms tended to focus too strongly on what was visible andreadily identifiable at the level of the state and state – society relations, but did notaccount for important unintended consequences that were occurring and diffusing inwider society as well as for less visible socio-political phenomena because they werepartially trapped in the mythology served up by the Ben Ali regime. What this meansis that both paradigms operated from similar mythologies about Tunisia, while, atthe same time, drawing very different conclusions about them
  • unintended consequences have animpact on the regime because the reforms it initiates have surprising effects that itneeds to deal with, but, interestingly, they also have an impact on scholars whosetheoretical tools might need sharpening in light of the occurrence of events thatcontradict what seemed to be valid theoretical assumptions
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  • When one looks in detail at the data provided by the World Bank theimpression is certainly positive and some notable achievements have been realizedby the Tunisian regime in the social sphere as well. Poverty rates declined from 7.7per cent in 1984, three years before Ben Ali came to power, to 3.8 per cent in 2005.Literacy rates went up from a low 48 per cent in 1984 to 78 per cent in 2008 andwomen were included in this literacy drive
  • the Tunisian regime wasable to increase its spending on education and health, apparently confirming thevalidity of the model of ‘social liberalism’ given that in 2011 its Index of HumanDevelopment was still higher than its North African neighbours
  • While the fundamentals of the economymight indeed have been good enough for global markets and international investorsand trading partners, the economic miracle of Tunisia had a very dark side whereunder-employment, unemployment, difficult access to the labour market, incomeinequalities and wide regional gaps were the main features
  • if the figures published by the interimgovernment after the revolution are accurate, ‘the unemployment rate among youngpeople from 18 to 19 almost rose to 30 per cent in 2009, and soared to 45 per cent inthe case of higher education graduates’.
  • thecomplexity of the Ben Ali period and how to ‘read’ it increases if one looks at thefact that between 1995 and 1998 the Caisse 26 – 26 (a national solidarity fund)implemented a number of development projects in the area of Sidi Bouzid and inpoorer regions such as the one around Gafsa, but after 2000 no further projects werelaunched in that region partly because from that moment the funds in the Caissewere used by Ben Ali’s inner circle to sustain their economic activities
  • a predatory economicsystem with members of the president’s family and close collaborators takingadvantage of these networks of patronage to acquire an increasingly larger slice ofthe economy
  • there was very littlethat was predictable about the uprising and the fall of the regime, and even withthe benefit of hindsight it remains quite difficult to find a causal mechanism toaccount for the success of the Tunisian uprising because events could have turnedout very differently
  • the same corrupt practicesalienated many working-class youth who, rather than becoming fully de-politicized,chose ‘below-the-radar’ social activism based around loosely structured socialnetworks and developed a particular dislike for state authorities, a factor that wouldbe useful when fighting running battles with the police during the uprising
  • the regime monitored Publinets veryclosely and periodically blocked access to a number of websites, but the point here isthat the regime also inadvertently improved not only the skills necessary foreconomic growth, but also those necessary for anti-regime online mobilization
  • For the supporters of the democratization paradigm, there was no doubt that theBen Ali regime seemed to keep the promises of democratic gradualism. Initially, itsslow pace was explained as necessary in order to avoid the problems that Algeria hadencountered in the same period when the country liberalized the political systemquite abruptly and, in hindsight, with catastrophic consequences
  • Ultimately the authoritarian resilience paradigm has been more fruitful inexplaining that the regime survived thanks to a mix of co-optation and repressionwhere rhetorical commitment to democracy and human rights was far from genuine,but does not capture the whole story because it does not pay sufficient attention tohow society reacted to sustained repression of dissent
  • there was an almost hidden, but very significant increase inIslamization based on the adoption of personal pious behaviour that was overtlya-political, but had quite clear anti-regime overtones
  • the increasing disconnect between thevalues of the ruling elites together with an urban-based, French-speaking milieu anda large part of the population which both lived by and wished society to be moreattuned to Arab-Muslim values
  • such behaviour was also a personalact of defiance against an authoritarian regime that did not perform its duties and wasmired in what many saw as decadence and corruption
  • The events of 2008 in themining district of Gafsa (Allal, 2010) is probably the best known episode ofanti-regime social mobilization in Tunisia during the Ben Ali years, as the wholedistrict took to the streets and faced down the security services in order to protestagainst the hiring policies and working conditions in the local mines. What issignificant about the protest is that it was not simply the workers taking to the streets.The whole population of the area was on board with this protest, which was brutallyput down. There are however other smaller incidents that occurred throughout thecountry (Chomiak & Entelis, 2011) and that indicated that social peace wasa fabrication of the regime
  • Upgradedauthoritarianism (Heydemann, 2007) was the notion that many scholars utilized toargue that authoritarian ruling elites were, paradoxically, strengthening their grip onthe different countries through the adoption of political and economic liberalreforms that were subsequently deprived of any substance and meaning and hijackedfor the elites’ own benefit. One of the masters of such authoritarian upgrading wascertainly Ben Ali, who in the process also managed to project an international imageof a secular and liberal modernizer bent on slowly constructing a democraticpolitical system
  • liberaleconomic reforms of the late 2000s resulted in growth in the economy while at thesame time rewarding social groups and clan members most loyal to the president,but also generated an economically and culturally globally connected middle class,which developed its own mechanisms to voice political dissent, but had benefited inthe 1990s from the liberalization of the economy that Ben Ali had implemented toget the country out of stagnation
  • the promulgation of secularlegislation out of kilter with the values of the majority of the population and theespousal of a rhetoric of modernization that clashed with the everyday reality ofhuman rights abuses, elitist consumerism and corruption, saw the emergence ofpublic expressions of a social pious Islamism that made important inroads inTunisian society while going almost undetected
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