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Ed Webb

Special Report: In Egypt's military, a march for change | Reuters - 1 views

  • As in the country, so in the barracks. Over the past six months, more than a dozen serving or recently retired mid- and lower-ranking officers have said they and their colleagues see Egypt's revolution as their own chance to win better treatment, salaries, and improved conditions and training. They are tired, they said, of a few very top officers becoming rich while the vast majority of officers and ordinary soldiers struggle.
  • "Military ranks struggle like the rest of Egyptians because, like Egyptian society, the wealth of the military is concentrated at the top and does not trickle down. You have to reach a specific rank before wealth is unlocked," one major said.
  • say they will hold off on pushing their demands further until the ruling military council hands over power to an elected civilian government
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  • Numbering at least 468,000 men - officials refuse to give the exact number saying it could hurt national security - Egypt's combined army, air force, air defense command, navy and paramilitaries make up the largest military force in the Arab world. More than half of those in uniform are conscripts.
  • One of the keys to the military's power is its grip on business, which was strengthened after Egypt's 1979 peace deal with Israel. Under that accord, the military had to shrink its forces. But instead of sacking hundreds of thousands of men, commanders opened factories to employ them. Those plants now produce everything from components for ammunition to pots and pans, fire extinguishers, and cutlery. The military also runs banks, tourism operations, farms, water treatment plants, a petrol station chain, construction firms, and import companies.Businesses owned solely by the military are exempt from tax, and often built on the backs of poorly paid conscripts, who make between $17 and $28 a month, although they are fed by the army and receive basic medical help. "A conscript goes into the army less for training, and more for working in one of the military factories or business schemes,"
  • the military establishment is likely to retain significant powers, no matter who wins the two-round presidential election
  • the armed forces have de facto control over all unused land in Egypt, or about 87 percent of the country
  • Many soldiers feel the U.S. money benefits American arms manufacturers and forces Egypt to buy outdated weaponry. Egypt, they say, needs to be able to make its own money to advance.
  • "The armed forces will not allow any interference into its business projects. This is a matter of national security," said Nasr.
  • "Previously the military budget was subject to specific laws and was not in any constitution," said General Mamdouh Shahine, who is responsible for legal affairs on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has run Egypt since Mubarak's ouster. "But now we want to bring it under the new constitution to ensure stability. By adding budgetary clauses to the constitution, I am simply asserting a reality that has existed for a long time. What is the problem with that?"
  • The spark for the soldiers' rebellion in Alexandria was a brutal episode in Cairo. On October 9 last year, a group of Coptic Christians converged on Cairo's television station to protest at the burning of a church. In a neighborhood called Maspero, the protesters clashed with soldiers; about 25 civilians were killed.The army says soldiers were also killed in the violence. The lieutenant colonel with direct knowledge of the rebellion at the Air Defence Institute said one officer and 22 soldiers died. Those who survived were seriously injured and some were disabled, according to a source at the military judiciary. Among other things Air Defence Institute officers demanded was financial compensation for the families of those dead.
  • There are also problems with training, which four senior officers said was evident in the poor handling of tanks and armored personnel carriers on the streets during last year's protests. At Maspero, inexperienced soldiers in charge of armored carriers injured protesters inadvertently, one recently retired general responsible for devising training systems for the military said.
  • "stay away from politics or organized religion, don't outshine your commander, don't think about improving the system."
  • While most soldiers and officers are religious, the military does not allow religious organizations to set up within its ranks.
  • "You must remember that at the end of the day, the army is patriotic," said the colonel. "Many of the rank and file refuse to rebel because they feel the country depends on them and they are the last institution standing. They want change but they would rather wait until a civilian government is formed."
Ed Webb

The Islamic Monthly - Winter/Spring 2012 : International: Ghostwriter for the Arab Leader - 0 views

  • Its nerves showed in July 2010, when King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa split his Ministry of Culture and Information into two unequal parts. The incumbent minister, an Al Khalifa woman, kept responsibility for culture and tourism. The more telling and urgent action concerned the information portfolio. In a public statement, King Hamad declared that Bahrain had become the target of "planned media provocations, particularly from Iran, to which the Bahraini media has not been able to respond as it must." He then decreed the creation of an Information Affairs Authority (IAA) to meet the Kingdom's "immense" political challenges. The man the king picked to lead the new authority is Sheikh Fawaz bin Mohammed Al Khalifa. As IAA chief, Sheikh Fawaz enjoys ministerial rank and is effectively Bahrain's Minister of Information, although only unofficial media use that Orwellian title.
  • Sheikh Fawaz is courteous, unquestionably loyal, and, at base, unimaginative. He is also relentlessly competitive
  • Tone-Lōc's Funky Cold Medina was a favorite
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  • Politics wasn't a favored subject of discussion for the sheikh. The Gulf War's scripted violence had left a strong impression: When prompted, he often reduced political matters to military or special forces' work. He revered the British royal family and the SAS, Britain's commando elite, and was surprised to learn that I had not voted for George H.W. Bush, the liberator of Kuwait. I soon learned that he admired winners in general. An avid sports fan, he supported Manchester United and the Dallas Cowboys, then the reliable champions of British and American football. For the first time in our acquaintance, this love of winners made his unfocused mind appear predictable.
  • Few Bahrainis acknowledged the large U.S. naval base that remains today
  • He seemed to be blandly incurious and without serious prejudices. He certainly did not read or write for pleasure. In fact, my ability to make sense of ordinary maps surprised him, as if a mark of special training
  • While government hours are 7 to 2, a concession to the sweltering climate, I soon learned to arrive by 10, preceding by a half-hour the sheikh and his retinue
  • I visited the new University of Bahrain and naively asked around for the political science department. The country's public university didn't teach the troublesome social sciences
  • The sheikh once saw the four-wheel-drive Range Rover he had provided for my personal use covered in mud, the result of a winter downpour that flooded the old part of Manama, which lacked street drains. He winced as if he had been pinched. He politely asked my plans to have the car washed, and I shilly-shallied an answer. The capacious Rover was soon quietly replaced by a small Mercedes 190 with mechanical problems. The exchange worked to my disadvantage in more ways than one, for the Rover's license plates indicated it belonged to the sheikh's father, Bahrain's security chief. The Rover thus conferred comic book superpowers that induced Pavlovian salutes from traffic cops and building guards – such a machine rightly should not have been dragged through the mud. In contrast, a Pakistani mechanic once patched the undistinguished Mercedes with cardboard wrapped in twine.
  • The monarchy is not wholly bereft of tolerance; it just occurs near the apex, among the family's scattered layer of advisers and aides, many of whom are foreign born. The Al Khalifa are ambivalent about otherwise touchy matters if they judge someone useful to their purposes. Issues such as religion, my shopkeeper-ish Indian ethnicity or my habit of calling the sheikh by name without prefixing his inherited title – unthinkable for a Bahraini commoner – never came up. I wasn't unique: The sheikh's banker, the man who handed me cash each month, belonged to the same Iraqi-Jewish émigré family as Bahrain's current female ambassador to the U.S., also a Jew.
  • Of course, ownership of the many reefs and islands between the two states had implications for oil and gas exploration. Yet the sheikh always spoke to me as if only family honor mattered. This normally unexcitable man clearly disliked Qatar's Al Thani rulers. He viewed the boundary disputes as a contest between entitled Al Khalifa patricians and Al Thani nouveau riche – possessors of the world's largest natural gas field, rulers of the country with the world's highest per capita GDP, and, one might add, imminent founders of the upstart Al-Jazeera TV network. Propelled by rivalry, Sheikh Fawaz simply wanted to beat them this time.
  • I also kept mum about the surprisingly incautious lawyers I had met who spoke bitterly about the regime's poor human rights record and discrimination against Shiites. I found these middle-aged men in their cheap, gray suits in almost every coffeehouse or bar I frequented. None appeared bent on importing Iran's revolution. They seemed defeated and physically worn, even underweight, but determined to share with a foreigner their stories of regime prejudice and abuse
  • Modern Bahrain works on the bases of stark social segregation, selective memory and diversion. I caught glimpses of the thousands of dark-skinned Asian laborers only as they fixed roads in the debilitating heat, or sat in the cheapest curry shops and all-male hookah stands where air conditioning was absent and Indian films played nightly on color TVs. Local lore had it that weather forecasters lied about the temperature to avoid work stoppages. The island's wealthiest foreigners were diverted in ways that assumed – often accurately – an inebriate's view of the good life. Although the teetotaler Sheikh Fawaz showed no interest in nightlife, Manama groaned under the weight of barhoppable hotels and nightclubs. Many clubs featured teams of comely Filipinas belting out pop songs. A large bar in the downtown area catered to U.S. sailors, complete with country-themed karaoke, line dancing and Budweiser beer.
  • Later that night, Sheikh H. and I talked politics again. Tired, he quietly noted that he hadn't been surprised to hear that the crown prince wasn't liked in the cafes. He said this accorded with his own sense of the future ruler's unpopularity. He added that others in the ruling family had serious doubts about the man, too. They worried that the crown prince was infatuated with the tiny military forces he commanded and wasn't savvy enough to handle the complexities of being emir. But, Sheikh H. admitted, nothing could be done about it. Looking back, Crown Prince Hamad may have felt little need for the savvy of an emir. He succeeded his father in 1999, and, in 2002, elevated his own title from "His Highness the Emir" to the historically unprecedented "His Majesty the King of Bahrain." Today, he shakes that vainglorious title over a resentful patrimony less than one-third the size of Rhode Island.
  • discrimination and chronic inequality explain the Kingdom's centrifugal politics better than old doctrinal differences. Nonetheless, the strategy of minority rulers cultivating the support of other minorities is a tested one (witness Syria). The Al Khalifa also have a long history of reliance on authoritative foreigners, stretching over a century from Bahrain's days as a British protectorate past independence in 1971. Indeed, Bahrain is now a U.S. protectorate, as the quietly expanding presence of the 5th Fleet confirms. An American arms dealer dubbed "The Merchant of Death" was a recurring figure throughout my stay in Manama.
  • Sociologists say that pre-modern bureaucracies value personal relations over professional merit. Sheikh Fawaz unwittingly supported this notion when he asked me to attend meetings with foreign investment companies seeking to do business with the national Pension Fund. Initially, I took notes while two chatty Merrill Lynch representatives pitched portfolio options. The reps struggled to discern my relationship with the sheikh they wanted to impress. The scene was repeated with other would-be fund partners, some of whom affected a false camaraderie that left Sheikh Fawaz unmoved. After a while, he asked if I would write a report on the Pension Fund's performance. The idea was laughable – I knew nothing about investment. But I didn't say no. Staring at the fund's data, I parroted the language of "small caps" versus "big caps" and other terms found in the introductory investment texts Sheikh Fawaz supplied, and wrote his report, inserting a couple of charts for gravitas.
  • the sheikh asked if I would consider writing a doctoral thesis for him at Cambridge or another elite English university. I quickly said no; ethical considerations aside, I knew he was unlikely to do it anyway (a correct assumption, it turned out)
  • He has severely curtailed foreign and local media since becoming information minister in 2010. In the months preceding the Arab Spring, the anti-censorship group Reporters Without Borders dropped Bahrain's rank from 119th to 144th in the world. As regime apologist, the sheikh still speaks in the same, mildly narcotized cadence that suggests aristocratic ennui more than stupidity. He effusively praises the largely foreign security forces responsible for the killings, torture and detentions, while claiming that outsiders want to destabilize the country. Even so, the minister now insists, the affairs of the Kingdom are "back to normal."
  • A relieved Sheikh Fawaz – now with 14,000-plus followers on Twitter – ecstatically praised the current crown prince "for his great exertions to return the Grand Prix race to Bahrain." Echoes of the sports-obsessed young heir pinged through my head
  • He was a rigid and competitive yet unsinister man 20 years ago. What would he have become given a different pedigree? Dictatorships, like Sheikh Fawaz today, work to obscure those choices
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    Great insight into Bahrain ruling family
Ed Webb

Good News Before More Battles in Egypt - carnegieendowment.org - Readability - 0 views

  • Morsi’s victory does not mean that democracy has triumphed in Egypt
  • The Muslim Brotherhood has already denounced the constitutional declaration, but the SCAF is unlikely to give in on that point after conceding Morsi’s triumph.
  • the secular parties that claimed that their past performance in the elections was poor because they did not have adequate time to organize do not appear to be making the massive effort to build their parties that they need in order to be successful the next time around
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  • The old regime still controls the institutions
  • two highly political legal suits currently pending in front of the administrative court—one seeking to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and one seeking to ban its Freedom and Justice Party. Both cases will be adjudicated in September
  • Morsi is the first president that came to power on the basis of a popular vote rather than by rising through the ranks of the military. But it is only one step in a process of transformation that will take time, be punctuated by many acrimonious battles, and in the end may not lead to democracy
Ed Webb

Can Essebsi's 'Call for Tunisia' Movement Unite the Opposition? - By Erik Churchill | The Middle East Channel - 0 views

  • The Call for Tunisia features a broad spectrum of former regime officials together with secular liberals. The former regime officials, or RCDists (from the Constitutional Democratic Rally), were excluded from running in the last elections and see in the new initiative a chance to revive their political prospects. (There was no such cleansing of the actual government administrations -- only positions in the Constituent Assembly). These officials and their supporters oftentimes criticize the current government as incompetent and unable to manage the complexity of government. They try to deflect criticisms of the rampant corruption and stasi-like police state of the past, by pointing to the (very real) progress achieved under Bourguiba and Ben Ali. They cite statistics on women's rights, improvements in education, and infrastructure development, and they compare Tunisia with its neighbors in the Maghreb and throughout Africa. Their motives are clear -- keep the good and throw out the bad of the former regime.
  • challenge will be to integrate their liberal values into what is at heart a conservative party
  • While Ennahda supporters talk about the extremism of Bourguiba/Ben Ali regarding Islamic practices (including banning the veil and a very liberal interpretation of Ramadan -- not to mention the systematic torture and imprisonment of Islamists themselves), many Tunisians felt comfortable being Muslim under the former regime. It is fair to say that many (though certainly not all) Tunisians did not feel that their religion was under assault under the previous secular regime
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  • Essebsi's movement has scared both liberal secularists and Ennahda supporters alike.  A return of the crooked, corrupt, and cruel former regime is everything that they fought against -- not just in the past 2 years, but in the last 30 years. While Ennahda will point to the abuses against Islam, and secular liberals will point to the harassment of human rights activists and infringements on freedom of expression, both will point to the ultimate failure of the Bourguiba/Ben Ali experiment to bring real progress to many parts of Tunisia. While visitors to Tunisia's coastal areas can see the development and progress of the last 50 years, it takes only a few minutes to get to villages that remain poor, backwards, and lacking in any opportunities to progress. They will point to the promises of Ben Ali to provide education and work, even while the educational system declined and job opportunities dried up. They will point to the fact that closer relations with the west only brought tighter visa restrictions and low-wage jobs.
  • Some have pointed to Mustapha Nabli, who has links to the former regime, but spent the last 12 years at the World Bank prior to coming back after the revolution to lead the Tunisian Central Bank. He is well respected in international circles and has already engaged in fierce debate with the coalition government over the central bank's independence, and as a result has received open calls for his sacking by President Marzouki himself. Others have cited Taieb Baccouche, a former labor and human rights leader, who most recently served with Essebsi as Minister of Education in the transition government. He has been making the rounds in Tunisian media on behalf of the Call.
  • the CPR and Ennahda have proposed legislation that would limit RCD participation in any future government. While political activists in Tunisia have long regretted the relative immunity granted to the former regime officials, many Tunisians continue to place the blame firmly on Ben Ali and his family. Essebsi has capitalized on this sentiment by stating that these proposals are anti-democratic and would only further polarize a society that needs unity. Nevertheless, with control over the government and the assembly, the coalition could tighten the rules to make it difficult for the Call to field candidates
  • The work for Essebsi's movement will be able to convince Tunisians that they can keep the gains of Tunisia's independence leaders while upholding the values of the revolution. For Tunisia's secular left, the Call represents an opportunity to join a party that may have real traction with ordinary Tunisians, but also signifies a capitulation for what many have worked so hard to change. Like in Egypt, the rise of two conservative parties (the Islamists and the Call) is a disappointment to those who fought for human rights and civil liberties. At the same time, in this conservative society it is hardly surprising that the debate is characterized by what kind of conservatism Tunisians will choose between
gabrielle verdier

Look Who's Coming to Europe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The success of Portugal’s revolution was not inevitable. There was a significant period of political instability, social unrest and economic dislocation, and there were even efforts to hijack the revolution and take the country down an anti-democratic path.
  • Tunisia and Egypt have received the overwhelming majority of the nearly 740,000 people who have left Libya
  • They have done so in a very generous way — opening their borders, homes and hearts. At the Tunisian border, I was moved to see local poor families sharing what little they had with the newcomers.
gabrielle verdier

When Wealth Breeds Rage: Inequalities Set the Stage for a Pan-Africa Arab Spring | The Jakarta Globe - 0 views

  • The idea of revolution has arrived, among the minority of youths with access to social media but also among the masses via the poor man’s Facebook: FM radio. And their geriatric presidents and prime ministers are nervous.
Ed Webb

Youth, Waithood, and Protest Movements in Africa - By Alcinda Honwana - African Arguments - 0 views

  • young Africans struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of finding sustainable livelihoods, and the absence of civil liberties
  • Political instability, bad governance, and failed neo-liberal social and economic policies have exacerbated longstanding societal problems and diminished young people’s ability to support themselves and their families
  • Many are unable to attain the prerequisites of full adulthood and take their place as fully-fledged members of society. The recent wave of youth protests can best be understood in the context of this generation’s struggles for economic, social, and political emancipation
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  • young Africans are living in waithood
  • a growing number of young men and women must improvise livelihoods and conduct their personal relations outside of dominant economic and familial frameworks
  • their sense of being “˜trapped’ in a prolonged state of youth
  • recent protest movements, led mainly by young people, stem directly from the economic and social pressures they suffer, and from their pervasive political marginalisation
  • Young activists appear to be struggling to translate the political grievances of the protest movement into a broader political agenda. Clearly, they seem to be more united in defining what they don’t want and fighting it, and much less so in articulating what they collectively want
  • interviews I conducted with young people in Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia, between 2008 and 2012, which resulted in my two most recent books: The Time of Youth: Work Social Change and Politics in Africa (published in August 2012 by Kumarian Press in the USA), and Youth and Revolution in Tunisia (published in June 2013 by Zed Books in the UK)
  • there is scepticism among youth that growth alone, without equity, will bring the solution to their problems
  • While Singerman’s usage of waithood suggests a sense of passivity, my research indicates that young people are not merely waiting, and hoping that their situation will change of its own accord. On the contrary, they are proactively engaged in serious efforts to create new forms of being and interacting with society. Waithood involves a long process of negotiating personal identity and financial independence; it represents the contradictions of a modernity, in which young people’s expectations are simultaneously raised by the new technologies of information and communication that connect them to global cultures, and constrained by the limited prospects and opportunities in their daily lives
  • Young Africans constitute a disenfranchised majority
  • Liggey, which means work in Wolof, the national language of Senegal, is celebrated as an important marker of adulthood. The ability to work and provide for themselves and others defines a person’s self-worth and position in the family and in the community. Yet, the majority of young people in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa are unable to attain the sense of dignity embedded in the notion of liggey.
  • African societies do not offer reliable pathways to adulthood; traditional ways of making this transition have broken down, and new ways of attaining adult status are yet to be developed
  • a liminal space in which they are neither dependent children nor autonomous adults
  • Waithood also evidences the multifaceted realities of young Africans’ difficult transition to adulthood, which goes beyond securing a job and extends to aspects of their social and political life
  • Ibrahim Abdullah (1998) and Abubakar Momoh (2000) have pointed to the use of the vernacular term youthman, in many West African countries, to describe those who are stuck in this liminal position
  • youth as a socially constructed category defined by societal expectations and responsibilities (Honwana and De Boeck 2005)
  • In Dakar in June 2011, rallying around the movement Y’en a Marre! (Enough is enough!), Senegalese youth came out to the streets, clashed with police, and managed to stop the approval of constitutional amendments that would benefit former president Wade. Galvanized by this victory, and using the slogan “Ma Carte d’Electeur, Mon Arme“ (my voting card, my weapon), the young Senegalese helped to remove Abdoulaye Wade from office in February 2012.
  • Although women are becoming better educated and have always engaged in productive labour alongside household chores, marriage and motherhood are still the most important markers of adulthood. While giving birth may provide girls an entry into adulthood, their ability to attain full adult status often depends on men moving beyond waithood (Calví¨s et al. 2007)
  • Although growing numbers of young people are completing secondary school and even attending university, the mismatch between educational systems and the labour markets leaves many unemployed or underemployed; they are pushed into the oversaturated informal economy or become informal workers in the formal sector (Chen 2006
  • Young Senegalese and Tunisians employ the French term débrouillage, making do
  • in the realm of improvisation, or “making it up as you go along,” and entails a conscious effort to assess challenges and possibilities and plot scenarios conducive to the achievement of specific goals (Vigh 2009)
  • young women and men in waithood develop their own spaces where they subvert authority, bypass the encumbrances created by the state, and fashion new ways of functioning on their own. These youth spaces foster possibilities for creativity; and as Henrietta Moore puts it, for self-stylization, “an obstinate search for a style of existence, [and] a way of being” (Moore 2011: 2). The process of self-styling is made easier by cyber social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
  • these new “˜youthscapes’ (Maira and Soep 2005) resemble Michel Maffesoli’s notion of “urban tribes,” understood as groupings that share common interests but whose association is largely informal and marked by greater “fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal” (1996: 98)
  • Waithood constitutes a twilight zone, or an interstitial space, where the boundaries between legal and illegal, proper and improper, and right and wrong are often blurred. It is precisely at this juncture that young people are forced to make choices. Their decisions help to define their relationships towards work, family, and intimacy, as well as the type of citizens they will become. Rather than being a short interruption in their transition to adulthood, waithood is gradually replacing conventional adulthood itself (Honwana 2012).
  • growth alone, without equity, will not guarantee social inclusion and better lives for the majority of the population. Indeed, young people rebel against the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the rampant corruption that they observe as elites enrich themselves at others’ expense
  • Young Africans today are generally better educated and more closely connected with the rest of the world than their parents. The young people I interviewed did not seem like a “˜lost generation’ nor did they appear apathetic about what is happening in the societies surrounding them. They are acutely conscious of their marginal structural position, and no longer trust the state’s willingness and ability to find solutions to their problems. In their shared marginalisation, young people develop a sense of common identity and a critical consciousness that leads them to challenge the established order (Honwana 2012, 2013).
  • Asef Bayat calls these dispersed actions “˜non-movements,’ which he describes as “quiet and unassuming daily struggles” outside formal institutional channels in which everyday social activities blend with political activism (2010: 5)
  • Young activists find themselves more divided; the broad unity forged during street protests dissipates as they struggle to articulate a new common purpose and to define a new political role for themselves
  • In the aftermath of street protests, young people appear to be retreating back to the periphery of formal politics, into their “˜non-movements.’
  • Today, the divorce of power from politics is deepening because power is being seized by supranational finance and trade corporations and by transnational organised crime syndicates. Devoid of power, politics remains localised in the nation state and responds to the interests of supranational powers rather than to the will of the people. In this sense, “˜sovereignty is outsourced’ and democracy becomes a charade, as politics has no power but instead serves power.
  • Aditya Nigam points to the current crisis of the “˜political’ and suggests that in the wake of the North African revolutions, these societies are “living in an interregnum when the old forms of politics have become moribund and obsolete but new ones have not yet emerged … Something, clearly, is waiting to be articulated in this relentless refusal of the political” by the younger generation (2012: 175).
  • In Tunisia, young activists are enjoying the freedom of independent civic and political engagement following the revolution, as these were banned under the old regime. But at the same time, their disappointment with party politics makes some young people turn to politicized forms of Islam. For example, the famous rapper of the revolution, “˜El General,’ is today an advocate for the instauration of Sharia law, and the lyrics of his latest song, titled “I Wish,” call for Tunisia to become an Islamic state. Indeed, young Islamists who joined radical Salafist groups believe that Sharia will be the solution to their problems because, as some of them put it: “Sharia is not politics, but a whole way of life, with its laws and its science.”
  • In Senegal, the Y’en a Marre activists pride themselves on being non-partisan and vow to work towards making politicians accountable to those who elected them
  • a “˜New Type of Senegalese’ described as: one that is more socially and politically conscious, assumes her/his responsibilities as a citizen, and fights for the well-being of the Senegalese people
  • my young interlocutors seem to believe that it is possible to achieve fundamental change outside of dominant political structures, even if they have not yet fully articulated how to do so
Ed Webb

'Everything is stolen from us': Tunisians fight to preserve cultural heritage | PLACE - 0 views

  • The looting of archaeological sites is a longstanding problem in Tunisia
  • Objects of significant historical and cultural value often end up on the European market and in the homes of Tunisia's rich and powerful
  • instability and chaos of conflict often provides a window for archaeological looting
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  • the authorities are getting more serious about tackling the illicit antiquities trade
  • The western region of Kasserine, where the shrine of Sidi Boughanem is located, is one of the most marginalised parts of the country - with government figures showing about one in four people unemployed, far higher than the 15% unemployment rate for the country as a whole. It is also one of the most archaeologically rich. There are four major sites located in an area of 8,000 square kilometres (3,000 square miles), and the land is peppered with architectural ruins and antique stones.
  • the sheer number of small sites makes it impossible to keep an eye on all of them
  • "There are economic reasons (for looting)," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in Tunis. "The blame should not be put on the people who are trying to get by day-to-day, but the persons who are furnishing these collections."
  • Ayoub Sayhi, a 22-year-old amateur filmmaker from Thala, called on the government to do more to care for the country's ancient objects. To Sayhi, the looting of Kasserine's antiquities was just another symptom of what he saw as the state's neglect of the region. "(My film) is to get the government to do something about this region because it is poor even though it is rich in natural resources," he said. "Everything is stolen from us, both in the day and in the night."
Ed Webb

Ten Theses on Revolutions by Mohammed A. Bamyeh - 0 views

  • As it torments what before it had appeared as solid, immovable authority, a revolution also contests established knowledge.
  • a longing is not an act, and a general condition of unhappiness does not predict any specific action
  • If revolutions could be predicted, they would never happen: the science that does this work of prediction would immediately become the science of government. The fact that regimes are always on the lookout for opposition does not mean that they know in what way they will meet their end.
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  • just like regimes, the revolutionary explosion often catches the committed revolutionary by surprise: the teeming masses rose up earlier or later than expected, they moved not by the book and not according to plan, but as a detonation in the normal flow of time.
  • In 2011, there was no plan for revolution, anywhere, when a whole world region went up in flames after a poor street vendor in a marginal town in Tunisia self-immolated. Nor was there a plan for the great Palestinian intifada of 1987, when a street collision resulted in the death of four Palestinian workers. While both spectacular revolts that followed could be explained by years of insufferable indignities preceding them, there was no specific reason that a specific indignity on a specific day would unsettle the mighty repressive norm that, by then, had seemed everlasting.
  • Like the 2011 uprisings, the 1987 intifada erupted when there was no hope, no resources at hand to encourage hope, and at a point when rational, realistic minds posited hopelessness as the solid structure of the world.
  • every revolution gives birth to its own intellectuals, especially where the existing intellectuals refuse to acknowledge its profound originality, and stick to their old system of thought that had predicted either the absence of revolution, or one of a very different character than what came to be. Thus every revolution brings its own knowledge with it; it does not follow an established science.
  • What comes out in the immediate aftermath of every revolution is not necessarily a new or better system. Before anything else, what comes out is an educational experience, even when a revolution appears to have failed.
  • Everyone is then encouraged to forget the revolution, to turn attention to what should come next, before they could reflect on how they had managed to unleash a revolution to begin with.
  • Revolutions are therefore not simply events in time. The last thing they change is the political system, the first thing they change is the culture.
  • asking questions that yesterday were not even known to be questions
  • Rare are the revolutions that do not result in books written about them; poems composed in their honor; art that provides them with continuing presence; commemoration that remind of their best hopes; interpretations that establish them as inescapable heritage
  • the less visible, but more pervasive social traces (ordinary dialogues, new friendships, ongoing thoughts), that revolutions leave behind in their aftermath.
  • a revolution proceeds as a general invitation to creativity, then lives on as emergent culture--thought, questions, arguments. As it gains expressive maturity and a self-bestowed right to presence, this culture, diverse as it may be, marks the onset of the next round of social transformation
  • The psychology of the moment is one of elevated spirit, extraordinary time, unusual solidarity, will to sacrifice, interruption of norms, license for originality that may appear unlimited. The aftermath of that moment is typically one of Realpolitik, rational calculations, instrumental thought, power struggles, more ordinary politics. And precisely in that re-emergence of quotidian time there will be much pressure to forget the revolution, long before the counter-revolution has performed any of its tricks.
  • What we call “education” flowing out of a revolutionary moment is an education that begins from the senses, is felt in the body as energy, in the mind as epiphany, in the soul as “the people”—an abstraction that for a moment becomes concrete, because it has become the person.
  • The move away from exploring the source and promise of such novelty, and back into the more ordinary, more familiar psychology of “realism,” encourages thinking of the revolutionary act as no more than means to ends.
  • Ordinarily, epistemological imperialism tends to be a practice of an established mighty authority that, by virtue of its longevity or scope of its power, has become too confident of itself. But epistemological imperialism may also be a practice of opposition that, from long life under a certain power, could only think of revolution as an expression of a right to the same power.
  • To their participants, a revolutionary gathering exceeds any single demand: it addresses a felt need for a total social renewal. The mission then seems greater than simply replacing one ruler by another. At that moment, the ordinary person is in the revolution precisely because that is where she is not being ruled. There, she finally discovers what seems like an inborn, organic capacity to act as a sovereign agent: without instructions, without authority, even without a guiding tradition.
  • This total spiritual condition suggests to everyone involved that the revolution is greater than any particularism. The consciousness of totality makes its appearance as a sudden revelation, comparable to prophetic vision: the moment when a hitherto unseen truth illuminates the whole existence
  • This explosive spirituality resides in the necessity of doing what must be done, with only imagination, rather than plan
  • another major question rears its divisive head: have we really overthrown the regime? To answer this, we realize that in our temporary unity, we avoided this question too: what was the regime? That we need now to know, because the answer will help us have some plan as to where to go from here, to determine how much of “the regime” is gone and how much still needs to be uprooted so as to arrive at the “goals of the revolution.” For some revolutionaries, the regime was simply the head of the regime. For others, it was an entire corrupt class surrounding it and benefiting from it. For others still, the regime is everyday life—the rotten head has infected all of society, and caused all society, its mores and social relations, to become equally rotten. For those, that society, too, needs to be overthrown. The old society, all of it, was “the regime.”
  • In an unjust world, there are always alternatives to revolt: the idea of fate; personal hedonism; intellectual immersions; criminality; clannish solidarity; the morality of fortitude; mind altering substances; soothing rituals; suicide; nihilism; graduate study. A revolution, therefore, is always a choice among other choices.
  • The revolutionary decision therefore is a choice to disregard reality and realism. It is a choice to act as an agent, to act freely and to feel freedom not as a theoretical principle, but as a new force that is itself creating this new person doing what a day before the revolution seemed to be outside of all realism. Revolutions, therefore, are primarily decisions against realism, and as such they create the free person who undertakes them and, in the process, empirically verifies a principle that previously had lacked credibility: that a different world is possible.
  • A common strategy of betrayal takes the form of the monopoly of memory. Monopoly of memory means that the revolution, along with its memory or heritage, has become monopolized by one faction against all others. In this case, those who see this betrayal will say that the “goals of the revolution” have been abandoned, or that the revolution has strayed from its path. But revolutions may have as many goals as they have revolutionaries, and consequently as many imagined pathways. Here, “betrayal” will be seen in someone’s choice to highlight one goal and disregard another, in someone’s feeling that a preferred path was not taken, even though it could have been, or that the revolution has stopped short, when it could have gone further.
  • the greatest enemy of all revolutions is forgetfulness, because it attacks the core of the revolutionary experience: how it defied odds, reality, rationality, and all that had seemed ordinary, solid and eternal
  • the revolutionary pattern of each era corresponds to where power has become porous then
  • The Arab uprisings of the current era, namely those of 2011 and 2019 (but not the civil wars that followed), reveal shared patterns: they all start out first in marginal, neglected areas, from which they migrate into the well-fortified center. They rely on spontaneity as their art of moving, not on organization, structure, or even a plan. They are suspicious of vanguardism, and seem to intuitively reject any strong idea of leadership. They prefer loose coordinating structures, and “coordinators” emerge as a new revolutionary species, indicating that revolutions now need sharing of information more than centralized guidance. They operate largely at a distance from political parties, and in fact give rise to no party that can claim to represent or embody the revolution. The agent of the revolution and the maker of history is the ordinary person, not the savior leader.
  • those revolutions spoke in the name of a vague and large entity called “the people,” not of any sub-group, class, tribe, sect, or even the “meek of the earth.” That generality expressed their character as a meeting place of all grievances.
  • The regime did not know any game other than that of the established system, and thought of the revolution as a passing noise that will dissipate in due time. The main mode of governing had become autocratic deafness, across the entire region.
  • the counter-revolution already knows that repression alone would be unable to save it from revolution. Thus it needs to fortify itself against the nascent revolutionary culture by promoting counter-revolutionary culture, aimed at the spirit of the revolution. For example: in place of the ordinary person, counter-revolutionary culture elevates the savior leader as the only worthy maker of history; in place of the belief that had emerged in the revolutionary moment of “the people” as an enlightened and noble body, counter-revolution fosters an image of peoplehood as a savage, illiterate mob, to be feared and policed, rather than provided with freedom and entrusted with capacity.
  • Culture and ideas, therefore, become central battlegrounds in the age of counter-revolution
  • Just as in the Arab case, where the revolutionary wave met counter-revolution, so did the global wave meet a global counter-wave. Both took place across dispersed geographies, indicating that like the revolutionary wave, the counter-revolutionary wave was inspired by a spreading feeling of threat or creeping disorder. The rise of an inter-linked right-wing populism globally after 2011 may indeed be an expression of a learning process of reaction, indicating the seriousness with which the revolutionary, or at least transformative, challenge was taken. And just as in the Arab case, the global counter-revolution learned from its encounter with revolution, real or imagined, that the old order must be defended in more authoritarian ways in the realm of policing and law, and more vigorously in the realm of ideas and culture.
  • The revolution was not just a surprising event, but an addition to the known facts of existence. And what was most certainly new here was the capacity to revolt, not what came next. That capacity was what the revolutionary moment had demonstrated.
  • The universal is always imperialistic when the only knowledge sought through it is confirmatory rather than transformative knowledge.
    • Ed Webb
       
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  • Discovery, therefore, has from the point of view of epistemological imperialism only quantitative rather than qualitative promise: it adds more of what I already know, not more to what I know.
  • there was a revolutionary person residing deep inside the conformist, traditional person one had seen earlier. If we do not know how to see that hidden person, we will not see the revolution.
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