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Arabica Robusta

New Lines: a parliament for the Rojava revolution | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

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oromo social movements stateless ethiopia war on terror rojava

shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • oday, many of these groups are blacklisted, as a direct result of the so-called War on Terror. This has resulted in the freezing of bank accounts, the enforcement of travel bans, and the cancellation of passports.Cynically enough, this means that through the act of blacklisting, those who are already without a state are turned stateless once more, facing a double negation. Blacklisting these organizations — literally placing them “outside” of democracy — has much to do with the threat they pose to the status quo of the global capitalist doctrine.
  • A collectively written text, the “Social Contract,” clarified the points of departure: Rojava was to become a non-state entity, where self-governance, gender equality, ethnic and religious diversity, the right to self-defense and communal economy would form the foundational pillars. Ever since — while in the middle of a war against the Islamic State and other jihadist groups such as the Al-Nusra Front, and surrounded by the forces of the Assad regime, Russian troops and the international “coalition forces” — Rojava revolutionaries have begun to put their new ideals of self-governance into practice.
  • The lines drawn throughout North Africa and the Middle-East were drawn by bureaucrats and colonists. As artist Golrokh Nafisi has said, it is time to draw new lines. Not according to the occupiers, but according to the resistance. Not lines that isolate one nation from another, but lines of new shapes and forms that allow us to enact this world anew. To create a new world we need the imaginary of what that world could or should look like. As such, every political imaginary needs an artistic imaginary as well.
Arabica Robusta

I cite: Campus protests: struggle and safety - 0 views

jdeanicite.typepad.com/...itlin-is-so-disappointing.html

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Some universities present themselves as caring, as providing mental health services and a personalized environment that will help students meet their individual needs and goals. For the most part, this is advertising -- as everybody knows. The reality is  stress, debt, the reproduction of privilege, and, for some, a few years of extreme partying.
  • What's innovative in the last round of protests is the weaponization of safety and vulnerability. Think cultural revolution rather than therapy, hundreds and thousands of students on campus after campus rejecting the status quo and demanding change. The attack on privilege is an attack on hierarchies of race and class, waged in the language available to those told they live in a post-racial society offering no alternative to capitalism.
  • The risk of invoking vulnerability and appealing to safety comes in the reinforcing of an authority who would promise security, who would recognize the vulnerable as vulnerable and guarantee that he would protect them from harm.
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  • From the changing climate to the barbarous economy, the university can't shore itself up against the society it includes and reproduces. 
  • Arabica Robusta on 23 Nov 15
     
    "That said, the rhetoric of safe spaces, vulnerability, and civility does seem part of the current moment. Why? Gitlin too quickly dismisses political economic considerations -- the enormity of student debt, diminished economic prospects, loss of rewarding work, and intensified financial insecurity facing this generation of students. He notes, only to discard, the surveillance part of contemporary life. I think these political economic factors are more important than Gitlin allows. They establish the terms through which the students are voicing their critique. Students frame their opposition in a language of safety and vulnerability because that is the language available to them after forty years of neoliberalism and in the second decade of the war on terror."
Arabica Robusta

tabula gaza - 0 views

tabulagaza.blogspot.com

social movements arab egypt

shared by Arabica Robusta on 15 Aug 15 - Cached
  • The widespread indifference toward the August 14 massacre that accompanied a rising fascistic spirit just confirmed that fall from grace.
  • Though I do not affirm the Brotherhood's cause to return to power, I believe in their right to dissent. All those that risk their bodies, like Bassem, risk the bullet. I will by no means try to justify the shocking actions of Egyptians that started the morning of June 30, the rise of the fascistic, the acceptance of the torment of others. The most powerful tool to these ends is the discourse of terrorism that has fed into the deep fear in the hearts of so many living inside a regime of terror. 
Arabica Robusta

Whatever is happening to the Egyptians? | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ever-is-happening-to-egyptians

social movements arab egypt

shared by Arabica Robusta on 07 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • In all cases, empirical evidence shows that the 1952 military-coup was not only rebellion against Egypt’s political regime, but also against the values and norms of its political subjects.
  • If the repugnance or fear of the AUC community about [real] slums can be explained in terms of class tensions or a growing abyss between the classes, the question which prevails is: why would AUC students be entertained by observing a virtual slum? What is the fascination? And what is perceived as particularly “exceptional” about people who, a few years back, were not even perceived as “other”? How, and why, did no one raise this question as the event was being planned and organised? Did no one question the purpose or logic behind the construction of a virtual human zoo of people who are neither less human nor less Egyptian than those coming to observe them? I searched the images and messages displayed and communicated on the day of the event for some answers.
  • Yet, it should definitely be taken into consideration that the struggle between the Nasserist social agenda and Sadat’s Infitah came to the surface in the July coup of 2013. A critical mass of the elites have now decisively aligned themselves with Sadat’s socio-economic policies (reflected in the recent economic forum, the reconciliation with corrupt businessmen, and the embrace of regressive taxation); bringing to the surface the symptoms of Sadat’s socio-economic revolution more vividly and bluntly
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The event signals the way in which the socio-economic gap is taking an ideological and cultural form, with implications not only limited to some AUC members, but widely accepted by other elites (in the media, the arts,academe, etc).
  • On Thursday April 23, the American University in Cairo's (AUC) Theatre and Film Club invited the AUC community to an event, where they could watch a simulation of an Egyptian slum, talk to "people of this ghetto", eat "their" food, and shop in places similar to where "they" shop.
  • Entering into this constructed slum, all you can hear are noises in variant forms: the market, the wedding, the beggars, the harassers, and loud popular music. To make it noisier, every few minutes, quarrels would break out here and there. The environment was designed to make one not only feel very irritable, but also unsafe. For how could a person feel safe among those wild barbaric creatures? Anyone who has ever entered a real Egyptian slum would quickly notice how different it is from the AUC-exaggerated version. The markets may be as noisy as portrayed, but only during peak hours (no more than 4-6 a day). Other sources of noise do not reflect reality. For instance, why would a beggar beg in a slum?
  • These were mere reflections of a mental picture of slum-seekers, constructed through their 'othering' by movies, advertisements for gated communities, and other forms of mass media messages familiar in the communications of the upper-middle classes.
Arabica Robusta

Sick and tired: Sri Lankan domestic workers fight back against violence | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...rs-fight-back-against-violence

shared by Arabica Robusta on 19 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • As The International Labour Organisation has recognised ‘domestic workers, whether working in their home countries or abroad, are vulnerable to many forms of abuse, harassment and violence, in part because of the intimacy and isolation of the workplace’. 
  • What is likely to make a difference this time is that the allegations of violence against Abrew have been taken up by the Domestic Workers Union (DWU). The union has been able to mobilise support from fourteen other civil society organisations and trade unions, including the International Domestic Workers Federation and the Women’s Political Academy. 
  • The feminization of housework means that domestic work is considered low skilled, not ‘real work’. It is subject to the idiosyncratic standards and whims of each household, where varying degrees of docility and acquiesce are encouraged. I have seen domestic workers in Sri Lankan homes managed through the smallest of gestures – the nod of a head, a glance, the movement of fingertips. 
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  • Using figures from the International Labour Organisation, Verité Research has highlighted a worldwide increase in demand for domestic workers. Verité  estimates that one in every thirteen women in the labour force will be a domestic worker. To use statistically crude imagery, on a packed London double decker bus, which at full capacity takes 84 people, you would be rubbing shoulders with at least six women domestic workers.
  • The power to capture and consume the time of others is what maintains and fixes modern class differences and the accumulation of status, the sociologist Bev Skeggs has argued recently.
  • Wetherell observe, “wherever the multiple between the wages of the rich and the poor grows, so does the number of servants.”
  • In her rousing Birkbeck Annual Law Lecture in 2013, the scholar Angela Davis suggested that in the twentieth century, the situation of black women domestic workers in North America approximated that found in slavery.
Arabica Robusta

Social movements and the fall of Compaoré - International Viewpoint - online ... - 0 views

www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php

social movements africa human rights globalization burkina faso

shared by Arabica Robusta on 10 May 15 - No Cached
  • the Blaise Compaoré regime left behind a country that was characterised by mobilisations that claimed the streets, going beyond the organised structures and that was not the sphere of the urban and/or “intellectuals”.
  • What really led Compaoré’s fall was a primarily young population (60 of Burkinabe are under 25) that was fed up, and the degree of awareness this population has regarding the real reasons for the burdensome reality faced by the vast majority. It is significant that primarily because they experienced its trials in a very concrete manner (land grabs, dispossession, repression, etc.), it wasn’t merely among the intellectual and urban classes that individuals would point fingers at the regime and rebel against it.
  • These protest dynamics are also due to the groundwork some trade unions and public organisations carried out (Collectif contre l’impunité [Collective against impunity], Organisation démocratique de la jeunesse [Democratic youth organization], Mouvement burkinabé des droits de l’Homme [Burkinabe Human Rights Movement], Coalition contre la vie chère [Coalition against high cost of living, etc.], that for years broadened and politicised the realm of protest activities in the country.
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  • It cannot be denied thatsucceeded in bringing together people that did not see themselves represented by established political organisations, which effectively was one part of the ‘critical mass’ mobilised against Compaoré. Furthermore, it also mobilised people around social issues (power cuts, state of hospitals, etc.). In that sense, it is an important movement. However, Balai citoyen had a tendency to consider fighting for Blaise Compaoré’s departure to be sufficient in itself; it considered organisations insisting on the exigency and necessity to create an alternative political and social project as not being separate steps but inseparable, and to be in fact adding fuel to Compaoré’s cause.
  • The fact that during the popular uprising no politician was called upon by the protesters is still a good indication of the credibility of the formal political opposition. In an opposition consisting of dozens of parties there is none that offers an alternative.
  • With regards to the Sankarist parties, understandably fighting for justice to be served for the assassination of Tomas Sankara, they cannot be considered to be carrying an alternative political project (economic, social, etc.). Judging by the mass of people identifying with Sankara and gauging from these parties’ low popularity, one has to recognise that they are not considered as his true heirs in terms of a political alternative, including the rejection of all external domination.
Arabica Robusta

Full text of "Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to a niece [microform]" - 0 views

archive.org/...MN5160ucmf_0_djvu.txt

social movements africa human rights globalization

shared by Arabica Robusta on 10 May 15 - No Cached
  • Arabica Robusta on 10 May 15
     
    As Austrian theologian Friedrich von Hügel said, "The Golden Rule is to help those you love to escape from you."
Arabica Robusta

Africa's social movements present opportunities, not threats, for rights groups | openD... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...esent-opportunities-not-threat

social movements africa human rights

shared by Arabica Robusta on 06 May 15 - No Cached
  • Human rights groups around the world must innovate or risk being rendered irrelevant by the new surge of street activism.
  • The African region is no exception, despite its diversity. Consider Senegal, where in 2011 the Y’en a Marre (“Enough-is-Enough”) youth movement and Mouvement 23 (“June 23 Movement”) seized the limelight during a turbulent political moment, and played a critical role in preventing former President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to amend the constitutional provision on term limits and hang on to power. In the process, long-established and extremely important Senegalese human rights organizations, such as Rencontre Africaine pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme  (RADDHO), appeared virtually irrelevant. They were not always present on the streets, and were not consistently able to use the moment to give their causes new visibility.
  • How can professional human rights organizations become more nimble, while also maximizing impact and sustaining their work over the long term? Doing all these things is crucial to remaining relevant in an age of increased grass roots activism.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Professional African rights organizations by contrast tend to focus on reforming the state, or on interacting with international organizations.
  • African organizations are also dependent on Northern donors, forcing their activities and thinking into short-term, project-based frameworks. As a result, they can’t see what’s going on in the periphery of their areas of expertise, even if those new developments are game changers. Moreover, ordinary people are often moved to action by events that are not on the human rights organizations’ radar. Thus, the mass movement that also mobilized so rapidly and powerfully against long-time Burkina Faso president Blaise Compaoré took most local human rights organizations completely by surprise.
  • Fast-moving, street-smart “fluidity” is thus crucial. At the same time, Senegal and other African countries also need the “solidity” of the traditional rights groups, including their permanent organizational structures, and their expert, paid staff. These traditional elements can form a bridge between moments of social protest, while also providing access to stable financing. This, in turn, will help sustain human rights campaigns over time.
  • Today, most African rights groups depend on foreign donors, but this does not have to remain forever true. As Austrian theologian Friedrich von Hügel said, “The Golden Rule is to help those you love to escape from you.” If foreign donors really do want to help African rights organizations, they must assist in creating a domestic philanthropic infrastructure.
  • During and after Africa’s liberation struggles in the 1960s, many groups became political parties, and lost touch with their organic roots. Let’s not allow the same thing to happen to African human rights groups.
Arabica Robusta

Always historicize! | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...always-historicize

social movements globalization strategy

shared by Arabica Robusta on 25 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The Left has always been prone to self-flagellation: what’s wrong with us? Why can’t we get our act together? Why can’t we convince the masses to join us? Such self-criticisms are understandable and, to some extent, justified. The history of the Left and the labour movement in the United States is nauseatingly full of the leadership's cowardice, opportunism, bureaucratism, and cooptation by the corporatist state. There is much to criticize.
  • Given this ‘logic’ of history, what have we to look forward to and what lessons can we learn from the past? One lesson, I think, pertains to how activists should conceptualize their activism. There is a tendency, common among every group from centrist liberals through to Leninists and anarchists, to interpret activism in very un-Marxian and unsophisticated ‘voluntaristic’ terms.
  • For example, it is hopelessly benighted to think that an international revival of the centralized welfare state (even in an 'updated' form) and of twentieth-century social democracy is possible. Those social formations were appropriate to a time of industrial unionism and limited international mobility of capital, very different from the present. They have been dying for 40 years (starting in the US and UK), and no such magical incantation as “We propose a new anti-austerity coalition” can call them back to life. Coalitions of that sort are desperately needed, and their targets should be at every level of government, but their outcome will not be a new and improved manifestation of twentieth-century social democracy.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Radicals can mitigate destructive trends and hasten constructive ones, but that's the extent of the systemic ‘agency’ they can exhibit. Accordingly, they can have a lucid and correct interpretation of their activism only by understanding the historical context of their society, and the significance of its dominant tendencies.
  • We are in the early stages of the very protracted collapse of corporate capitalism and the nation-state system itself. We know that ‘climate change’ is going to constitute a global cataclysm; we know that, under the impact of neoliberal policies, the world's social fabric is being torn apart; and even the business press recognizes that economic trends of underconsumption and overproduction portend catastrophe.
  • Amidst the horrific tragedies, one may take comfort in the knowledge that at least it is not permanent. In fact, myopic anti-social politics is undermining the ruling class and its economy, by destroying the conditions for its long-term survival. It may destroy most life on earth in the process, or it may not; but the Left should recognize, in any case, that the coming crises in every country of the world will not mean the extinguishing of hope.
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