From September 1973 to October 2020, democracy in Chile has traversed the full spectrum ranging from its nadir of the brutal military coup to the zenith of the revolutionary referendum and the “Million Man March” demanding the drafting of a new Chilean Constitution. The first two decades of the 21^st Century has witnessed a new form of participatory non-violent civil society protest movements across the globe.

They are spread across the world, ranging from Egypt’s Tahrir Square to the “Black Lives Matter” movement in the US, from the “Yellow Vests” movement in France to the historic Brexit, from Brazil of 2015-16 to Lebanon of 2019-20, from the streets of Hong Kong to all the major cities of India. Basically, heterogeneous mass protest movements have defined much of the early part of the 21^st century.
 

A collage photo showing the following protest movement photos in a clockwise manner from the top-left corner- Wall street movement in the US (source: Newsweek), Anti-CAA movement in India (source: Hindustan Times), Hong Kong protests (source : Sky News), Arab Spring in Egypt (source : US News) , Brexit marches (source : Reuters) , Chile protests (source : Al Jazeera).

Definition of Modern Democracy and the notion of Participative Democracy

Aristotle in ancient Greece described Democracy as “The government of the poor or those less fortunate”. Let us ride back from ancient Greece to the modern world. In the Universal Declaration on Democracy, the Inter-Parliamentary Council (IPC) of the UN declares in the 1^st Part that “Democracy is thus a basic Right of citizenship to be exercised under conditions of freedom, equality, transparency and responsibility with due respect for plurality of views” and also goes on to proclaim that “Democracy is founded on the primacy of the law and the exercise of Human Rights”. Participative Democracy has its origin in the 2^nd Part of the Declaration, where it is stated that “Democracy is founded on the Right of everyone to take part in the management of public affairs”. Thus, the concept of participative democracy is not as alien a concept as some of the autocratic governments across the world make it look like.
 

A new form of protests and its origin

The 21^st Century began with a flourishing global hegemonic capitalist system with the US sitting at its pinnacle. But the next decade saw several military interventions and expeditions primarily led by the US and its allies (UK and France) in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The US got embroiled in their biggest military conflict since the dark days of Vietnam. This increased military expansionism coincided with an unprecedented global financial crisis which surfaced in 2008. This was the biggest financial crisis the world had seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Capitalism, as we know it, based on the “Trickle Down” Theory of economics was suddenly feeling the heat. Suffering from negative growth and high debt, many large capitalist democracies suddenly found themselves on the verge of economic bankruptcy. Countries declaring bankruptcy, major multinational corporations closing down started a wave of unemployment and financial instability which spread from the developed nations to the developing ones (ironically just like the “Trickle Down” Theory). How did Capitalism respond? Nations started adopting strong fiscal austerity measures, high taxation policies, reductions in government spending like subsidies, health and education sectors. As time passed, the situation only worsened. People reeling under unpaid loans, mortgaged homes, high taxes, reduced subsidies and growing unemployment started hitting the streets in mass protest. This ranged from Europe (France, Greece, Ireland and many more) to Latin America (Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and many more). Thus, economic inequality stemming from globalization and capitalism was the biggest contributor to the rise of street protest movements. But it was not the only reason.

The biggest political reason was a quest for more effective, participative and transparent form of functional Democracy. Democracy as we had mostly seen in the last half of the 20^th Century was mainly equivalent and limited to electoral democracy. Exercising Universal Adult Franchise, the citizens of a nation could directly elect Parliament or the President to enact legislations and govern. But the fallacies of democracy being only limited to the electoral version of it were being felt across continents. On the other hand, a participative democracy is one in which the electorate not only elects its legislature but also participates actively in public opinion forming, policy drafting and governance. Protest movements originating out of political instability, financial crisis, climate crisis, government authoritarianism and rising militarisation has been on the rise for the last two decades. There has been protest movements aimed at enacting popular transparent legislations seeking higher degrees of government accountability or scrapping of draconian laws (like the Lokpal Bill movement or the Anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) movement in India) or sometimes seeking meaningful Government action regarding certain extraordinary situations. For example, the Shahbag movement in Bangladesh was not aimed at toppling the government at all, but its objective was to force the government to take action against the ghastly war criminals of the 1971 Liberation War.

 If the 20^th Century saw armed revolutions aimed at overthrowing establishments and seeking Socialism as its goal, the 21^st Century is witnessing participative, mass civil society street movements aimed at quenching the thirst for more economic, political and societal freedom and higher degrees of citizenry participation in the functioning of democracy.
 

Leadership, composition and protest methodologies

The matters of leadership and protesters’ composition in these mass movements need to be understood in detail. Across countries there has been a sinking of public confidence in established traditional political parties. This has stemmed from political and financial corruption, ineffectiveness and rampant nepotism in the political class. Most of the protest movements have been relatively spontaneous and organised through the online digital social media platforms. An important attribute has been the fact that leaders did not create these movements, but these movements created a new league of civil society leaders. Be it Nigel Paul Farage of Brexit or Imran Sarkar of Shahbag or Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khaled in India, these new-age protest movement leaders have been a product of functional and active civil society activism.

The composition and nature of the protest groups has also been as intriguing and vibrant as the protests itself. The protest movements have been characterised by the diverse and heterogeneous nature of the participating protestors. There has been a mammoth participation of women, teenagers, intellectuals, educationists, students across the spectrum. Subtle ideological differences have not been a barrier in drawing up of the basic charter of demands, designing protest methodologies and setting up of movement’s objectives.

For example, in the Arab Spring revolution of 2011, the Muslim brotherhood stood hand in hand with the Communists and Social Democrats in seeking the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. This has been a common trait of these protest movements. As these movements have not been led by single political parties, there has been participation from the political activist circles as well as the cultural and social activist circles. LGBT rights organisations have thronged the streets as well. There has been a large-scale participation of intellectuals, actors, writers, journalists, free and independent thinkers. As discussed earlier, most of these movements were aimed at the ruling establishment, major financial giants and the globalised capitalist system. Thus, we can easily say that, at the crux of these movements have been the anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, pro-social welfare and pro-leftist ideology. The basic objectives of participative and transparent democracy, more egalitarianism and social welfare have been the common demand across the centre-left to the radical-left of the political spectrum.

These aforementioned movements saw many novel protest methodologies. These movements have been characterised by civil resistance and disobedience, demonstrations, road sit-ins, online activism, singing protest anthems, enacting street plays, impromptu speeches, displaying colourful and powerful hand-drawn posters and mass reciting of the Constitutional rights. These new and unique ways of demonstrations have attracted the young generation and women of all ages to these movements. In today’s times of online activism, this translation of online protests to real and physical resistance has been the hallmark of these civil mass movements.
 

A brief note on some popular mass movements and their objectives

The objectives of these movements have varied from one country to another. But the common point that has remained ingrained in all these protests is the hunger and quest for more answerable, open, transparent and participative form of Democracy. As discussed earlier, there has been widespread anger and resentment against globalization, capitalism and Nations’ big brotherly attitude towards its citizens. Most of the objectives have been political or economics related. A tilt towards the Left of Centre, more social freedom, decrease in the State’s oppressive measures, more civil liberties have been the rallying point for many. Most of the Arabian and North African revolutions from 2011 to 2016 resulted in the ouster of ruling dispensations like that of Gaddafi in Libya or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

The majority of the European movements like that of the Yellow Vests movement of France, anti-austerity movements in Italy, Ireland and Greece have led to incumbent governments getting voted out of power. The biggest story in Europe was the Brexit. The British crown rooted for the UK to remain in the European Union but the astounding referendum results where there for everyone to see. Globalisation had angered a much larger section of the society than it had pacified. It had created enormous economic inequality and disparity.

In the US, the Occupy movement created a war-cry of “We are the 99%”, reflecting the deep alienation the majority of Americans (the have-nots) felt in comparison with the top 1% of the society (the haves). This alienation was a direct result of capitalist economic benefits that reached only the top layer and multinational corporations. The public frustration was directed against the Multinational Wall Street corporations who were the reason for the global financial crisis on one hand and on the other hand the US government used public funds to bail them out. The more recent Black Lives Matter movement started as a protest against the brutal police murder of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis, but soon spiralled into a pan-USA movement against racism ingrained across US institutions and society.

South America has witnessed large-scale protest movements against authoritarian regimes in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and many other countries. Most of these South American countries were tired of financial austerity measures, lowered government subsidies and pensions, high healthcare and education spending, high gas bills and a long list of reasons plaguing their finances and lives. The protests in Chile began as a simple demonstration against a hike in metro ticket prices and soon it translated into the “Million Man March” in the streets of Santiago. The Chilean referendum resulted in an overwhelming 78% of citizens demanding the scrapping of the illegitimate dictatorial Pinochet Constitution of 1980 in favour of a “more egalitarian” new Constitution.

In the South-East Asian region, there have been large and widespread protest movements in India, Pakistan, China and Bangladesh in the last decade. India has witnessed civil society activism and movements of massive proportions in 2019 against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The ruling rightwing government has been forced to put the aforementioned legislation in the backseat and has not framed the CAA rules even after passing the controversial legislation in parliament nearly one year back.

In Pakistan there was massive civil unrest in 2013-14 culminating in the Azadi March against the Nawaz Sharif government. There were claims of systemic election rigging and subverting of democracy by the ruling party. Pakistan saw an overhaul of the erstwhile Nawaz Sharif government.

In Bangladesh there was a separate story altogether. The war criminals who perpetrated unimaginable violence through genocide of Bengalis and indiscriminate rape of women during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War had remained largely unpunished for more than four decades (from 1971 to 2013). Even with a secular and liberal Sheikh Hasina government in power nothing substantial was being done in this regard. The Shahbag movement of 2013 led by students and intellectuals brought the country to a grinding halt. Finally, the government passed a new law to punish Abdul Qader Mollah and the other war criminals swiftly and the Bangladesh Supreme Court complied.

In China, the Hong Kong protests have been there for the whole world to see. China has been systematically undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy and infringing civil liberties. The clashes in the streets of Hong Kong between the pro-democracy protestors and the authoritarian Chinese regime has given a sneak peek into what happens to democratic movements in an opaque Chinese system. The world would love to know more about the plight of democratic protests in Tibet (Buddhists led by the 14^th Dalai Lama) and Xinjiang (Uighur Muslims). But rest assured, the way this quest for democracy has advanced in the first two decades of the 21^st century, it will not be long before the streets of Beijing get flooded with pro-democracy protestors. It is not possible to enlist all the mass movements and their objectives in this article, thus a notable few have been elaborated.
 

The way forward towards a more democratic and egalitarian future

In a nutshell, it can be concluded that democracy and the hunger for it has been at the epicentre of all protest mass movements across the globe. The path ahead is laden with several obstacles and limitations which need to be either eased or erased. The United Nations (UN) cannot limit its role to merely framing certain guidelines. The UN needs to effectively counter and reprimand undemocratic practices in various countries to safeguard civil liberties, democratic institutions and human rights. The UN needs to reform and revamp its Security Council and allow a more diverse representation in the Security Council’s permanent members section. The entire continents of South America and Africa have no representation in the Security Council’s permanent member section. For the UN to remain credible, effective and relevant enough in the 21^st century multi-polar and diverse world, it needs to come out of its 75-year-old post-World War II era composition and thought process.

The current global politico-social situation is filled with both threats and opportunities. Right-wing authoritarianism has been on the rise in several countries like Turkey, Brazil, India, Hungary and many others. The threats of fascism, dictatorship and authoritarianism of elected governments have to be fought by the progressive and democratic forces seeking to expand the spectre and effectiveness of democracy. The Left and democratic forces have a very crucial role to play in this resistance against the growing clout of the authoritarian Right. The single basic objective should be to fight for the protection of democratic institutions of nations, to name a few – the Judiciary, Election Commission, Legislature and Executive. In order to protect these institutions from the intrusion of an authoritarian and repressive State, the free and independent media platforms, the civil society and the intellectual intelligentsia must act as the “Checks and Balances” point for the government’s execution of governance. The independent media and the civil society have the hallowed job of creating public opinion in a democracy. Abraham Lincoln once said, “The Country with its institutions belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government they can exercise their Constitutional right of amending it or their Revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it”. As Lincoln had meant more than a century back, when democratic rights of citizens are suppressed and subverted by States, it is the duty and right of the citizenry to rise in revolution. Democracy cannot be and shall not be the Will of the State, but it shall be the Will of the Citizens. Our quest for more transparent and inclusive forms of participative democracy through mass movements shall only grow up and beyond as “we have nothing to lose but our chains”. Let the wise words of Gandhi be our guiding light – “Civil Disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the State becomes lawless or corrupt”.

*Debaditya Raychaudhuri teaches Computer Science at Chandernagore College, West Bengal, India. He is an enthusiast of Indian politics and hails from a Bengali refugee family.

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The Algerian population has taken to the streets in a peaceful and nonviolent manner to protest against President Bouteflika’s running for a fifth term of office. Ryad Kramdi/AFP

There has been relatively little public opposition to Bouteflika’s continued reign over the past 20 years. But after the country’s state-run news agency announced in February that Bouteflika would stand for re-election, on April 18, protests erupted.

Bouteflika, who has been in poor health since a 2013 stroke, is widely seen as an ineffective head of state in a country suffering from a deep economic crisis. Public appearances by the president are now extremely rare. In December, Bouteflika cancelled a meeting with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, supposedly because he had the flu. Tellingly, Bouteflika is currently reported to be in Switzerland for “medical checks,” despite the political crisis.

Taking to the streets

Popular resistance to his re-election bid has only grown over the past weeks. From Algiers to Oran, people young and old have taken to the streets and campuses across the North African country to peacefully protest the continuing hold of Bouteflika and his inner circle on power.

Economic crisis has worsened in Algeria as oil revenues plunged with falling oil prices. The unemployment rate is near 12%, with the youth rate at 29%. With half of the population younger than 25, Bouteflika’s government is facing a structural and social crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Several candidates have registered to run against Bouteflika, but protesters say elections in Algeria are not free or fair. Some opposition parties plan to boycott the presidential vote if Bouteflika stays in the race.

Students joined the mobilisations against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on February 26, in Oran, Algeria. AFP

In March 3 written statement, Boutelika said that he will run for re-election but step down soon after if elected. No timetable was given, and the offer has not brought calm.

Large-scale public protests are unusual in Algeria, where the National Liberation Front – a political regime in power since independence from France in 1962 – regime has violently crushed all signs of dissent. In 1988, more than 500 were killed during Algeria’s “black October” demonstrations, which were followed by a military coup in 1992 and subsequent civil war.

Security forces also met 2001 protests by Algeria’s Kabyle people with violence; 160 were reportedly killed. Other opposition movements, such as protests in 2011 and an anti-shale gas movement in 2015, flared but weakened quickly.

Algeria largely stood out the Arab Spring – a series of protests in 2010 and 2011 that brought down authoritarian governments in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere – in part because of memories of the country’s brutal civil war of the 1990s.

Today, however, protesters of all ages and walks of life are out in strength – students, working men and women, and journalists resisting state censorship. All are calling for a return to the rule of law and demanding that Bouteflika renounce running for a fifth term.

The atmosphere of Algeria’s protests is generally festive. As they march down city streets, protesters often sing popular football anthems with a political twist to express their demands. Songs ring out from Algeria’s 1962 independence movement and the social movements of the 1980s. From balconies overhead, women sing out their support.

While there has also been anger and indignation, fiery speeches, violence and clashes with police have been relatively limited. A “million-man march” on March 1 was reported to be mostly peaceful, with the state news agency claiming that 183 people were injured.

Pro-democracy protesters sing Algerian football songs, adjusting their lyrics to reflect the current situation in Algeria. For more information, see the documentary Babor Casanova, by Karim Sayad (2015).“

The street as public forum

The moving crowds, rallies and meetings have turned Algeria’s streets into something of a public forum. In a country where the government does not allow a real political dialogue, this is how the Algerian people practice their politics.

Protesters demand an end to the rule of Bouteflika and his clan. This includes the president’s brother Saïd and other family members who have a controlling hand in state affairs and the economy.

The Algerian resistance has also taken to social media to share messages of hope, filling the web with broad smiles and forceful slogans about political change in their country. Twitter posts show that citizens are remaining positive about their chances of democracy.

In an effort to keep control, prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia has warned demonstrators that a ”Syrian scenario“ – civil war – may result if Bouteflika isn’t returned to office on April 18.

Unlike in the past, the protests have even received some domestic media coverage – particularly after journalists protested Bouteflika’s rule – both in mainstream papers as well as private broadcasts. Ongoing coverage shows streets and squares occupied by protestors, with police officers surrounded by demonstrators.

Algerian protesters are also gaining an international audience, with support from the Algerian diaspora in Paris, Montreal, Geneva and other cities.

Is the regime losing its grip?

Across the nation, the feeling that the 57-year-old regime’s grip on power may finally be slipping.

So far, the protesters’ strategy has been resolutely nonviolent. They have even made peaceful gestures toward the police and expressed their civic responsibility in unexpected ways, including cleaning the streets after demonstrations.

By resisting political pressure and fatalism through nonviolence, everyday citizens are seeking to change how power may be exercised in Algeria, peacefully yet insistently calling on the government to allow dissent and listen to what its people have to say. Real dialogue, they say, is the only way to restore the legitimacy of Algeria’s government in the eyes of its people.

Will peaceful protest be enough to shift the balance of power in Algeria? The future of the movement is uncertain, yet a fifth term for Bouteflika is clearly unthinkable for many citizens.

Translated from the original French by Clea Chakraverty and Leighton Kille.
 

Ghaliya Djelloul, Sociologue, chercheuse au Centre interdisciplinaire d’études de l’islam dans le monde contemporain (IACCHOS/UCL), Université catholique de Louvain

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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EPA/Alexei Druzhinin

As the table below indicates, the number of dictators who’ve fallen in recent years for all sorts of reasons is a cause for optimism.

But has their demise led to any kind of democratic reform? It’s a mixed picture to say the least. While a handful of promising cases deserve praise, only a few of the dictatorships that have fallen in recent years have given way to lasting, stable democracies.
 

The 2010s began with tremendous optimism for the future of global democracy, reaching an apogee with the Arab Spring protests in 2011. Across the Middle East and North Africa, several dictators fell in a row: after Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya was toppled in a civil war. Fighting also erupted in Yemen, leading to the eventual flight of longtime strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh.
 

It seemed for a moment that in one fell swoop, a clutch of countries were suddenly shaking off authoritarianism at last. But with the exception of Tunisia – whose situation is still somewhat fragile – none of them have developed into democracies.
 

Egypt’s brief spell under the elected Muslim Brotherhood came to an end in 2013, when a military intervention brought General Abdel Fatteh al-Sisi to power. He remains president today, legitimised by largely meaningless elections. Libya is still a weak state beset by instability and violence; Yemen has slipped into devastating conflict and humanitarian crisis. Though protests exploded throughout the Middle East, only modest reforms took place elsewhere. And in Syria, the Assad regime’s crackdown on the 2011 protests helped spark a nightmarish conflict that has torn the country apart.
 

Iraq and Afghanistan, meanwhile, saw a change in leadership with the elections that forced Nouri al-Maliki and Hamid Karzai out of power. But neither country’s democracy has notably improved. Afghanistan is still authoritarian and unstable, and in Iraq, Maliki is still very powerful behind the scenes.
 

Mixed bag

Latin America was home to a clutter of military dictatorships for decades, but since the mid-to-late 1980s, most of its countries have been flawed but functioning democracies.
 

The two notable holdouts were Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Cuba under Fidel Castro – and in the last decade, the two have diverged considerably. While Cuba has reformed a little under the rule of Fidel’s brother Raúl, who has now handed over to Miguel Díaz-Canal, Venezuela is falling apart under the dictatorial leadership of Chavez’s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro. Other regimes in Latin America continue to hold free and fair elections, but struggle to uphold the rule of law.
 

In Asia, meanwhile, a few less-than-democratic countries have made strides towards reform, but most authoritarian regimes have stayed the same. Still, some reforms and resignations are noteworthy. In the Caucasus, Armenia’s Serzh Sargsyan was recently forced to resign after mass protests against his rule. Almazbek Atambayev of Kyrgyzstan also stepped down after elections, the first peaceful handover of power in the country’s history.
 

In South-East Asia, most of the attention since 2015 has been on surprising events in Myanmar, when the military regime that ran the country for decades allowed open elections for the first time since 1990. Myanmar’s military government was oppressive even by authoritarian standards, so it was quite something to see it holding elections, releasing political prisoners and allowing more press freedom. The regime’s leader, Thein Sein, stepped down to make way for Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.
 

But the democratic transformation was short-lived. The regime has continued to violate the human rights of its minority groups, most notably the Rohingya minority, and civil liberties and press freedoms are in serious jeopardy.
 

Turfed out

One place where things are looking up for democracy is Sub-Saharan Africa. The last decade has seen the overall standing of democracy in Africa improve. In the early 1980s, only five countries in Africa could be considered democratic: Botswana, Gambia, Mauritius, Senegal and Zimbabwe. The end of the Cold War saw the expansion of elections and civil liberties. But more recent years has seen the fall or peaceful resignation of important authoritarian figures, many of them old men who had clung on to power for decades.
 

Yahya Jammeh of the Gambia eventually fled the country in 2017 after he lost the presidential elections to the opposition. Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso resigned after political protests broke out in 2014, following nearly three decades in power. José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola resigned after nearly 40 years in power (though he remains influential in Angolan politics). All three countries have become slightly more democratic as a result.
 

But the biggest tree felled in Africa was undoubtedly Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. In his capacity as president since 1980, Mugabe had become increasingly dictatorial and brutal, and his misguided leadership plunged the country into chaos. When he unceremoniously fired his vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa at the end of 2017, his previous backers in the military decided they had finally had enough. With parliamentary impeachment hearings in the offing, Mugabe eventually resigned, and new elections are scheduled for July 2018.
 

The bloodless Zimbabwean transition was a heartening spectacle, but there are nonetheless plenty of other countries to worry about. Hungary’s Viktor Orban is threatening to constrict his country’s democracy by clamping down on civil liberties, even as he wins landslide election victores. China’s Xi Jinping recently orchestrated the removal of term limits, giving him power to rule indefinitely. Thailand’s military is heading the most repressive government the country has seen in years. Still, while many countries have taken an authoritarian turn, others have made a success of their escape from dictatorship.
 

As recent events in Armenia attest, citizens the world over are becoming more involved in politics and taking their displeasure to the streets. And while it’s true that most dictators who fall are replaced by another dictator, there are enough examples to the contrary to give the defenders of democracy some hope.
 

Natasha Ezrow, Senior Lecturer, University of Essex

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Protester mocking President al-Sisi. Alisdare Hickson, CC BY-SA

Al-Sisi’s grip on power may appear firm, but his country’s problems can’t be thrown into jail like his opponents. His predecessors Hosni Mubarak and Anwar Sadat learned this the hard way.

Yet don’t expect much hand-wringing from the West about Egypt’s stability in the coming days – despite its having been through a revolution and a coup already this decade. Governments and other strategists only appear to worry about countries in this region once discontent turns “hot” – like in Syria, Yemen, Libya or Iraq.

Our research shows that this may be a serious and costly mistake. The whole region is suffering from exactly the same deep-seated problems as before the Arab Spring of 2010-11. In Egypt and various other apparently stable countries, there are very high levels of discontent that could easily boil over.

Then and now

The uprisings earlier in the decade were not simply demands for Western-style democracy. Protesters may have been disillusioned by all the election rhetoric from these authoritarian regimes in democratic clothing, but they were primarily disgusted by corruption, abuse of power and economic inequality. They wanted governments that would address these concerns rather than lining their own pockets and those of their cronies.

Unfortunately little has changed, as newly released opinion polls show for Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia – with upwards of 1,000 people surveyed in each country. While citizens worry about issues their governments prioritise, such as security, terrorism and religious extremism, their main concerns are the same as in 2010 – decent jobs, inflation, inequality and corruption.

Top two challenges by country

Arab Barometer, 2016.

People don’t believe their governments are responsive to their priorities. Fewer than one third of Egyptians think so, while in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Jordan that figure drops to a quarter or less. In Lebanon it is a mere 7%.

Across all six countries an astonishing 85% or more think their governments are not making a serious effort to tackle corruption. Meanwhile, 75% or more are not satisfied with their governments’ efforts to create jobs or fight inflation.

Views on economy, corruption and terrorism

Arab Barometer, 2016.

The discontent is worst in Lebanon, where fewer than 5% of people approve of the government’s work. Even the performance on internal security – the one area where citizens in the other five countries are relatively satisfied – was considered adequate by only a quarter of Lebanese respondents.

This region-wide disenchantment translates into low confidence in parliaments and political parties, the key institutions which ought to be representing citizens’ interests. Confidence varies from country to country: Lebanon again scores poorly. Egypt fares better than others, but this owes more to intense government propaganda than any real effectiveness.

Trust in state institutions

Arab Barometer, 2016.

Citizens also don’t feel they have the civil and political rights necessary to legitimately express their grievances and push their governments for reforms. When people are unable to adequately express their unhappiness, it inevitably increases the potential for radicalisation.

Views on civil rights

Arab Barometer, 2016.

Little changed

As a result of the Arab uprisings, governments fell in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and eventually Libya, while there were more limited political changes in Jordan and Kuwait. Governments in other countries announced political concessions, including Morocco, Algeria, Oman and Saudi Arabia.

Yet since the issues which drove many of these protesters to the streets have not been addressed, their governments remain vulnerable both to mass mobilisation and to less obvious forms of radicalisation – as recent protests in Tunisia show.

Western policymakers and academics concerned with security are at risk of missing this. They do not seem to have learned the lessons of the Arab uprisings. Absent armed conflict, they still tend to dismiss the importance to stability of social cohesion, inequality and poor political representation.

Sisi or Sisiphus? Wikimedia

We must therefore reassess the stability of countries like Egypt. We must stop assuming their leaders will forever be able to simply repress dissent, and stop assuming that such repression doesn’t come with costs and risks, both human and political.

These countries are in fact security “sinkholes”: regimes whose foundations erode while apparently seeming stable, often to the point of collapse. Far from being a sign of strength or stability, remaining deaf to the needs of the people make things worse in the long run.

As al-Sisi makes his inevitable victory speech, we would be wise not to ignore these warning signs. Until we learn that conflict must be dealt with at its roots, history is liable to just keep repeating itself.

Pamela Abbott, Director of the Centre for Global Development and Professor in the School of Education, University of Aberdeen and Andrea Teti, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Aberdeen

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Tunisian Assembly of the Representatives of the People vice president Abdelfattah Mourou (L) and President of Ennahda movement Rached Ghannouchi are seen during the 10th General Assembly of the Tunisian Ennahda Party at the Olympic Hall in Rades, Tunisia on May 21, 2016. Picture by Nicolas Fauque/Images de Tunisie/ABACAPRESS.COM.

One of the most interesting books this summer may be a rather innocuous book by Anne Wolf, a leading Tunisia and North Africa specialist. In Political Islam in Tunisia: A History of Ennahda, Wolf, a University of Oxford researcher, presents the hidden history of Ennahda, Tunisia’s main Islamist movement, from the 1960s until the post-revolution present. Before the popular uprisings of 2011 and the overthrow of then President Ben Ali, Ennahda was banned and barely researched.

Based on more than four years of field research, and over 400 interviews, as well as access to private archives, Wolf’s account reveals in unprecedented detail one of Tunisia’s most influential political actors. Wolf tracks the evolution of Ennahda’s ideological and strategic orientations within the local turbulence of Tunisia’s political contexts. As the first full history of Ennahda, the book ought to be rightfully lauded as a major contribution to literature on Tunisia, Islamist movements in general, and more broadly political Islam in the Arab world.

It is an essential read for anyone who wishes to understand why Tunisia, hitherto at least, remains the last revolution standing from the Arab Spring. What makes Wolf’s account especially interesting is the tantalising possibility of Ennahda offering a different answer to the question what should be the role of political Islam in the Arab public sphere. Ennahda’s somewhat surprising answer is a claim to a specific Tunisian experience. Despite the claim of a Tunisian exceptionalism, one cannot help but wonder if such a claim belies the possibility of a Muslim democracy that offers a different approach from the failure of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, or Turkey’s AK Party, which had been hailed as the first post-Islamist party, but whose increasingly authoritarian turn have dismayed both inside and outside observers.

Wolf is particularly good at distinguishing Ennahda from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which many analysts treat as the paradigmatic Islamist movement. So whilst she notes the peak of Muslim Brothers’ influence in the 70’s, she traces Ennahda’s intellectual heritage back to the reform-minded clerical classes of the recently reopened Islamic university of Zaytouna, who objected to the French colonial penetration in the late 19th century. What emerges is Ennahda that perceive themselves as inheriting a dissenting strand of Islam and railed against the official scholarly establishment who were co-opted by the regime who subordinated French colonial interests over those of Tunisia.

She notes the parallels between Ennahda and these reformist minded ulama not rejecting modernity, but insistent on providing a modern Islamic alternative. In her retelling, Wolf provides more support for a more ambivalent reading of early Arab modernists not as liberal reformers, who did not want to make Islam more ‘progressive’ as we would see it, but who wanted to articulate an Islam to make it more relevant for the lives of contemporary Muslims.

Tracing Ennahda’s roots as the heirs of a reforming Zaytouna heritage is also important for demonstrating its bona fide Tunisian roots. This serves to undermine the efforts of successive regimes to question Ennahda’s Tunisian’s roots, tainting them with the brush of foreign subversion be it that of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or of more contemporary relevance Iran or Qatar, depending on the political context. That this demonstration is necessary, speaks not only to the effectiveness of Ben Ali’s propaganda as it does about the abiding power of French Laïcité tradition amidst the powerful and stridently secular elites in Tunisia.

Wolf dismantles Tunisia’s long-standing image as a ‘fortress of secularism’. She notes that whilst the country’s first president Habib Bourghiba vehemently initiated various aggressively secular modernisation drives, later built upon by his successor, that included dismantling the traditional religious establishment in Zaytouna and Al-Qayrawan university the jewels of Islamic scholarship in North Africa, this was not embraced by the majority of the public. So whilst the state marginalised political expressions of Islam and successfully profited in utilising an international image of a secular Arab state par excellence, the porosity of such a facade was laid strikingly bare, with Ennahda winning a landslide victory gaining 37 per cent more than the next eight leading parties with only 35 %, despite having no grassroots organisation one year before the revolution. And whilst it lost support in the 2014 elections, by becoming the second major party, Ennahda has confirmed that they were here to stay as a major player and will continue to shape Tunisia’s future.

The years of repression that Ennahda suffered during their underground years both under Bourghiba and especially Ben Ali is covered extensively and sympathetically. Ranging from physical deprivation and social isolation to torture whilst in prison, to the harassment and abuse of families of those sent to prison. Despite her measured prose the author doesn’t hesitate to make sharp commentary.

For instance, she claims that Ennahda activists have ‘internalised narrative of victimhood’ whilst failing to acknowledge any violence that they may have committed or threatened to commit themselves. While it is easy to dismiss Wolf’s sentiments as somewhat glib, she correctly distinguishes the torture and harassment suffered by Ennahda and the latter’s embrace of victimhood. Even if we may be reluctant to begrudge victims of torture for any resentment towards members of the former regime, it pays to remember however that these activists are negotiating with members of the former regime.

It is an awkward pre-condition for Tunisia’s successful post-revolutionary politics, that it must be inclusive and forward looking enough to give elements of the previous regime a stake in the new post-revolutionary status quo, save for the most egregious. Yet reading some of Wolf’s harrowing accounts it must surely feel like the tortured are in negotiations with their torturers. That such sentiments are easier said than done only puts in perspective how difficult the construction of a democratic Tunisia will actually be.
 

In a field that too often discusses Islamists without allowing them to express themselves, her account relies on hundreds of interviews, and the book successfully reveals the voices of those she writes about. Her account leaves the reader not only wanting more, but also wondering what she has left out. One striking example of the latter is the extent to which her interviewees have insisted on their anonymity. Whilst a hardened Tunisia watcher may amuse themselves trying to guess who or what Ennahda faction the interviewee comes from; a less seasoned observer may wonder how impermanent the political status quo must feel if six years after the revolution so many have chosen to remain anonymous.

It is suggestive that activists are wearily hedging their bets, fearful of a possible counter-revolution and any ensuing bloody crackdown. It’s a salutary reminder of how novel the democratic experiment remains in Tunisia, and that it has yet to establish any political norms beyond a narrow elite. Compare how different such a situation is to Turkey where despite the occurrence of regular military coups acting as correction, the idea is that after a brief interregnum the acknowledged norm is to return to a democratic albeit staunchly secular ideal.  Only now after a long history of coups has the idea of coups become gradually unthinkable for the public. It was notable that in 2016 even staunchly secular parties, those who would’ve most benefited from any secular correction, immediately condemned any kind of coup attempt.
 

The same cannot clearly be said of Tunisia and it puts in perspective why the Ennahda leadership has prioritised economic reconciliation instead of cracking down on crony capitalism so stymieing the economy. Wolf notes that this would envision a freezing of corruption investigations with the promise in return of a capital injection into the economy. The rationale here is clearly not economic but political, in other words, a kind of insurance policy where the idea is that members of the former regime’s business and political elite would be less willing to destabilise a political status quo when it has so much of their capital invested in it.

What is striking is that both parties know how much these business and bureaucratic elements are essential to Tunisia’s success, not only because of their capital but because they have monopolised the country’s know-how and business experience. Ennahda’s leadership finds itself in an unenviable position, they have to hold their nose to any repugnance they may feel to any perceived ‘dirtiness’, as they know that the threat of their departure would significantly diminish Tunisia’s post-revolution and may return it to the same economic conditions that incited the revolution in the first place. Furthermore, they know they are not the only ones courting them, and that significant external backers are prowling and would like nothing more than Tunisia’s democratic experiment to fail, something that has become especially prominent in light of the ongoing Qatar crisis in the Gulf.
 

While Wolf’s book was published just before the Gulf crisis, the crisis has only highlighted the extent to which Tunisia’s success is exposed to external political headwinds. This is especially the case given that all of the protagonists in the crisis have made strategic investments, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and most prominently the one who is currently on the other side of the conflict, Qatar who in November 2016 gave over $1.25 billion in aid. In light of its economic relations with all of the parties, Tunisia has officially remained neutral, with its rationale stark: Tunisia simply cannot afford to side with one party over another. Of course, the crisis itself is a good example of how circumscribed the foreign policy of smaller countries like Tunisia can be, and the extent to which smaller counties are informed by the actions and potential reactions of their stronger neighbours.

In this respect, the book’s one significant omission is the minimal coverage given to Ennahda’s thinking and how it has been informed by the relations to its neighbour. In this respect even if Wolf’s approach is ethnographic and her focus lies in examining Ennahda’s history given the precarious environment that Tunisia find itself in, with a civil war next door in Libya, and neighbouring an authoritarian military regime in Algeria with a troubled history with Islamism, one would be surprised if Ennahda’s leadership’s calculus had not been informed by Tunisia’s external actors.

Consider for example France, Tunisia’s former colonial power, whose only role in the book is that of a site of exile for Ennahda activists, as is Switzerland and the UK, the latter of which Ghannouchi himself escaped to. Even more surprising is minimal mention of Algeria which has been accused of decidedly murky actions in the Algerian Civil War during the 90s, and a regime that has never been hesitant to intervene in its neighbours’ conflicts if it served its perceived strategic interests. One imagines that it would be interested in the appearance of an Islamist dominated democracy next door. Yet save for the most curious bread crumbs; we learn that Algerian generals smuggled Ghannouchi out, and hints of an ongoing ‘special relationship’ between them, except for this there is very little in Wolf’s narrative to suggest that Ennahda has been conscious of the five-hundred-pound gorilla next door.

Pondering on how all this relates to Ennahda’s domestic politics, a strong impression forms as to how much the absence of a talented secular opposition hobbles Ennahda. In the absence of an internal check to Ennahda, its base has quickly latched on to conspiracy theories explaining away the frustrations of Ennahda’s goals. The worst problem is not that they are disempowering, but that there may be more truth in them than there are lies.

With certain Gulf nations having made good on their reputation as regional check to Islamists across the region, fears of a regional bogeyman have unexpectedly proven to be more effective than the presence of a 500 pound somewhat belligerent gorilla next door. One wonders if in the absence of a robust opposition Ennahda can discipline itself and exercise restraint over its ambition and sense of entitlement and mind Tunisia’s strategic environment which has previously kept a natural check on everyone’s ambitions. 

If Wolf is revealing Ennahda’s past, she is more elliptical of its future. She wisely counsels us to be wary of complacency and is dubious on whether Tunisia’s revolution can yet be labelled as a success. Whilst the survival of the sole remaining revolution should be celebrated she warns her audience away from wishful thinking; we should not confuse Tunisia’s designation of ‘least unstable’ political society post-Arab Spring with it being deserving as a governance model for other Arab countries to follow. Indeed, the very threat of such a label has encouraged elements both internal and external, to resolve to destabilise Tunisian politics further.

She also points out that Ennahda itself is ill equipped to tackle future problems before coming to power it has built up little to no experience in governance at either local or national politics, unlike say the Turkish AK Party. Instead it’s leadership was borne out of an ideological struggle which has left them unprepared for issues of policy and national leadership: as some prominent party members themselves have told analysts, ‘[w]e went from the prison to the palace’.

As for the hope that Ennahda can become a progressive Islamist political actor, after hundreds of interviews with Ennahda activists Wolf is dubious how far-reaching the extent their progressive commitment actually is. Noting that Ennahda’s a Big Tent party, her narrative notes the differences amongst its leading cadres, and she pointedly circumscribes the role and ideological authority of Ghannouchi that belies much other literature. While his voice is obviously important, Ghannouchi is very much one voice amongst many.

Furthermore, she adjudges that his apparent embrace of democracy and multi-party governance is as much motivated by strategic imperatives as it is borne from ideological convictions. More to the point, while the views of Ennahda’s leadership can be called at best ‘liberal’ and at worst ‘pragmatic’, she remarks that only when its base embraces this progressive commitment can Ennahda truly be considered reformed. She further notes the ill-guarded hostility and suspicion of the opposition towards Ennahda only serves to confirm its defensiveness and victimhood, not an attitude that is conducive to a successful transition to the inclusive democratic culture Tunisia needs.

At this point it’s worth raising whether Wolf, alongside other analysts, is not only giving the wrong answer, but perhaps indulging in the wrong question. How convincing is the suggestion that if Ennahda does not wish Tunisia to become a liberal democracy, it automatically be considered an unsuitable western partner? Should the west really hold out on Ennahda converting into a progressive liberal democratic party, rather than consider Ennahda as partners to construct a robust Muslim non-authoritarian republican model democracy.

The fact that not everyone shares our convictions that liberal democracy is not the best solution should not surprise us. Perhaps we should not be surprised that other cultures take a more detached and more pragmatic view towards liberal reforms, than western nations whose very self-conception involves a triumphant repudiation of the dark age of ignorance that preceded it. Perhaps given that Tunisia is a country, steeped in pre-modern tradition that preceding the modern democratic and liberal revolution, and which enjoyed its golden years before the onset of industrialisation, colonialism and modernisation as a society it may be more reluctant and resistant to modern democratic and liberal revolution.

In that sense, we may need to wait out until an internally organic political theology emerges that justifies a democratic Muslim governance model according to its own internal tradition. However, such a modern manifestation will by necessity be contentious especially considering that there is no hierarchical centralised authority that can change a tradition by fiat from the top.

Perhaps we need to adjust our exception about what are good outcomes for the region and what should be considered a ‘good outcome’ for a political reform. This is not lowering the bar, but perhaps be more realistic in accepting that democratic forms of governance must suit the context of the local people. Lest we forget such sentiments echoes the argument made by early Zaytouna reformist Islamic thinkers that Ennahda claim descent from.

It’s with these more measured expectations in mind that an excellent Hudson Institute policy paper by Eric B Brown and Samuel Tadros, advocates a Muslim republicanism. They propose that it is an American strategic goal for ‘Tunisia [to] emerge as a self-sustaining democracy that can contribute to solving the larger crisis of governance and republicanism in the Arabic-speaking world’. In this instance, what is proffered is not the hope of a liberal democracy but a more realistic idea, if rather vague, non-authoritarian Muslim democracy as an alternative to ‘ political cul-de-sacs of Islamism and unreconstructed laicism’.

This will allow the idea of inclusive Tunisian democracy whose excessive secularism would not alienate the wider Tunisian populace integrating into a wider political society of the new Republic. Even more optimistically it could open up the possibility of gradual political reform rather than a crash bang wallop revolution with the dangers the latter entails. The possibility of a vibrant Tunisian political society not only being desirable but also attainable could spark a discussion about what kind of governing models are attainable for the Middle East and the Muslim world generally.

Furthermore, they recognise that within Ennahda there are competing trends and they stress the importance of bolstering the more pragmatic trend which will allow it to compete more effectively with other Salafi or Islamist tendencies. To the extent that they hope that this tendency can manage ‘to persuade its rank and leadership that Islamism is over and that democratic Tunisia is already an Islamic state; indeed, that Islam requires civil democracy and pluralism’ then to that extent Ennahda becomes a more viable partner for the possibility of creating a long term stable MENA order.

However, they are well aware that more time is needed for such a change to take place, and the running concern throughout the paper if such time will ever be given the fragility of the revolution.

The quality of Anne Wolf’s Political Islam in Tunisia, a sympathetic and yet realistic portrayal of Ennahda, makes us appreciate both why so many hope that it can become a prized partner in the construction of republican Muslim democracy. Yet these self-same reasons explain why post-revolution Tunisia remains fragile, in a tragic irony, the self-same grounds of hopes explain why so many actors are invested in Tunisia’s ongoing democratic dysfunction at worst, and in its destruction at best. It would seem that six years after the Arab Spring, the prospect of the Tunisian exception remains precarious and everything is still up for grabs.

Faheem A. Hussain is about to begin a PhD in Politics at Royal Holloway University of London pursuing research in liberalism and multiculturalism.

This article was first published on openDemocracy.

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Public opinion surveys, including the World Values Survey, the Arab Barometer and the Arab Transformations Survey, suggest that the majority of citizens are still resistant to gender equality. While there are considerable differences between Arab countries, when it comes to gender issues, conservative values are deeply entrenched, perhaps even more so since the uprisings.

Islam itself is often identified as the cause of this resistance. Some even identify a “clash of civilisations” between the West and the Islamic world, with the way women and girls are treated as proof of “backwardness” and “barbarism”.

But the lack of progress on equality between men and women is the product of external as well as internal factors, including the lack of political alternatives to Islamism and the way in which women’s equality agendas are disregarded by autocratic regimes
 

Excluding women

In some cases, this exclusion of women has been spearheaded by Islamist movements, a fact sometimes attributed to the increase in the influence of religious groups across the region – the so-called Islamist winter. In other cases, this patriarchal restoration is driven by self-proclaimed secular and democratic forces. Either way, the contract whereby men and women have separate and complementary – rather than equal – roles has seldom been successfully challenged.

While most societies across the globe are becoming more liberal when it comes to gender, not only are Arab countries the most conservative, there is also little evidence of change. Our research, which looks at how political and social attitudes changed after the Arab uprisings in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia, suggests that although women tend to be more progressive, both women and men share conservative attitudes and have, if anything, become more conservative since 2011.

In 2014, while women were generally less conservative than men, differences were relatively small. A clear majority of men and women believed that gender equality and the empowerment of women should be enshrined in the constitution, but there seemed to be little support for actually implementing it. On the Arab Transformations Gender Index, only 17% scored as definitely in favour. The proportion of women (25.1%) was noticeably higher than men (8.9%), and while the figures for men showed little difference across the six countries, varying from 6% in Egypt to 12% in Iraq and Morocco, women’s attitudes showed much greater variation, ranging from 10% in Egypt and Libya to over a third in Jordan, Iraq and Morocco. But they were still a relatively small minority.
 

There appeared to be fairly strong support for gender equality in education and for married women working outside the home, though relatively less for women being involved in politics. Strong support, however, remained for Islamic family law, which in most current interpretations treats women as second-class citizens when it comes to marriage, divorce, children and inheritance.
 

Support for sharia law

Men and women across the six countries wanted their constitution to enshrine sharia as the main source of law, although there is no single understanding of what this entails. While most Arab countries ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, most entered reservations to clauses relating to family law. Differences between the sexes were slight here, and in Jordan and Libya women appeared even more conservative than men.

So why do a clear majority of women support a second-class status for themselves? In the West, the resilience of such attitudes is often attributed to a patriarchal “essence” of Islam. Indeed, influential Islamist actors across the region – including governments – often make the very same claim. However, historians and others have shown that the conception of gender rights has not been constant across the Arab world.

It is clear that progress was made in the 19th and 20th centuries, but reversed in the late 20th century with an increase in conservatism perhaps since the neoliberal “open door’ (infitah) reforms of the 1980s and a superficial commitment to democracy. In addition, the idea that Islam is a barrier to gender equality is contradicted by the progress being made in other Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh and Senegal.

Women’s advocacy in the region is caught in a bind. On the one hand, male-dominated conservative Islamist leaderships are perfectly happy to accept a status quo that discriminates. On the other, a tokenistic gender equality is promoted by some regimes seeking to appease Western governments’ demands. Plus, the gradual retreat of Arab states from the provision of essential social services created the conditions for a de facto cooperation between state and religious groups: regimes accepted growing Islamist influence in return for welfare services they were no longer willing to supply.

Patriarchal attitudes persist not because Islam is incompatible with gender equality, but because in most Arab countries since the 1970s, progressive forces have been undermined by supposedly "secular” regimes. Surveys show that conservative gender attitudes are entrenched, but also that people remain profoundly dissatisfied with their ruling elites for precisely the same reasons for which they protested in 2010-2011.

During the Arab Spring, what protesters demanded was not just the removal of corrupt leaders, but an end to a system based on increasing economic injustice and political marginalisation, and held together by repression. Gender equality is an essential part of achieving that goal.

Pamela Abbott, Director of the Centre for Global Development and Honorary Professor of Sociology, University of Aberdeen and Andrea Teti, Director, Centre for Global Security and Governance, University of Aberdeen
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Image credit: Rana Magdy

Six years have passed since that fateful day on January 25, a day that changed Egypt.Two years ago, as Egypt started palpably plummeting into a terrible state, people started asking: “Was it worth it?” The question lingers with no definitive answer till this day.

How did we arrive at this state? After having witnessed the events leading up to this point in time, I can no longer offer a political analysis of the situation without factoring in psychological changes that affected the various sections of Egyptian society.

The most significant changes that took place over the past few years were within people’s minds, more so than in policy, both political and economic. People’s beliefs and emotions form their motivations which shape today’s political arena. People’s drives are a result of their mental and emotional changes. Resistance to the status quo comes from within the mind, as does acceptance.

This is the battle we see before us today, a battle of minds and will.
 

The seed

Six years ago, when people took to the streets to protest, they were not fully aware of how deep the rabbit hole went. They were not aware of the depths of corruption and the lengths those in power would go to in order to safeguard their interests. People viewed Egypt’s institutions as capable of change and underestimated the formidable bonds of corrupt interests that were more powerful than a revolution.

When people began protesting on January 25, they were motivated by a handful of incidents that proved to be the tip of the iceberg of endemic corruption.

A few examples of the major events that led to the January 25 and January 28 protests were: the cold blooded murder of Khaled Said by the police and attempts by forensics, prosecution and an array of other Egyptian institutions to cover it up; and the unabashed wide scale election fraud in 2010 by the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).

Numerous other factors also contributed to people’s general sense of dissatisfaction, some of which were: government incompetence and corruption, the cut back on welfare, Mubarak’s succession plan to hand over power to his son Gamal Mubarak, extortion of the middle class by security agencies and mass income inequality.

What initially started out as calls to end corruption and police brutality rapidly turned into chants for the removal of Mubarak.

These reasons for disgruntlement built up over time and became unbearable in 2010, and when Tunisia managed to remove Ben Ali, the people became motivated to join the planned protests to decry police brutality on January 25. This date was symbolically chosen because it was ‘Police Day’ – a national holiday.

What initially started out as calls to end corruption and police brutality rapidly turned into chants for the removal of Mubarak. It’s true that from day one people chanted, “The people want to bring down the regime”, but it was transformed into real resolve only after having been provoked by the police’s brutal response to protests.

Perhaps people’s ignorance of the measures the regime would take to maintain its interests is why the people continued to escalate and didn’t back down, hoping that change would take place once and for all. After all, it seemed ridiculous at the time that the regime’s response to calls of ending police violence and brutality was more violence and brutality.
 

The roots

Image credit: Rana Magdy

The role of journalism slightly changes under oppressive regimes. These regimes are not merely built on brutality and repression, but on lies to justify the necessity of the crimes committed against the people.Real journalism is about conveying the factual story within a context of some moral guidelines. In other words, at the risk of oversimplifying, real journalism is about spreading the truth. But truth that counters an oppressive regime’s lies becomes an instant enemy and so do its bearers.

In this manner, I consider myself part of the movement to overhaul Egypt’s corrupt political system by exposing crimes and lies spread by the regime. Anyone who has simply reported on facts and is not afraid to challenge the official narrative is part of that movement.

It is also in this vein that I consider any journalist who has truthfully reported events that took place within the context of Egypt’s revolution part of that movement. Because even if they claim neutrality, a truthful account would naturally be biased against the oppressor.

The movement that came to life as a product of January 25, in its purest form, became a fight for truth, rights and justice. Those referred to as ‘revolutionaries’ are just ordinary people who managed to believe in this fight in some way or another.

It is this adamant rejection of the reality of the regime’s ugly crimes that is most conducive to despair.

In a sense, the greatest triumph of January 25 was to lay bare the truth about Egypt’s rulers and institutions, and to galvanize blocks of citizens into resiliently exposing that truth. Yet the greatest disappointment remains that facts are not enough to set things right. This is possibly a global trend with the rise of racism and intolerance.

Now, it’s back to a battle that is shaped by people’s emotions and mental state rather than by the facts at hand. In Egypt, denial runs deep and people would sooner turn their backs on incontrovertible facts than change their minds.

It is this adamant rejection of the reality of the regime’s ugly crimes that is most conducive to despair. To see a nation full of brainwashed individuals who can no longer engage logically in an argument or acknowledge facts presented to them paints the bleakest of all pictures.

Growing up I never imagined dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in color. I imagined them in morbid colors, sometimes in black and white but mostly in sepia, a desert shade where air was polluted distorting nature’s colors.

Yet here I am living through the darkest page in Egypt’s modern history and I can still see my world in color. It’s only when I remember everything that we have been through that the memories all turn really dark once again, with a heavy burden of sadness and helplessness taking over my senses.
 

The pests

It is difficult to meaningfully list all the events that took place over the past six years that led us here, but there are a few key aspects of the struggle that have remained a constant thread.

There was never any democratic transition at any point, even with the relatively fraud free elections that brought Mohamed Morsi in as president. Morsi was negotiated into presidency and the results were announced later than scheduled on account of that.

There were no attempts for the creation of independent state institutions to instill checks and balances – neither by SCAF, Morsi, Adly Mansour, or Sisi. What did exist, at intermittent times, is true power for the people on the ground pushing for change, but this was never translated into power within national institutions.

Egypt has been kept on a tight leash with the army’s grip on power ensuring the protection of its military economic empire as its primary mandate.

Egypt has been kept on a tight leash with the army’s grip on power ensuring the protection of its military economic empire as its primary mandate.

The goal of the Egyptian security apparatus has been to quell the protests against rulers. With the failure of the democratic movement to create a sustainable framework, Egypt’s blueprint for moving forward became entirely security based.

That roadmap was accompanied by a revenge agenda, mainly targeting the people, for daring to question their leaders. Young people taking to the streets, revolutionaries continuing to push for change and the Muslim Brotherhood who dared envision themselves in power have been the prime targets.

A snapshot of today’s Egypt is unpleasant. The leadership is reckless with its resources, benefiting the corrupt at the expense of people.

An Italian researcher Giulio Regeni murdered by Egyptian security forces. Egypt’s legendary football star Mohamed Abutrika along with over 1500 others arbitrarily placed on a terror list. Political prisoners are in the thousands.

The police are killing with impunity and abusing their positions. The judiciary and public prosecution have no structural independence, often politicized or coerced. The military is expanding its economic empire, rigging the economy for its benefit.

Minorities such as Copts, Nubians, Shiite Muslims, north Sinai Bedouins are still discriminated against with no signs of a move towards equal rights. Loan agreements are being made without any consideration of the effect they will have on future generations. Prices have doubled and the pound’s purchasing power has greatly diminished. The media is being strictly controlled and all critical voices are being silenced.

The opposition is being targeted by all means available: prison, military trials, asset freezing, forced disappearances, assault on privacy by leaking private phone conversations, physical assault, threats, etc… pretty much the full range of the arsenal available to despotic regimes.

In many discussions about the Egyptian revolution, the narrative revolves around existing structures of power that participated, such as the military, the NDP and the Muslim Brotherhood. These structures certainly had a role to play and their motivations affected the outcome, but it was not only these organized structures that created the present context.
 

The fight

Image credit: Rana Magdy

I would argue that it was more the unorganized and their individual, yet collective, actions and decisions. Take for example Mohamed Mostafa “Karkea”, the Ultras fan and tennis champion who left his home to join protesters when they were being shot at by the army in December 2011. He was in turn killed by the army.Or Mina Danial who believed in a secular state yet joined the march to Maspero in October 2011, because he believed that all citizens must leave their closed communities and demand equality for all as citizens of this country. Mina was killed in what became infamously known as the Maspero massacre.

Maybe all these attempts failed to bring about the demands of their bearers, however, those and countless others helped shape what the revolution is: a battle of minds.
The activists who foresaw a military overtake and marched to Al Kobba Palace on July 2, 2013 denouncing both Morsi’s undemocratic trajectory and the foreseeable military rule. Many were detained and put on military trial.

Or the activists who decried military trials for civilians while the constitution was being written, and were in turn punished by being thrown in jail.

Maybe all these attempts failed to bring about the demands of their bearers, however, those and countless others helped shape what the revolution is: a battle of minds.

Similarly, those who fell prey to the regime’s counter narrative helped shape the counter revolution. You hear them say the same things, parroted over and over, to justify crimes.

They recycle phrases such as, “at least we’re better than Syria and Iraq”, “Egypt is fighting a war on terror”, “Sisi saved Egypt” and countless other statements that cannot withstand the test of facts and logic.

The middle class, divided between calls for justice and their fear of losing what they already have, has certainly shaped this arena. The poor are caught between those promising religious piety and those promising protection under a banner of nationalism. Of course, neither of these promises are fulfilled, but their faith in what could come next helped shape the context in which we’re now living.

When people rose up six years ago, they only saw dreams of a better country. Now fear and violence cloud their vision. The middle class that rose up against the murder of Khaled Said delivered a clear message, that they too could be killed at any point like Khaled Said. Their murderers would be protected by state institutions much like the murderers of Khaled Said. In short, the response to the middle class was: “Indeed, you are all Khaled Said”, and remains so.

Egypt is now a land of fear and oppression butFull Blurb a few brave souls remain behind bars as others fight for truth and justice.

Egypt is now a land of fear and oppression but a few brave souls remain behind bars as others fight for truth and justice. However, the battle now is also against people’s fear and denial.

Six years ago, there was no collective consciousness that there were others who saw the same reality of corruption, greed and oppression.

Six years on, there is an ambiguously shaped entity referred to as ‘the revolution’ whose members are possibly in hundreds of thousands, yet unable to bring about many of its dreams.

Six years on, ‘the revolution’ brought on an awareness and a will to fight oppressive structures that opened up the gates of hell.

The power of the revolution was not in the political changes it brought about but on the influence it exerted on each individual en masse. In a sense, it was a collective journey experienced personally by each individual.

The true cost of that journey of awakening and awareness was to antagonize the oppressive powers into resisting a vision of a country without their oppression.

The result is what we see today, an era of political, cultural and economic decadence and a body of resistance that remains scattered, crushed, targeted and defamed yet resilient and adamant.

Was it worth it? Perhaps that remains debatable, depending on each individual’s personal journey and perspective.

(Wael Eskandar is an independent journalist and blogger based in Cairo. He is a frequent commentator on Egyptian politics and has written for Ahram Online, Al-Monitor, Daily News Egypt, Counterpunch, Middle East Institute, Atlantic Council: Egypt Source and Jadaliyya, among others. He has also contributed to Egypt's Kazeboon campaign and other projects that focus on youth and digital information. Eskandar has made media appearances for numerous news channels including France 24, Russia Today, Al Jazeera and Alhurra).

(This article was first published on openDemocracy).

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An Egyptian anti-Mubarak protesters sleeps on the wheels of a tank in Tahrir square, Cairo. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

The 2016 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR) by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was focused on the region’s youth – those aged between 15 and 29 – a significant group that keeps on growing. This is the first report of its kind to be released after the Arab Spring, and details how young people are more politically aware and motivated to achieve their civil and human rights. Yet they face considerable challenges, primarily economic and security-related. The poor economic planning by the existing regimes is only prolonging and worsening these problems, as a more politically-conscious population grows.
 

The unemployment plague

Youth unemployment among those aged between 15 and 24 was at its highest in 2014, at almost 30%, more than double the global average. By 2019, an even greater disparity will emerge, as estimates project the global average to decline, with the Arab world’s rate increasing steadily. Considering that the region’s population growth is the largest worldwide, over 60 million jobs will need to be created by 2020 simply to stabilize youth unemployment.
 

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Decolonizing Gender in the Arab World  
My research has sought to critically engage with two core assumptions underpinning the formulation of such a paradox. The first assumption is the reduction of women’s activism to the act of resisting patriarchy. This assumption is embedded within the concept of the private/public divide, whereby feminists argue that women are relegated to the private sphere, whilst men dominate the public sphere. This division becomes problematic when we look at evidence from the Arab world, where women’s participation has been encouraged as a means and marker of modernization. Since the end of the nineteenth century, nationalist discourse across the Middle East constructed the figure of a so-called new woman, who was educated and publicly visible. In this context, middle class and elite women began to enter public life, primarily by founding charitable associations but later also creating women’s unions that called for greater rights for women within marriage and widened women’s access to education. These women were not merely ‘resisting patriarchy’ but rather saw themselves as contributing to the struggle against ‘backwardness’ and for the modernization of the nation. In particular, women’s visibility became a key marker of identity for the emerging middle classes and an embodiment of the notion of ‘middle class modernity’ [2].

The second assumption underpinning the question of women’s rights in the Arab world is embedded within a long-standing Orientalist epistemology that sees women’s condition as a marker of the Arab world’s backwardness. On this basis, a popular answer amongst Western commentators to why women’s activism has not resulted in progress in women’s rights has come to be ‘because of the resilience of Arab patriarchy.’ This answer is problematic because of the way it reduces the causes of women’s subordination to Arab cultural values and beliefs, implying that the ‘West’ sets the civilisational standard for women’s rights. Moreover, arguments about the deficient nature of Arab culture with regards to women completely erase structures of power based particularly on class and nationality and ignore the role of global political economy and geopolitics in the reproduction of these intersecting hierarchies. Therefore, to formulate the title of this article as ‘How the West Undermined Women’s Rights in the Arab World’ is not to promise an exposé of Western government covert operations but rather to problematise, from the start, the way that we commonly think about women’s rights and women’s activism in the Arab world. In particular, I wish to highlight the geopolitical dimensions in the construction of gender norms and the resistance to them, as well as to extend our understanding of women’s rights beyond laws and public policies to include the ways in which women publicly subvert and resignify gender norms through their public participation.

The Rise of Radical Movements after 1967
This article focuses on the period from 1967 until the 1980s, in which the Arab world saw a rise of radical and revolutionary movements, challenging the political and geopolitical status quo, and their subsequent defeat by Western allies in the region (in particular, the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi Arabian and Israeli regimes). As we commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Arab uprisings, it is important to reflect on the political turmoil and contentious politics unleashed after 1967, which reveal some interesting parallels to the period from 2011 until 2013. 

The massive defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war brought into question the legitimacy of the pan-Arab project and led to a new era in Arab politics. Much has been written on the military and political dimensions of the 1967 war (amongst others, Louis and Shlaim)[3] as well as on the intellectual soul searching that followed the massive defeat.[4] However, there has been almost no attention paid to the gendered implications of the defeat. This is significant not only because it marginalizes the particular experiences of women and indeed men as gendered subjects and citizens. It is also significant because the 1967 defeat created a new opportunity for women to transgress the state feminist gender norms that had been integral to post-independence state building.

In Egypt, the profound shock of the 1967 defeat unleashed new oppositional movements, at the center of which was the student movement. It was initially sparked by outrage at the lenient prison sentences handed down to the army generals responsible for Egypt’s defeat in the war. However, the demands of the students went much further, including calls for greater political freedoms as well as the removal of intelligence and police from university campuses.[5] In January 1972, thousands of students participated in demonstrations, leading to a sit-in in Tahrir Square. The students were forcibly dispersed the following day and some were arrested. However, radical students continued to raise their national and political demands, in addition to protesting against the arrest of their colleagues.

Within these leftist and nationalist movements, issues of women’s rights and liberation were subordinated to the national and political goals of resisting imperialism and authoritarianism, fighting for social justice, and liberating Palestine. Whilst movement leaders believed that women should be mobilised to participate in the public sphere as a means of modernizing Arab societies, they ignored gender inequality within the private sphere.[6]

Yet these movements successfully mobilized young women into political activism on an unprecedented level. The post-1967 political turmoil provided opportunities for young women to transgress dominant gender norms. Egyptian human rights activist Aida Seif al-Dawla recalls being at university during the height of the Egyptian student movement:
“I remember I did things then, which now I am thinking about, I would never do them again […] You just walked into a lecture room and [would say]… “What the hell are you doing sitting in the lecture room? You should join the movement!” […] and then you walk out, and it’s so embarrassing to think about….”

The West is [not] an agent of progress and women’s rights in the Arab world. Rather, as a result of their geopolitical interests, they have supported regimes that have clamped down on revolutionary and radical popular movements and suppressed women’s embodiments of radical femininities. Over the long term, the demise of radical, secular movements has led to a decoupling of secular women’s rights agendas from local popular projects, paving the way for their co-option and instrumentalisation by authoritarian regimes and international actors and rendering secular women’s rights activists vulnerable to accusations of representing foreign agendas. Women activists face similar dangers today in the context of an ongoing counter-revolution across the Arab world. 

Another activist was Hala Shukrallah, who was born in Cairo in 1954, but had spent a large part of her youth in Canada, where her father was an ambassador for the Arab League. She returned to Egypt in 1971 and was propelled into activism by the arrest of her brothers, who were active in the student movement. Despite her young age, she became one of the leaders of the movement of the families of the arrested. She recalls a meeting with the speaker of the parliament, who knew her father very well:  
“so he started speaking very personally with me, “Oh Hala, I have known you since you were a child,” So I told him, “Please, be very professional.” And he was very upset about it. I of course was very rude. But anyway, that was natural for the time”. 

The memories of many of the women I interviewed suggest a social-political environment in flux in the period after the 1967 defeat. Diverse social and political movements had emerged to challenge the political, geopolitical and social status quo. Whilst ideologically, these movements had problematic attitudes to gender equality, nevertheless, they provided a terrain upon which young, middle class women could subvert gendered hierarchies and transgress dominant norms of gendered respectability, by participating in street demonstrations, joining political groups, challenging authority, and disobeying parents. Some were even arrested. In this way, women aligned their performances of radical new gender constructs with resistance to the socio-political and geopolitical status quo.

The Counter-Revolution
However, this post-1967 revolutionary wave in the Arab countries was eventually defeated by Western allies in the region. In particular, US support for Egypt amounted to billions of dollars in aid after President Anwar al-Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel in 1979.[7] The counter-revolution not only targeted radical political forces but also women and gender.

President Sadat first attempted to undermine radical political movements by allowing Islamists to operate openly on university campuses, in contrast to the rule of his predecessor Gamal Abdel-Nasser, under whom Islamists had been imprisoned and even executed.[8] Women’s bodies and gender norms were central to this counter-revolution. Aida Seif al-Dawla recalls that the Islamists took over the student union in 1975 and began to advertise Islamic dress at reduced cost: “And it was during that time […] [that] I got to know a couple of young women, both of them were veiled and we got on well and so […] they started saying, ‘why don’t you put [on] the veil’.” 

Aida also remembers the conflicts between Islamists and other students:
“Yeah, so those final years in university, there were the Islamists on the one hand and the Nasserists on the other hand. And the confrontations were violent, […] students got beaten up. Of course, we as women, we did not get beaten up. I didn’t at least. But we received a lot of abuse. […] you know calling us ‘bitches’ and ‘whores’ and that ‘we are after husbands’ and that’s why we are involved in politics and stuff like that. So I was happy to graduate.”

Sadat’s support for Islamist students and his broader rapprochement with political Islamists was not only a way to counter the influence of Nasserist and leftist political groups but also to signal a clear break from Nasser’s secular modernizing regime, central to which had been state feminism. Sadat undermined some of the gains for middle class women through the introduction of infitah or economic reforms privileging the private sector. The relative decline in public sector wages as a consequence of infitah disproportionately impacted women, for whom the public sector was the employer of first choice. For the first time, and in a marked departure from the Nasserist era, there were public debates questioning the desirability of women working, and the government “offered numerous incentives [to women] to take a leave of absence without pay to raise their children and/or to work on a part-time basis”.[9] Such attitudes reflected growing social conservatism, which was being encouraged by Islamists.

Popular resistance to infitah culminated in the 1977 uprising, called the ‘bread riots’ in Western media, or the ‘bread uprising’ by Egyptians. The protests were triggered by the government’s announcement of the removal of subsidies on several basic commodities, including sugar, bread and rice, as well as reductions in state salaries, which led to a doubling of prices over night. On 17 January, workers walked out of their factories, and were later joined by thousands of students, civil servants, and other Egyptians, who marched on downtown Cairo. Protests spread throughout the country.
All in all, 160 demonstrators were killed and eight hundred injured by security forces.[10]. Thousands of leftists were rounded up and imprisoned, accused of attempting to overthrow the regime.[11] Many were released without charge, but not before having spent up to 6 months in administrative detention.[12] Human rights activist Magda Adli, then a student of medicine at Al-Azhar University, was one of about twenty individuals arrested for her involvement in the uprising and spent more than a year in prison. 

Within these leftist and nationalist movements, issues of women’s rights and liberation were subordinated to the national and political goals of resisting imperialism and authoritarianism, fighting for social justice, and liberating Palestine. Whilst movement leaders believed that women should be mobilised to participate in the public sphere as a means of modernizing Arab societies, they ignored gender inequality within the private sphere.

“I was arrested at university and I was charged with attempts to overthrow the regime and joining a secret organization and all the rest of the list of accusations by the state security that is still used until now. I spent fourteen or fifteen months in jail. […] So, that was a year lost from university […] And, I was sentenced to three years in jail, along with other people too, around twenty people were sentenced, […]  but I didn't do the rest of the time… I was under surveillance by the state security all the time even when I was doing my exams… and every new case that state security had against political activists or socialists or whomever, I was wanted for interrogation, […] So, I was playing cat and mouse with the state security all the time, so they couldn't catch me although I was charged with three cases after that, until I graduated.”  

The wide scale clampdown on activists after 1977 heralded the end of the leftist student movement as a force within Egyptian politics. Many of the underground Marxist organizations began to break up. Similar to what we have seen in Egypt since the summer of 2013, many activists became disillusioned and withdrew from public activism. Many took time out to read, pursue careers or doctoral studies abroad, reflecting upon and revising their previous political-ideological beliefs. Women who attended university in the 1980s remarked to me that there was a near absence of political activism on Egyptian campuses beyond Islamist student groups.

Decoupling of Women’s Rights Agendas and Activism from Popular Struggles
A central part of the counter-revolution was the restoration of the gender status quo ante, in which women were expected to comply with gendered hierarchies and notions of female respectability. However, this did not end women’s public involvement. Perhaps paradoxically, women’s independent organizations and initiatives began to flourish in the aftermath of the counter-revolution. The ‘New Woman’ study group, which later became the New Woman Foundation, was started by former members of the student movement in order to understand women’s specific subordination. Nawal El-Saadawi established the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, raising the issue of violence against women. In 1985, a group of women activists and lawyers created a coalition against the repeal of the relatively progressive 1979 amendments to the personal status law, amongst other initiatives in the 1980s (see Al-Ali for further details).[13] 

The re-emergence of women’s independent associations in Egypt, for the first time since the 1950s, gave space to women to articulate a new gender discourse that escaped the problematic subordination of women’s issues within revolutionary and radical ideologies. However, in a context where popular forces were defeated and political opposition groups, with the exception of the Islamists, were weak, it also led to the isolation of women’s rights agendas within domestic and regional politics. This isolation was exacerbated by the increasing ‘NGOisation’ of the women’s movements after 1990[14], which did not support the mobilisation of wider constituencies. Moreover, women’s rights demands became delegitimised by the fact that the Egyptian regime selectively instrumentalised women’s rights and attempted to co-opt women’s organizations, through the National Council for Women for example. This was part of projecting a ‘modern’ image abroad and securitising women’s rights within the US-led alliance against ‘terrorism’. [15]

It is therefore unsurprising that when popular movements began to emerge after 2000, initially sparked by the Second Palestinian Intifada, women’s rights issues were not on the agenda. Women were highly visible in these movements, yet, unlike the revolutionary movements after 1967, there was almost no attempt to include ‘the woman question’ within these movements’ opposition to US imperialism, neo-liberalism and authoritarianism.

Repopularising and Depopularising Women’s Rights after 2011
It was only between 2011 and 2013 that women were able to re-insert the ‘woman question’ back into popular movements. In response to threats to women’s rights and increasing violence against women activists, under the rule of SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood, mass-based women’s organizing emerged outside of the established women’s NGOs. Egyptian women activists were at the forefront of struggles for social justice and democracy in post-Mubarak Egypt, whilst also raising gender-specific demands with regards to women’s participation and bodily integrity. Indeed, they successfully integrated the transformation of gender norms into demands for broader socio-political transformations (see various chapters in El Said, Meari and Pratt).[16]

However, the achievements of women’s independent, mass activism have been undermined by the political polarisation and increasing authoritarianism seen since the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi in July 2013. Whilst the post-July 2013 regime has moved to extend women’s rights through the constitution and anti-sexual harassment law of 2014, it has also severely restricted freedom of association and expression. In this way, a new patriarchal bargain is crucial to the counter-revolution, in which the regime protects women’s rights, and in return, women must abandon their freedom to organize and define their own agenda. As I wrote last year, activists are facing a huge challenge in their simultaneous attempts to maintain their dynamic paradigm for gender justice, to resist state cooptation and top-down impositions, and to embed revolutionary gender constructs from the grassroots-upwards.

Conclusion
In this article I aimed to problematise two assumptions about women’s activism and women’s rights in the Arab world. First, I have attempted to expand our concept of women’s agency beyond resistance to patriarchy and to demonstrate the ways in which the subversion and re-signification of gender norms were also part of a counter-hegemonic movement against the post-1967 socio-political and geopolitical order. In other words, women’s participation in radical movements embodied socio-political transformation, including the transformation of gender norms. In this respect, we see parallels in the emergence of mass-based women’s activism as part of revolutionary struggles after 2011.

Second, I have aimed to problematise the notion that the West is an agent of progress and women’s rights in the Arab world. Rather, as a result of their geopolitical interests, they have supported regimes that have clamped down on revolutionary and radical popular movements and suppressed women’s embodiments of radical femininities. Over the long term, the demise of radical, secular movements has led to a decoupling of secular women’s rights agendas from local popular projects, paving the way for their co-option and instrumentalisation by authoritarian regimes and international actors and rendering secular women’s rights activists vulnerable to accusations of representing foreign agendas. Women activists face similar dangers today in the context of an ongoing counter-revolution across the Arab world. 

[This article is a condensed version of a lecture of the same name given at LSE Middle East Centre on 20 January 2016. The longer lecture also discusses Lebanon and Jordan. A podcast of the lecture can be heard here.The lecture is based on some of the material from a forthcoming book on women’s activism in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. A digital archive of all the interviews conducted for this research will be made publicly available alongside the publication of the book].

(This article has been reproduced with permission from Jadaliyya ezine). 
 

References
[1] Abu-Lughod, Lila (1998) Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[2] Watenpaugh, Keith David (2006) Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
[3] Louis, Wm. Roger and Avi Shlaim, eds. (2012). The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[4] Ajami, Fouad (1981) The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[5] Abdalla, Ahmed (1985) The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923-1973, London: Saqi Books, pp. 151-153.
[6] Hasso, Frances S. (2000) Modernity and Gender in Arab Accounts of the 1948 and 1967 Defeats, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 32: 4, pp. 491-510.
[7] Brownlee, Jason (2012) Democracy Prevention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[8] Abdalla, Ahmed (1985) The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923-1973, London: Saqi Books. Ayubi, Nazih (1991) Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World, London: Routledge. Gerges, Fawaz (2012) The Transformation of Arab Politics: Disentangling Myth from Reality, in Louis, Wm. Roger and Avi Shlaim, eds. The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 285-314.
[9] Hatem, Mervat (1992) Economic and Political Liberation in Egypt and the Demise of State Feminism, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 24:2, pp. 231-251.
[10] Kandil, Hazem (2012) Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt, London: Verso Books, p. 169
[11] Hirst, David (1977) Egyptians Riot over Price Rises, The Guardian, January 19, p. 1. Stevens, Janet (1978) Political Repression in Egypt, Middle East Research and Information Project Report, no. 66, pp. 18-21.
[12] Stevens, Janet (1978) Political Repression in Egypt, Middle East Research and Information Project Report, no. 66, pp. 18-21.
[13] Al-Ali, Nadje Sadig (2000) Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East: The Egyptian Women’s Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[14] Jad, Islah (2004) The NGO-ization of the Arab Women’s Movements, IDS Bulletin, 35:4, pp. 34-42.
[15] Pratt, Nicola (2012) The Gender Logics of Resistance to the ‘War on Terror’: constructing sex–gender difference through the erasure of patriarchy in the Middle East, Third World Quarterly, 33:10, pp. 1821-1836.
[16] El Said, Maha, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt, eds. Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World, London: Zed.
 

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