Celebrating Revolution Day in Tunisia. Demotix/ Chedly Ben Ibrahim. All rights reserved.“Out
of the revolution and counter-revolution…was born the dialectical movement and
counter-movement of history which bears men on its irresistible flow, like a
powerful undercurrent, to which they must surrender the very moment they
attempt to establish freedom on earth.” Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
Today marks five
years since the start of Tunisia’s revolution. 17 December 2010 was a day like
every other, except for one act that transformed it into the beginning of an extraordinary
set of events.
Tunisia’s
revolution and the ensuing wave of protests that swept the Arab world caught
the world by surprise. Much ink has been spilt in the last five years in an
attempt to piece together a genealogy of this upsurge of dissent, seeking to
trace the roots of an earthquake that emerged from the fertile inner reaches of
Tunisia’s rural and deprived regions. While academics debate whether the
determinant factors were economic, social, political, demographic or
technological, what matters for those who lived them is that these uprisings
laid bare the lived experiences of the people of this region and put their
demands at the heart of political events, rendering the invisible visible.
The
Tunisian revolution started with the story of one man, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose
self-immolation lit the flame of dissent and struggle. His act would have
remained an isolated act of desperate protestation at injustice, just like the
tens of others who had set themselves on fire before him in similar conditions,
had it not been for the acts of others who transformed it into a nation-wide call
for freedom, justice and dignity.
What
captures the essence of the uprisings of 2011 is that they were a moment of a reassertion of people and of politics from below. Through
collective mobilisation, people created a moment so powerful that it toppled
rulers and created the biggest political change in the region since decolonisation.
The uprisings had no master narrative – they were a series of micronarratives
produced by ordinary people. What made the scenes so inspiring was precisely
this vibrant representation of all parts of society, What
made the scenes so inspiring was precisely this vibrant representation of all
parts of society. female and male, young and old,
rural and urban, poor and wealthy, religious and secular, people of all walks
of life – the unemployed, farmers, factory workers, lawyers, doctors, housewives,
students, doctors. This desectorialised collaborative effort created a moment in
which fiction was exposed, power was redefined and existing political and
analytical frameworks shattered.
The first fiction to be shattered was that of the ‘Arab
exception’. These events were made more extraordinary by the fact that they unfolded
in a region long considered immune to the democratic waves that had swept
across other regions, led by people who, it turned out, craved freedom,
dignity, and social justice as profoundly as other peoples. The slogan invented
in Tunisia and which spread throughout the region was “the people wants the
fall of the regime”, a cry that at once constituted and asserted the existence
of one people, who had the capacity to express a collective will and who
demanded to be heard. This was an inconvenient truth for some – certainly for authoritarian
rulers in the region, who had repressed and depressed their people into
submission, crushing resistance through coercion and cooptation. This… created a moment in which fiction was exposed, power was redefined and existing political and analytical frameworks shattered.
The second shattered fiction was that of the ‘security pact’, an
arrangement by which Arab societies were expected to trade freedom, political
inclusion and human rights in return for security and economic growth. This was
nowhere exemplified better than in Ben Ali’s Tunisia, in which the scarecrow of
disorder and instability were regularly brandished to silence opponents – in
the 1990s by framing government repression as a response to an ‘Islamist threat’
to state and society, and then in the 2000s shifting to the fight against terrorism, making full use of the opportunities provided by the global
‘War on Terror’.
In exchange for obedience, the regime offered an ‘economic
miracle’ built on macro-economically sound policies, neoliberal reforms and ‘good
governance’, a discourse that convinced most international financial
institutions and foreign governments. This ‘miracle’ turned out to be a mirage
based on fictitious economic data, hiding a reality of gross inequalities,
pervasive corruption and economic mismanagement that created mass structural unemployment,
regional disparities and economic insecurity for vast parts of society. The security
pact thus failed to deliver on its own promises, putting paid to the notion
that the economic could be separated from the
political, and that stability and security could
be viewed in isolation from a wider notion of human security and wellbeing.
The third fiction shattered by the Arab uprisings is that the
fate of Arab nations is dictated by external actors and allows no possibility
for autonomy or change. The past century of Arab political and intellectual
discourse has been saturated with a keen awareness that decisions about this
part of the world are taken somewhere far removed from its people – whether by
rulers who are unrepresentative of their wishes or by global powers whose
interests far outweigh the interests of the region’s 300 million inhabitants. A
deep sense of humiliated fatalism and strangled sovereignty made it difficult
to even imagine alternative political realities. A
deep sense of humiliated fatalism and strangled sovereignty made it difficult
to even imagine alternative political realities. The Arab uprisings threw macropolitics out of the window in
favour of “people politics” – the politics of individual actions, grassroots mobilisation,
networks and communication. The future, it turned out, was not history waiting
to be written by others, but a new reality to be forged through collaborative
action.
This splintering of the fictions that
had sustained decades of dictatorship has opened up an intense struggle in the
Arab world. Every revolution splits society into those who embrace change and
those who find change deeply threatening. As Hannah Arendt noted, “counter-revolution…has always remained bound to revolution as
reaction is bound to action”. We see the reassertion of
authoritarian rule across the region, supported by regional and global
resources, as the feloul (remnants of the old regime) have
staged a comeback that has proven far more organised, ruthless and
well-resourced than expected.
The deep vortex of violence into which the Arab world has
descended in recent years is a result of this intense struggle between revolution
and counter-revolution, in which every instrument of war is put to use. We have
witnessed the use of every trick in the counter-revolutionary rulebook,We have witnessed the use of every trick in the
counter-revolutionary rulebook starting with the centuries-old
“divide-and-rule” technique. starting with the centuries-old “divide-and-rule”
technique of fragmenting society into groups and sub-groups, selectively arming
or privileging certain groups or sub-groups and persecuting others. The activation
of ethnic and sectarian identities as markers of economic or social privilege
and marginalization has been deftly deployed by authoritarian rulers across the
Arab political landscape, from Yemen and Egypt, through to Syria and Iraq.
Alongside these traditional
techniques, we see the more cutting-edge tactics exemplified by sophisticated
political and media propaganda designed to attack the foundations of support
for democratic change. These campaigns construct and propagate an image of the
revolution as a pestilence that has brought only instability, violence and
malaise. The revolution is blamed
for every ill in society from unemployment and poverty to disorder, littering
and congestion.
No mention is made of the causes of
these problems, which existed long before the revolution. Instead, an incessant
onslaught of rumours, misinformation and complaints is unleashed on the
population, in a daily campaign of psychological warfare. It seeks to destroy
any belief ordinary people have in the possibility of change. More dangerously,
it seeks to destroy any belief people have in themselves, blaming them for
daring to rise up to challenge the status quo, and for having the arrogance to
believe they could have a say in governing their own affairs. The aim of the
counter-revolution campaign is to make clear to people that they only have one
choice – between dictatorship, security and stability on one hand, and democracy,
chaos and terror on the other. The rise of extremist groups such as ISIS plays
perfectly into this narrative, emerging as a product of the counter-revolution and a
driver of it. These political and media campaigns construct and propagate an image of the revolution as a pestilence that has brought only instability, violence and malaise.
However, while we may be in the counter-revolutionary moment, it
is too early to declare its victory quite yet. While today we find ourselves
debating whether or not those moments in 2011 were truly ‘revolutions’, they
have undoubtedly created revolutionaries – ordinary people who may not have
been politically engaged before the uprisings but who are now sensitised to the
repressive system of authoritarian power and who are resisting it through their
own forms of political agency, individually or collectively, by word or deed,
in the real and online worlds. The uprisings have given birth to a generation
of young people born under dictatorship who witnessed a crack in the
authoritarian wall split open and caught a glimpse of the other side.
The challenge we face now is how to reconstruct the collective voice
that emerged during the Arab uprisings. Despite the diversity of visions, this
collective voice did converge on shared goals – political accountability, a say
for the people in electing their rulers, fighting corruption, putting public resources
and institutions at the service of the public and not a narrow circle of
families and clans.
The challenge is how to build and sustain strong social
movements that can keep alive the key demands of the revolutions. Such
movements are desperately needed to maintain the push for change through the
long dark days of struggle ahead. They have a vital role even once dictatorial
regimes are overthrown, in order to push for the dismantling of repressive
authoritarian structures that continue to monopolise control over society and
resist all reform. The rise of extremist groups such as ISIS plays perfectly into this narrative.
While the five year anniversary of the spark of the Arab
uprisings will inevitably unleash a wave of analyses, explanations and
lamentations about the shape that events have taken, it is simply too early to
assess changes or predict outcomes. What is certain is uncertainty – that the
status quo of the region, built on fictions of stability without human rights
and growth without economic inclusion, has been shattered.
It is not ordinary people who made the choice to unleash the
forces of sectarianism, violence and chaos. Their
cries of “silmiyya, silmiyya” [“peaceful, peaceful”) on the streets were
drowned out by the best response their regimes knew – coercion through violence
and terror. It was the choice of authoritarian regimes of the region who,
for the most part, resisted reform for decades and seek to prevent change, at
whatever cost. While we may well be faced with cycles of repression,
contestation and democratisation in the region, change must begin somewhere. And
so “the dialectical movement and counter-movement of history” is
set in motion.