Celebrating Revolution Day in Tunisia. Demotix\/ Chedly Ben Ibrahim. All rights reserved.\u201cOut
\nof the revolution and counter-revolution\u2026was born the dialectical movement and
\ncounter-movement of history which bears men on its irresistible flow, like a
\npowerful undercurrent, to which they must surrender the very moment they
\nattempt to establish freedom on earth.\u201d Hannah Arendt, On Revolution<\/i><\/p>\n
Today marks five
\nyears since the start of Tunisia\u2019s revolution. 17 December 2010 was a day like
\nevery other, except for one act that transformed it into the beginning of an extraordinary
\nset of events.<\/p>\n
Tunisia\u2019s
\nrevolution and the ensuing wave of protests that swept the Arab world caught
\nthe world by surprise. Much ink has been spilt in the last five years in an
\nattempt to piece together a genealogy of this upsurge of dissent, seeking to
\ntrace the roots of an earthquake that emerged from the fertile inner reaches of
\nTunisia\u2019s rural and deprived regions. While academics debate whether the
\ndeterminant factors were economic, social, political, demographic or
\ntechnological, what matters for those who lived them is that these uprisings
\nlaid bare the lived experiences of the people of this region and put their
\ndemands at the heart of political events, rendering the invisible visible. <\/p>\n
The
\nTunisian revolution started with the story of one man, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose
\nself-immolation lit the flame of dissent and struggle. His act would have
\nremained an isolated act of desperate protestation at injustice, just like the
\ntens of others who had set themselves on fire before him in similar conditions,
\nhad it not been for the acts of others who transformed it into a nation-wide call
\nfor freedom, justice and dignity. <\/p>\n
What
\ncaptures the essence of the uprisings of 2011 is that they were a moment of a reassertion of people and of politics from below. Through
\ncollective mobilisation, people created a moment so powerful that it toppled
\nrulers and created the biggest political change in the region since decolonisation.
\nThe uprisings had no master narrative \u2013 they were a series of micronarratives
\nproduced by ordinary people. What made the scenes so inspiring was precisely
\nthis vibrant representation of all parts of society, What
\nmade the scenes so inspiring was precisely this vibrant representation of all
\nparts of society. female and male, young and old,
\nrural and urban, poor and wealthy, religious and secular, people of all walks
\nof life – the unemployed, farmers, factory workers, lawyers, doctors, housewives,
\nstudents, doctors. This desectorialised collaborative effort created a moment in
\nwhich fiction was exposed, power was redefined and existing political and
\nanalytical frameworks shattered. <\/p>\n
The first fiction to be shattered was that of the \u2018Arab
\nexception\u2019. These events were made more extraordinary by the fact that they unfolded
\nin a region long considered immune to the democratic waves that had swept
\nacross other regions, led by people who, it turned out, craved freedom,
\ndignity, and social justice as profoundly as other peoples. The slogan invented
\nin Tunisia and which spread throughout the region was \u201cthe people wants the
\nfall of the regime\u201d, a cry that at once constituted and asserted the existence
\nof one people, who had the capacity to express a collective will and who
\ndemanded to be heard. This was an inconvenient truth for some \u2013 certainly for authoritarian
\nrulers in the region, who had repressed and depressed their people into
\nsubmission, 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.<\/p>\n
The second shattered fiction was that of the \u2018security pact\u2019, an
\narrangement by which Arab societies were expected to trade freedom, political
\ninclusion and human rights in return for security and economic growth. This was
\nnowhere exemplified better than in Ben Ali\u2019s Tunisia, in which the scarecrow of
\ndisorder and instability were regularly brandished to silence opponents – in
\nthe 1990s by framing government repression as a response to an \u2018Islamist threat\u2019
\nto state and society, and then in the 2000s shifting to the fight against terrorism, making full use of the opportunities provided by the global
\n\u2018War on Terror\u2019. <\/p>\n
In exchange for obedience, the regime offered an \u2018economic
\nmiracle\u2019 built on macro-economically sound policies, neoliberal reforms and \u2018good
\ngovernance\u2019, a discourse that convinced most international financial
\ninstitutions and foreign governments. This \u2018miracle\u2019 turned out to be a mirage
\nbased on fictitious economic data, hiding a reality of gross inequalities,
\npervasive corruption and economic mismanagement that created mass structural unemployment,
\nregional disparities and economic insecurity for vast parts of society. The security
\npact thus failed to deliver on its own promises, putting paid to the notion
\nthat the economic could be separated from the
\npolitical, and that stability and security could
\nbe viewed in isolation from a wider notion of human security and wellbeing. <\/p>\n
The third fiction shattered by the Arab uprisings is that the
\nfate of Arab nations is dictated by external actors and allows no possibility
\nfor autonomy or change. The past century of Arab political and intellectual
\ndiscourse has been saturated with a keen awareness that decisions about this
\npart of the world are taken somewhere far removed from its people \u2013 whether by
\nrulers who are unrepresentative of their wishes or by global powers whose
\ninterests far outweigh the interests of the region\u2019s 300 million inhabitants. A
\ndeep sense of humiliated fatalism and strangled sovereignty made it difficult
\nto even imagine alternative political realities. A
\ndeep sense of humiliated fatalism and strangled sovereignty made it difficult
\nto even imagine alternative political realities. The Arab uprisings threw macropolitics out of the window in
\nfavour of \u201cpeople politics\u201d – the politics of individual actions, grassroots mobilisation,
\nnetworks and communication. The future, it turned out, was not history waiting
\nto be written by others, but a new reality to be forged through collaborative
\naction.<\/p>\n
This splintering of the fictions that The deep vortex of violence into which the Arab world has Alongside these traditional No mention is made of the causes of However, while we may be in the counter-revolutionary moment, it The challenge we face now is how to reconstruct the collective voice The challenge is how to build and sustain strong social While the five year anniversary of the spark of the Arab It is not ordinary people who made the choice to unleash the Celebrating Revolution Day in Tunisia. Demotix\/ Chedly Ben Ibrahim. All rights reserved.\u201cOut of the revolution and counter-revolution\u2026was 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.\u201d Hannah Arendt, On Revolution…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhad sustained decades of dictatorship has opened up an intense struggle in the
\nArab world. Every revolution splits society into those who embrace change and
\nthose who find change deeply threatening. As Hannah Arendt noted, \u201ccounter-revolution\u2026has always remained bound to revolution as
\nreaction is bound to action\u201d. We see the reassertion of
\nauthoritarian rule across the region, supported by regional and global
\nresources, as the feloul<\/em> (remnants of the old regime) have
\nstaged a comeback that has proven far more organised, ruthless and
\nwell-resourced than expected.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\ndescended in recent years is a result of this intense struggle between revolution
\nand counter-revolution, in which every instrument of war is put to use. We have
\nwitnessed the use of every trick in the counter-revolutionary rulebook,We have witnessed the use of every trick in the
\ncounter-revolutionary rulebook starting with the centuries-old
\n\u201cdivide-and-rule\u201d technique. starting with the centuries-old \u201cdivide-and-rule\u201d
\ntechnique of fragmenting society into groups and sub-groups, selectively arming
\nor privileging certain groups or sub-groups and persecuting others. The activation
\nof ethnic and sectarian identities as markers of economic or social privilege
\nand marginalization has been deftly deployed by authoritarian rulers across the
\nArab political landscape, from Yemen and Egypt, through to Syria and Iraq. <\/p>\n
\ntechniques, we see the more cutting-edge tactics exemplified by sophisticated
\npolitical and media propaganda designed to attack the foundations of support
\nfor democratic change. These campaigns construct and propagate an image of the
\nrevolution as a pestilence that has brought only instability, violence and
\nmalaise. The revolution is blamed
\nfor every ill in society from unemployment and poverty to disorder, littering
\nand congestion.<\/p>\n
\nthese problems, which existed long before the revolution. Instead, an incessant
\nonslaught of rumours, misinformation and complaints is unleashed on the
\npopulation, in a daily campaign of psychological warfare. It seeks to destroy
\nany belief ordinary people have in the possibility of change. More dangerously,
\nit seeks to destroy any belief people have in themselves, blaming them for
\ndaring to rise up to challenge the status quo, and for having the arrogance to
\nbelieve they could have a say in governing their own affairs. The aim of the
\ncounter-revolution campaign is to make clear to people that they only have one
\nchoice – between dictatorship, security and stability on one hand, and democracy,
\nchaos and terror on the other. The rise of extremist groups such as ISIS plays
\nperfectly into this narrative, emerging as a product of the counter-revolution and a
\ndriver of it.\u00a0These political and media campaigns construct and propagate an image of the revolution as a pestilence that has brought only instability, violence and malaise.<\/p>\n
\nis too early to declare its victory quite yet. While today we find ourselves
\ndebating whether or not those moments in 2011 were truly \u2018revolutions\u2019, they
\nhave undoubtedly created revolutionaries \u2013 ordinary people who may not have
\nbeen politically engaged before the uprisings but who are now sensitised to the
\nrepressive system of authoritarian power and who are resisting it through their
\nown forms of political agency, individually or collectively, by word or deed,
\nin the real and online worlds. The uprisings have given birth to a generation
\nof young people born under dictatorship who witnessed a crack in the
\nauthoritarian wall split open and caught a glimpse of the other side. <\/p>\n
\nthat emerged during the Arab uprisings. Despite the diversity of visions, this
\ncollective voice did converge on shared goals \u2013 political accountability, a say
\nfor the people in electing their rulers, fighting corruption, putting public resources
\nand institutions at the service of the public and not a narrow circle of
\nfamilies and clans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nmovements that can keep alive the key demands of the revolutions. Such
\nmovements are desperately needed to maintain the push for change through the
\nlong dark days of struggle ahead. They have a vital role even once dictatorial
\nregimes are overthrown, in order to push for the dismantling of repressive
\nauthoritarian structures that continue to monopolise control over society and
\nresist all reform. The rise of extremist groups such as ISIS plays perfectly into this narrative.<\/p>\n
\nuprisings will inevitably unleash a wave of analyses, explanations and
\nlamentations about the shape that events have taken, it is simply too early to
\nassess changes or predict outcomes. What is certain is uncertainty \u2013 that the
\nstatus quo of the region, built on fictions of stability without human rights
\nand growth without economic inclusion, has been shattered. <\/p>\n
\nforces of sectarianism, violence and chaos. Their
\ncries of \u201csilmiyya, silmiyya<\/em>\u201d [\u201cpeaceful, peaceful\u201d) on the streets were
\ndrowned out by the best response their regimes knew \u2013 coercion through violence
\nand terror. It was the choice of authoritarian regimes of the region who,
\nfor the most part, resisted reform for decades and seek to prevent change, at
\nwhatever cost. While we may well be faced with cycles of repression,
\ncontestation and democratisation in the region, change must begin somewhere. And
\nso \u201cthe dialectical movement and counter-movement of history\u201d<\/em> is
\nset in motion. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"