(H/B) THE NEW ARAB REVOLUTIONS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

Παρουσίαση

This book cannot be read as easily as a detective story or a news report. It is marked by sinuosity, convoluted narratives, multiple views, and sometimes even contradictory or unknown vistas that leave the last word to the reader. There is no single satisfactory explanation of complex social movements, and there is no way to predict for sure what will happen. Still, one can be aware of the stakes and the new mobilization capacity of the Arab world through what has happened recently and what has happened in the more distant past. Before the Arab uprisings, this part of the world was considered to be hopelessly bending under the yoke of despotic regimes. The social movements, small or large, were perceived as leading to nowhere (they did not lead to any major political opening during the previous four decades; in that sense, this interpretation was not mistaken). The new Arab awakening through the relentless uprisings in 2011 brought another view, one that would show the Arab world in turmoil and change through protest movements large and small, through limited acts of disobedience or more extensive social movements.
This view also has its limits. The new upheavals have perhaps given undue weight to the preceding protest movements, small or large, as their harbingers, although the past turbulences undoubtedly played a role in the recent uprisings. The two views (nothing was happening in the Arab world/everything was moving) are largely overstated in that they make us believe in the predictability of major social events, provided we are seeing it through the appropriate glasses. This viewpoint is consistently contradicted by major social upheavals and reborn out of the belief that science gives us the capacity, as Descartes said, to "become master and owner of nature" by predicting events. In social sciences this view is largely flawed, because-among other reasons-societies are made in part of free agents. [...] (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Enlarged Phenomenological Perspective
A New Paradigm for Social Movements?
The Demo-Movements (DM)
The Arc of Demo-Movements
Part 1: Unexpected Demo-Movements in the Middle East and North Africa and Their Dynamics
1. The Iranian Green Movement Differences and Similarities between the Arab Revolutions
Precedents of the Green Movement
2. The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity and Freedom
The Historical Precedents
The Gafsa Mineral Field
The 18 October Movement for Rights and Freedoms
The Ben Guerdane Revolt
The Counterintuitive Character of the Tunisian Revolution
The Jasmin Revolution's Symbolic Causes
The Hectic Revolutionary Imaginary
The Revolutionary Drama Unfolds
The Effect of New Communications on the Jasmin Revolution
3. Egypt's Revolution
Historical Precedents
The Kefaya Movement
The April 6 Youth Movement
Khaled Said and His Posthumous Role
The Impact of New Communications on the Egyptian Revolution
4. The Arab Spring through Historical Precedents in Other Countries
The Reactionary Awakening and the Containment of the French Revolution
The Springtime of the People, 1848
Dual Visions of Revolution: 1688 versus 1789
Comparison with Color and Velvet Revolutions in Eastern Europe
Latin American Transition to Democracy as Another Parallel to the Arab Spring
The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon
PART II: The Would-Be Middle Class as the Subjective Foundation of the Arab Spring
5. The "Would-Be Middle Class"
Women and the Sense of Quasi-Equality with Men
Dignity versus Honor
Dignity, Humiliation, Decency, Recognition
The Three Periods and the Fate of Empathy
Perspectives of Civil Society
The Subjective Civil Society
Netizens and the Virtual Agora
Lessons from the Past
Subjectivation as the Self-Realization of the Would-Be Middle Class
The Role of the Economy in the Would-Be Middle Class
Diaspora and the Dream of Joining the Middle Class
The Imaginary Side of the Diaspora
Revisiting Modernization Theories
6. Characteristics of the Demo-Movements
Lack of Explicit Leadership Avoidance of Violence
Reconsidering Nonviolence in the Arab Autumn
Lack of Explicit Strategy
Lack of Specific Ideology
The Death of Holistic Utopias: Authoritarian Nationalism versus Jihadism
The Lack of an Avant-Garde and the Advent of Intermediary Intellectuals
The Loss of Centrality of Religion: The Post-Islamist Age
The New Pan-Arabism versus the Old
The Historical Precedents
Divisions in the Arab World
The Three Waves of Pan-Arabism
Democracy without Shame
The Gender Issue
The Islamic Puzzle
The Islamist Question: The Taming of the Shrew?
The Evolution of a Revolutionary Group towards Democracy in Morocco
The Student Movement in Iran
7. Obstacles to Democracy
Sectarian, Communal, and Tribal Strife
Bahrain as a Case of Pseudo-Sectarian Strife
Syrian Sectarianism
Egypt's Communal Strife
Yemen's Sectarian and Communal Strife
Libyan Tribal Strife
Violence in the Uprising
The Persecuted Identity
The "Refuseniks" Attitude
The Difficult Task of Overcoming Sectarianism
PART III: The New Social Actors
8. Social and State Actors and New Technologies
Types of Social Movements According to Communication Technology
Technologies of Communication
Authoritarian Governments' Use of the Media
The Internet, Arab Public Opinion, and the New Individual
Soft Mobilization Technologies
9. The New Social Actor and Demographics
Demographic Change
Role of Education
Access to New Communication Technologies
10. Types of Activists, Old and New
Citizen Journalists
Mistreated Journalists in the Post-Revolutionary Era
Human Rights Activists and World Public Opinion as a Moral Witness
Nonpolitical Activists
Child, Adolescent, and Teenage Activists
Political Activists
Professionals
Medics as the New Activists
Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs
Women Activists
Asma Mahfouz
Mona Seif and Gigi Ibrahim
Nawara Najem
Tawakul Karman
Bushra al-Maqtari