**Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens**

# Re-Configurations Rachid Ouaissa · Friederike Pannewick Alena Strohmaier *Editors* Contextualising Transformation Processes and Lasting Crises in the Middle East and North Africa

# **Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens**

### **Series Editors**

Martin Beck, Institute of History, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Cilja Harders, Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Annette Jünemann, Institut für Internationale Politik, Helmut Schmidt Universität, Hamburg, Germany

Rachid Ouaissa, Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Stud, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

Stephan Stetter, Institut für Politikwissenschaften, Universität der Bundeswehr München, München, Germany

Die Reihe beschäftigt sich mit aktuellen Entwicklungen und Umbruchen in Nor ̈ dafrika, dem Nahen Osten, der Golfregion und darüber hinaus. Die politischen, sozialen und ökonomischen Dynamiken in der Region sind von hoher globaler Bedeutung und sie strahlen intensiv auf Europa aus. Die Reihe behandelt die gesamte Bandbreite soziopolitischer Themen in der Region: Veränderungen in Konfiktmustern und Kooperationsbeziehungen in Folge der Arabischen Revolten 2010/11 wie etwa Euro-Arabische und Euro-Mediterrane Beziehungen oder den Nahostkonfikt. Auf nationaler Ebene geht es um Themen wie Reform, Transformation und Autoritarismus, Islam und Islamismus, soziale Bewegungen, Geschlechterverhältnisse aber auch energie- und umweltpolitische Fragen, Migrationsdynamiken oder neue Entwicklungen in der Politischen Ökonomie. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf innovativen politikwissenschaftlichen Werken, die die gesamte theoretische Breite des Faches abdecken. Eingang fnden aber auch Beiträge aus anderen sozialwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen, die relevante politische Zusammenhänge behandeln.

This book series focuses on key developments in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the Gulf and beyond. The regions' political, economic and social dynamics are of high global signifcance, not the least for Europe. The book series covers the whole range of the ongoing transformations in the region, such as new developments in regional confict and cooperation after the uprisings of 2010/2011 including Euro-Arab and Euro-Mediterranean relations, or the Israeli-Palestinian confict. On a (trans)national level, volumes in the series look at authoritarianism and reform, social movements, gender dynamics, Islam and Islamism, political economy, migration, as well as energy and environmental issues. The series focuses on innovative work in all sub-disciplines of political science and other social sciences disciplines that address political developments in the Middle East.

Dr. Martin Beck ist Professor für gegenwartsbezogene Nahost-Studien an der University of Southern Denmark in Odense, Dänemark.

Dr. Cilja Harders ist Professorin für Politikwissenschaft und Leiterin der "Arbeitsstelle Politik im Maghreb, Mashreq, Golf" am Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin, Deutschland.

Dr. Annette Jünemann ist Professorin für Politikwissenschaft am Institut für Internationale Politik der Helmut-Schmidt-Universität Hamburg, Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg, Deutschland.

Dr. Rachid Ouaissa ist Professor fur Politik des Nahen und Mittleren Ostens am Cen ̈ trum fur Nah- und Mittelost-Studien der Philipps-Universität Marburg, Deutschland. ̈

Dr. Stephan Stetter ist Professor für Internationale Politik und Konfiktforschung an der Universität der Bundeswehr München, Deutschland.

Rachid Ouaissa · Friederike Pannewick · Alena Strohmaier Editors

# Re-Confgurations

Contextualising Transformation Processes and Lasting Crises in the Middle East and North Africa

*Editors* Rachid Ouaissa Marburg, Hessen, Germany

Friederike Pannewick Marburg, Hessen, Germany

Alena Strohmaier Marburg, Hessen, Germany

ISSN 2626-224X ISSN 2626-2258 (electronic) Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens ISBN 978-3-658-31159-9 ISBN 978-3-658-31160-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. **Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Verantwortlich im Verlag: Jan Treibel

This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature.

The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

# **Acknowledgement**

This book would not have been possible without the valuable contributions of our authors, which we would like to thank at this place. Furthermore, we are very grateful for the great support of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for having facilitated ideally and fnancially this edited volume. Our gratitude extends also to Jake Schneider for style editing as well as to Lea Bausch and Anna Christina Scheiter for copy editing this manuscript.

> Rachid Ouaissa Friederike Pannewick Alena Strohmaier

# **Contents**





# **Editors and Contributors**

# **About the Editors**

**Rachid Ouaissa** is professor of Near and Middle Eastern Politics at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). His main felds of research are political, economic and societal developments in the MENA region, the rise and transformation of Islamist movements, and rentier states and the role of middle classes. Since February 2013, he served as spokesperson for the research network "Re-Confgurations". Since April 2020, he is also director of the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis.

**Friederike Pannewick** is professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany) and co-director of the research feld "Travelling Traditions: Comparative Perspectives on Near Eastern Literatures" within EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She is co-editor of the book series Literatures in Context: Arabic-Persian-Turkish (Reichert) and has published extensively on modern Arabic literature and theatre.

**Alena Strohmaier** is postdoctoral researcher and project leader of the research project "'But I'm not flming! I'm just doing a bit of video...' Cinematic appropriation processes of protest videos 2009–11 in the Middle East and North Africa" (2019–2023; funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Prior, she was the academic coordinator of the research network "Re-Confgurations" and managing editor of *META Journal. Middle East—Topics & Arguments* (both Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies). Her main areas of research are diaspora flm, media and migration, digital archives, and video activism.

# **Contributors**

**Anne-Linda Amira Augustin** Büro der Außenbeziehung des Übergangsrates Südarabiens in Europa e. V., Berlin, Germany

**Thorsten Bonacker** Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Susanne Buckley-Zistel** Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Claudia Derichs** Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

**Andrea Fischer-Tahir** Institut für Erziehungswissenschaften, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

**Sihem Hamlaoui** Marburg, Germany

**Perrine Lachenal** Tunis, Tunisia

**Felix Lang** Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Rachid Ouaissa** Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Friederike Pannewick** Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Charlotte Pardey** Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Walaa Said** Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Mariam Salehi** Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Christoph Schwarz** Frankfurt a. M., Germany

**Alena Strohmaier** Institut für Medienwissenschaft/Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Nina S. Studer** Institut für Islamwissenschaft und Neuere Orientalische Philologie, Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland

**Tareq Sydiq** Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

**Steffen Wippel** Berlin, Germany

# **Introduction**

# Re-Confgurations: A New Conceptual Framework for Research on the MENA Region

# Rachid Ouaissa, Friederike Pannewick and Alena Strohmaier

This essay collection is the outcome of interdisciplinary research into political, societal, and cultural transformation processes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany. It builds on many years of collaboration between two research networks at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies: the research network "Re-Confgurations: History, Remembrance and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa" (2013–19), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the Leibniz-Prize research group "Figures of Thought | Turning Points: Cultural Practices and Social Change in the Arab World" (2013–20), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Both research projects' central interest lay in the political, social, and cultural transformation that has become especially visible since 2010–11; we conceptualize this transformation here using

R. Ouaissa (\*) · F. Pannewick

Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany

e-mail: ouaissa@staff.uni-marburg.de

F. Pannewick e-mail: pannewick@staff.uni-marburg.de

A. Strohmaier

Institut für Medienwissenschaft/Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: alena.strohmaier@staff.uni-marburg.de

© The Author(s) 2021 R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_1

The authors' names appear in alphabetical order having contributed equally to both the edited volume and the introduction.

the term "re-confgurations." At the core of the inquiry are interpretations of visions of past and future, power relations and both political and symbolic representations.

With the concept of "re-confgurations," building on the work of Norbert Elias, we seek to construct a conceptual framework for notions of fguration processes (Elias 2003) and interdependencies between individual state and non-state actors and groups as well as the resulting restructuring of power relations. The concept describes the inextricable, ever-shifting entanglement between humans and history. We do not take stagnation as a premise (Bar 2009; Rougier 2005). Quite the contrary, the social groups and individuals in the MENA region are situated within continuous dynamics of repositioning. The various interdependencies between social groups and norms, along with the infuences of indirect (regional and global) entanglements in regard to economic and social contexts and discourses, lead to a constant re-confguration and reinterpretation of power relations.

The notion of re-confgurations expands upon conventional approaches of transformation and transition, which assume that social upheavals are linear and normative, and adapts them to the political, economic, and cultural realities of the MENA region. Michael Mann (1998) has already pointed out that the idea of a "great revolution"—such as the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution—, which assumes a clean break between old and new systems, is one of the academic fallacies of historiography. We therefore view the events of 2009–13 in the MENA region, as well as the uprisings in Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq since 2019, as open-ended processes (Bozarslan 2015; Gerges 2014; Dawisha 2013).

The Green Movement of 2009 in Iran and the "Arab Spring" in Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen (2011–13) unleashed a deluge of international research into the backgrounds, effects, and meanings of popular protest movements and subsequent developments in the MENA region. In this complex and disparate research discourse, there is a gradually emerging epistemological shift in thinking across disciplines studying the MENA region.

The popular insurgency movements in the MENA region posed a genuine challenge to the social sciences and humanities (Beck 2013). Aside from the discussion as to whether these are upheavals or revolutions (see Bayat 2013; Jünemann and Zorob 2013), these events were embedded in a variety of historical and social trends and contexts. Bozarslan (2015) considers the popular insurgency movements to be the commencement of a new cycle in the history of the MENA region whose outcome remains to be seen. Ajami (2012) calls this the third *Nahḍa*, alluding to the Arab awakening and entry into modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Dawisha (2013) calls it the second *Nahḍa*. Unlike Ajami, who counts the 1950s and 1960s—shaped by national

leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Habib Bourghiba in Tunisia and the early leaders of the Baath Party in Iraq and Syria—as the second *Nahḍa,* Dawisha only applies the word to the historical renewal movement of the nineteenth century and the upheavals of 2011. Other approaches interpret the events as the end of postcolonialism (see Tripp 2013; Lynch 2013; Khosrokhavar 2012; Dabashi 2012; Perthes 2015).

Likewise, the reasons for the emergence of the popular insurgency movements are interpreted variously. Among the underlying causes researchers point to are the economic policies of postcolonial elites in the MENA region (see Heydarian 2014); the structural weakness of the highly pension-dependent and scarcely diversifed regional economies and the associated diffculties with transitioning to capitalism (see Achcar 2013; Hanieh 2011); but also the pressure to conform triggered by neoliberal globalization and its attendant crises, which have also led to popular insurgency movements in other regions of the world (such as the ¡Democracia Real YA! movements in Latin America, the Occupy movement in the US and Europe, and Movimiento 15-M in Spain; see Heydarian 2014; Guazzone and Pioppi 2012). According to other approaches still, these movements resulted from a fragile alliance between a culturally, ideologically, and economically heterogeneous middle class facing decline and a broad, marginalized subaltern stratum (cf. Kurlantzick 2013; Kandil 2012) on the other. Factors such as demographic change (see Courbage and Todd 2007; Ferguson 2011), generational conficts (see Dhillon and Yousef 2009), and changing gender relations (see Moghadam 2003) also play a role, as shown by the focus on youth cultures in the media and academia (see Honwana 2013; Jung et al. 2013; Wessel 2013; Khalaf and Khalaf 2011). Embedded in the global framework of a transnational, anti-system protest movement and as a result of the structural crisis of global capitalism (cf. Lawson 2012; Wallerstein 2011), the popular insurgency movements in the MENA region (see Beinin and Vairel 2011; Hinnebusch 2014) were ascribed a new collective self-confdence through the intensive use of novel social media platforms (see Jenkins et al. 2013; Strohmaier and Krewani 2021). Meanwhile, other approaches refer to the "Arab winter" (see Abdul-Hussain et al. 2012) in light of wars and the progressive erosion of a number of states in the MENA region due to the rise of political Islam (see Bokhari and Senzai 2013; Cesari 2014; Hamid 2014).

Developments since 2010–11 have contributed to a growth in the reception of a number of research areas within MENA regional studies that had previously been given fairly scant attention. The intervening years have also brought changes in analytical perspectives. For example, political scientists and historians of the MENA region are now devoting greater focus to civil society actors and subaltern groups (Al-Zubaidi et al. 2013; Harders 2015; Cronin 2012). There is also a growing emphasis on the agency of marginalized groups such as women (see Langohr 2015; Khalid 2015), young people (see Abdalla 2016; Ouaissa and Gertel 2014) and ethnic-religious minorities or middle classes blocked from advancement (Ouaissa 2013). In this context, the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies are more closely considering day-to-day practices, subversive forms of resistance, mobilization techniques, and forms of representation (see Carapico 2014). The uprisings were also interpreted as a rewriting or renegotiation of the social contracts between the states and societies of the region (see Bouziane et al. 2013).

This development is accompanied by the growing infuence in research of an expanded notion of politics that treats languages, art, literature, performance, graffti, music, and flm as analytical categories and even as refections and seismographs of social and political change (Salime 2015; Tripp 2012; Mehrez 2012; Dabashi 2012, p. 225 f.). Here, for example, the focus is placed on linguistic and aesthetic self-expression and the history of its interpretation (see Khalil 2011; Harb et al. 2013; Baker 2015). Some approaches look for portents of popular uprisings in literature (Sakr 2013; Mvogo 2012; El Maarouf 2014), while others examine the role of artistic forms of expression in transformation processes (see Amine and Roberson 2013; O'Rawe and Phelan 2016; Strohmaier 2019; Pannewick 2020).

These popular uprisings have made an important contribution to a new fourishing of efforts to redesign and reclaim public space (see Schielke and Winegar 2012; Kraidy 2016). Visual, auditory, and pictorial cultural practices are regarded as new forms of resistance; in particular, graffti as a resistance practice and an aesthetic form of expression in public space has received special scrutiny in many publications (see Zoghbi and Don Stone 2011; Hamdy et al. 2014; Gröndahl 2013). Moreover, the popular insurgency movements have raised the question of how to deal with past injustices. Transitional justice processes (see Fisher and Stewart 2014) and memory cultures can be identifed in this context as a discursive feld in which power struggles over the interpretation of history play out and new, at times self-directed, narratives are shaped.

# **Re-Confgurations as Dynamic Processes of Change**

The concept of re-confgurations builds on Norbert Elias's notion of fguration. Elias uses fguration to describe the foundations of social life in human interdependencies, i.e. a social community in the sense of a social network of mutually dependent individuals (e.g. family, household, club). He argues"that human beings should be seen primarily as interdependent, forming fgurations or networks with each other which connect the psychological with the social, or habitus with social relations" (Van Krieken 2017). The term re-confgurations extends this concept, breaking away from transition studies. It refers to dynamic change processes within structural, spatially situated, discursive, and symbolic power networks. By taking into account the interaction between action and structure, it makes visible the specifc "order of change" (Elias 1978, p. 149).

The concept of re-confgurations rests on a conceptual architecture that illuminates the constitution, modifcation, and transformation of political, economic, social, and cultural relations leading to the formation of new power relations. This paradigm frames patterns of interaction as a mixture of confict and cooperation, which—going beyond Elias's understanding of confguration—either usher in new constellations of order or seek to uphold the old ones. If the president of a country is deposed by a coup d'état, as in Egypt, this does not necessarily bring profound systemic change. On the contrary, according to the fndings ten years after the popular insurgency movements in the MENA region, a constellation of order can be sustained at its core in spite of superfcial corrections.

We therefore understand re-confgurations of political, social and cultural systems as a process of both confictual and cooperative interactions aimed at restoring or even maintaining the old order by building new alliances, whereby the orders, structures and discourses are then modifed in order to preclude major changes. Thus, the process-based concept of re-confgurations implies negotiations and struggles over societies' visions of the future, on the basis of historical experience, during the intermediate phase between a period of upheaval and a period of new order. This opens up a perspective for debates concerning participation and political and symbolic representations. The visions of the future are themselves based on historically grounded narratives that shape the renegotiations of political and economic conditions; to paraphrase Koselleck (1988), they are the past of the future.

This essay collection deals with interdependent, overlapping, repetitive, cumulative, and transformative processes (Boudon 1979) whose analysis makes it possible to account for both repetitive structures and dynamics of change (Koselleck 2000, p. 12 f.). By departing formerly dominant narratives of nationalism and Islamism in the MENA region, with their highly ideologized view of history, scholars incorporate a number of heretofore marginalized voices and histories into the broader social discourse. In this way, phenomena that have so far been neglected by research, such as labor disputes, everyday acts of resistance, (semi-)autonomous social spaces and actors, and minority or subaltern groups are brought into the spotlight in order to lend historical depth to research on current developments in the MENA region. For example, Rachid Ouaissa's chapter analyzes the re-confgurations of the Algerian political system. He explains the (re-) establishment of power alliances and traces power shifts through oil price fuctuations on the global market, laying out the concomitant instability of systems of co-option based on the distribution of rent. In times of power crises, the state class is prepared to make concessions, such as economic and political liberalizations. During the 1980s oil crisis, the single-party system was terminated, elections authorized, and the economic system liberalized. Eventually, the civil war (1992–2002) contributed to restoring the system and enabled those with power to co-opt the middle classes anew and secure loyalty to the Boutefika system through the distribution of rent. Since February 2019, however, an unprecedented mass social mobilization has been underway. The Hirak movement disrupted the order within the state class and forced President Boutefika to step down, but the regime, under military leadership, still tried to re-confgure the political system by eliminating old clans and striking new alliances. This is the story of a political system's re-confgurations that seek to sustain the old order by building new alliances.

The anthology also examines contemporary re-confgurations of cultural memory in various countries of the region arising from the weakening of once-hegemonic grant narratives and the corresponding authoritarian systems. Over the past two decades, Germany has seen a signifcant rise in the study of cultural memory, remembrance cultures, forms of passing down historical knowledge in private and collective contexts, the relationships between public and private memory, the politics of history, etc.

To date these fourishing felds remain underdeveloped in reference to the countries of the MENA region (Silverstein and Makdisi 2006). Yet political upheavals often provoke an increased societal interest in historical subjects and diverse activities for the sake of reconstructing cultural memory. Various actors' struggles over the power to assert an interpretation and defne a society's cultural memory invite conclusions about the depth of the social and political transformation in the MENA region. In this context, Susanne Buckley-Zistel's chapter asks what processes of reckoning with the past have been initiated and how these processes relate to the search for justice and the quest for remembrance on a more global scale. In the aftermath of the "Arab Spring," the affected countries are going through various forms of transitions, signifcantly re-confguring the MENA region. A number of new civil society actors, political elites and international norm entrepreneurs are engaging with the lengthy histories of repression in the respective countries, as well as with the violence that occurred during

the Arab Spring, in order to deal with the legacy of human rights abuses (Sriram 2017). These transitions to justice are not without obstacles and challenges, however. The objective of Buckley-Zistel's chapter is therefore not to tell a story of various transitional justice and memory projects in post-Arab Spring countries but to situate the practice of doing so in time and space. On a related topic, Perrine Lachenal examines the notion of "martyr" as socially constructed and contested along gendered and political lines in her chapter examining how heroes and martyrs have been produced and deployed in post-revolutionary Tunisia. It begins by revisiting governmental attempts, launched soon after the revolution, to monopolize and institutionally defne who could beneft from offcial recognition as a martyr. Lachenal unpacks the divergent defnitions of "martyrdom" according to offcial institutions and bereaved families respectively, arguing that the boundaries of "martyr" as a moral category are often drawn in terms of differing masculinities. Her chapter goes on to demonstrate how the category of "martyrs of the nation" has progressively overshadowed the category of "martyrs of the revolution" in offcial memorial practices, as the commemoration of the revolution has progressively focused on its uniformed victims, leaving out the civilian dead.

The judicial dimensions of the political upheavals in the MENA region comprise another key aspect. In the case of Tunisia, the process of transitional justice was carried out after the successful overthrow of the old autocratic order. The Moroccan case shows that a reckoning with the past can also be enacted as a public performance and exploited to justify a new regime. In another sense, contemporary trends in the MENA region offer diverse entry points for transition studies that go beyond judicial reckoning processes. Mariam Salehi's chapter explains the development of the Tunisian transitional justice process. Drawing on Norbert Elias's ideas about social processes, she argues that dynamics of transitional justice processes cannot be understood solely via international norms and the "justice industry," which jointly shape institutionalized transitional justice projects, nor solely by considering the context and political preferences of domestic actors. Rather, she argues, they are shaped by the interplay of planned process with unplanned political and social dynamics; with a political context in fux, power shifts, and sometimes competing planned efforts in other realms. Basing her fndings empirically on "process-concurrent" feld research in post-Arab Spring Tunisia, she shows that a technocratic/institutionalized transitional justice project can develop dynamics that are somewhat, but not entirely, independent of power shifts. However, the abovementioned interplays may lead to frictional encounters, which trigger feedback loops, new processes, and new structures.

In their chapter, Thorsten Bonacker and Tareq Sydiq explore how, according to scholars of historical sociology, the re-confguration of social and political order in postcolonial society can best be understood as an ongoing (re)interpretation of modernity's cultural and political program. Thus, diverse actors shape the re-confguration of the social and political order in postcolonial societies and movements that hold competing views on what constitutes a modern society. They argue that one important way of developing these interpretations of modernity is that actors vernacularize ideas and institutional models of modernity from what Bendix has called "reference societies" (1967). A reference society is simultaneously an imagined vision of how a society should look and an existing society to which actors refer when they link their claims for social change to a broader understanding of modernity. The chapter offers, frst, a conceptual approach to understand the role of reference societies in the dynamics of postcolonial and post-revolutionary state-building. They argue that especially in situations of transformation and institutional crisis, reference societies function as an important resource for claim-making and identity construction. Second, they illustrate the argument through the case of Iranian society, which has incorporated very different versions of modernity in its postcolonial and post-revolutionary history, making it a particularly interesting example.

Increasingly, however, transformations to states and societies no longer come solely from within. The impact of transregional factors on social processes is growing. Transnational processes are at the foundation of Claudia Derichs's chapter, which is devoted to a multiregional perspective of a "global 1968." The year 1968 has a special meaning in some parts of the world, but others do not attach much importance to it. While the European perspective tends to assert a "global 1968," the timeline may look quite different from another vantage point. The chapter adopts such a vantage point in addressing "1968 and beyond" or the "long 1960s," as the period is often referred to, as a time of global transformations, but with particular local manifestations in their ideological underpinnings and their justifcations for (violent) action. Empirical examples of this include the Middle East and (Southeast) Asia; in particular, the chapter discusses the cases of the June War of 1967 in the Arab world and the massacres in Indonesia in 1965. The defeat of Arab armies against Israel and Indonesia's tragic events of the 1960s each paved the way for a gradual strengthening of various Islamic missionary and activist movements that spread across both regions and subsequently gained huge mobilizing momentum. This chapter argues that the emergence of strong Islamic movements in this period has had vast repercussions for decades to come, for example by advancing "Islamization" in many countries around the

The rise of transregional factors extends beyond the political and artistic sphere; it also includes business. Globally operating entrepreneurs are capable of acting across different economic systems and can either adapt their operations to the local system or contrarily, through lobbying, seek to align the system with their own activities. Steffen Wippel elaborates on northern Morocco and the metropolitan area of Tangier, which has experienced important urban, economic, and infrastructural re-confgurations since the late 2000s. This includes the building of a globally signifcant mega-container port, the reconversion of the old inner-city port area into a glamorous waterfront, the establishment of huge industrial estates and new tourism facilities, and the construction of state-of-the-art land transport routes. Starting from a spatial perspective, his chapter tackles transformative effects on different spatial scales. Notably, it considers large-scale (trans-)regional links emerging from these new megaprojects, which make Tangier an interregional hub and integrate new processes of regionalization on several levels. Furthermore, effects on the city itself concern local processes of territorialization and fragmentation, which also affect people's daily life in their work as well as leisure activities. In its conceptual considerations, the chapter seeks to grasp the different shifting, intermingling, and interpenetrating scales of effects and interventions with regard to current transformation processes in and around Tangier.

In media and art, we increasingly encounter a transregional audience, in which forms of art and media circulate among regions. This does not only apply to mainstream media and the Internet. Cultural exchange and media fusions also take place around the world at local festivals; the effects of this on a global avant-garde have yet to be seen. The focus here is on how exogenous factors such as international communities and organizations, diaspora groups, and other international actors infuence the re-confgurations. Alena Strohmaier's chapter explores the formation of the (self-ascribed) label "Iranian diaspora" and its cinematic representations. The Iranian diaspora and its flmmaking can be used to illustrate the transformation of both diaspora into postdiaspora and diaspora flm into postdiaspora flm. This re-confguration manifests itself spatially on three levels: the real space of the diaspora, which is subject to socio-political changes; the internal-diegetic spaces in the flms themselves, which constantly bring new themes to the fore; and flm as its own space-creating entity, which constantly updates its own mediality. In Iranian diaspora flm, these different spatial dimensions come together.

Felix Lang's chapter suggests possible avenues for adapting conceptual frameworks to the study of peripheral cultural production. The events unfolding in Syria since spring 2011 have led to a thorough transformation of the intellectual and artistic space in which Syrian authors, flmmakers, and artists move. Beginning with an overview of the connections of institutions, artists, and works which form this contemporary space of cultural production, his chapter goes on to consider the problems existing theoretical conceptions of such spaces from the sociology of arts (e.g. Bourdieu's felds or Becker's art worlds) encounter when faced with the empirical reality of the Syrian case. He shows that the transnational, unstable, and often transient nature of these formations and their links with large-scale socio-political changes, such as wars, are diffcult to grasp with conceptual toolkit developed on the model of the exceptionally stable spaces of production of Western Europe and the US. Sihem Hamlaoui discusses the effective implementation of change as a crucial concern for Tunisian educational leaders in the twenty-frst century. One of the major challenges to the effective implementation of reforms is the resistance to change among teachers or staff members, as their habits slow the process of implementation of any educational reform. Resistance to technology has been found to be a prominent cause of most system failures, especially when witnessed in the very people who are expected to use the technology the most. This highlights the importance of understanding the causes and possible remedies of technology resistance. Studies explored the black box of resistances and suggested a theoretical explanation. Hamlaoui's chapter divulges the hidden motives behind Tunisian faculty members; resistance towards digitalization and suggest a theoretical implementation strategy in order to reach the intended goals of reform.

Research repeatedly addressed spatial aspects of transformation processes (for example, spatial inequality as a cause of the 2010–11 protests), but it also raises additional questions, which are discussed in terms of socially constructed space as proposed by cultural studies and the social sciences (e.g. Lefebvre 1974, 2006; Schroer 2006). By now, the struggles over future orders in the MENA region have attained an unforeseen level of drama. (Civil) wars, state disintegration, and quasi-state entities such as the "Islamic State" call into question the postcolonial order in places such as the Kurdistan cantons of Syria and the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Andrea Fischer-Tahir's chapter turns the focus to the Kurdistan region of Iraq, discussing practices of consumption within the context of the neoliberal transformation. The chapter examines representations of everyday life in light of the consumption of meat, specifcally chicken. Across class and spatial lines, today's Kurdish household tends to consider chicken to be integral part of the daily diet. Industrialized poultry farming started in the 1970s within the context of Baathist modernization, whereas in the 1990s, the "production" of chicken had been extremely limited due to the international embargo. However, the boom of international business since 2003 has improved access to chicken for most parts of the population. Nevertheless, neoliberal restructuration of Kurdistan's economy brought new disorder as it led to total dependency on food imports, including chicken and eggs, whereas Kurdish farmers are unable to compete with mainly Turkish and Iranian players in commodity chains. The chapter considers ways of making this contradiction visible or invisible, respectively, within Kurdish nationalist narratives that both refect and structure re-confgurations of the social order.

This puts to the test the suitability of "MENA" as a concept and raises the question of how we can conduct research in regional studies "that moves beyond fxed 'spatial containers' and other established spatial structures" (Wippel and Fischer-Tahir 2018, p. 13). It is now time to focus on entangled spaces that are trans-nationally and transregionally open-ended—transverse macro-areas, border zones, regional subspaces, and (trans-)local contacts and locations—from a multi-scale perspective. In this context, we understand space as a historically constructed product that also grounded in collectively shared representations (designations, symbols, maps, etc.) that can be handed down or questioned intergenerationally. Ideas of space rooted in different eras form a reservoir of reference points for identity, which can be repeatedly reactivated in new confgurations, especially when a hegemonic structure falters (Hirschhausen et al. 2015). Instead of treating the MENA region as a supposedly fxed geographical space, we advocate for framing it more accurately as a highly diverse but densely interwoven ensemble of overlapping "arenas" (Green 2014) consisting of changeable geographies of dense social networks of relationships.

Aside from spaces of confict, our focus is also on the emergence and movement of spaces of economic exchange, spaces where norms, values, and identities are renegotiated through forms of cooperation. A deterritorialized notion of space also encompasses the post-national "intermediate space," "transitional space," or "third space" of cultural production (see Bhabha 1994) as well as spaces of memory and cultural memory. It is also important to clarify how the radically changed spatial and temporal modalities of interaction in the digital age serve to structure social negotiation processes.

Generations constitute another aspect of re-confguration processes. Karl Mannheim (1928) defned a generation as a community whose members develop a similar structure of experience and relevance due to major historical events or sociostructural changes and, depending on the generational unit, act differently as protagonists of social change. Thus, individuals create historical confgurations and are themselves formed by them (Pilcher 1994). Some chapters in this volume compare interpersonal generational relations and social generational relations in the different social contexts and theorize them more robustly from a transregional perspective. This concerns the societal structuring of actors' lifespan (transition to adult status, entanglement with social exclusion; "waithood" Dhillon and Yousef 2009), the renegotiation of the collective past through transgenerational transmission and the "(re)invention" of historical narratives and cultural practices as well as the negotiation of political projects that are represented primarily by the younger generation according to structural logic. Ten years after the Arab Spring, which was widely hailed as the outcome of youthful protests, we must especially identify the biographical patterns that guide processes of engagement and disengagement (cf. Fillieule 2001; Hivert 2013). The phenomenon of "youth" is viewed as a psycho-social space of possibility rather than a life stage with clear quantitative boundaries (King 2002). Although this space is derived from the social and familial march of generations, it can only be qualifed in terms of the research subjects' own patterns of interpretation, their own relevance structure, thus their own representations.

Christoph Schwarz's chapter asks how transitions to adulthood are institutionalized and brokered. He further asks how class, gender, social exclusion, and precariousness are linked to the structure of these transitions and the hegemonic cultural defnitions of "youth" and "adulthood." Have these regimes shifted since the protest movements of 2011? To explore these questions and reconstruct the respective regimes of youth transitions in Morocco and Spain, his chapter contrasts two social movements: the Moroccan *diplômés chômeurs* (unemployed graduates) and the Spanish PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) housing movement. Amira Augustin discusses a protest movement that emerged in 2007 in South Yemen called the Southern Movement. At frst, it was a loose amalgamation of different groups, most of them former army personnel and state employees of the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) who were forced from their jobs after the southern faction lost the war of 1994. Because of state security forces' brutal treatment of protesters, more and more people joined the demonstrations, and the appeals began to change to concrete political demands, such as national independence of the territory that had once formed the PDRY, which in 1990 unifed with the Arab Republic of Yemen to form the Republic of Yemen. To understand how the demands of South Yemeni independence survived more than two decades of repression, Augustin's chapter investigates the major everyday form of resistance in South Yemen. By appropriating hidden forms of resistance, such as intentional and unintentional intergenerational transmission of a counter-narrative, South Yemenis were able to strengthen the calls for independence in recent years. Using examples from participant observations in South Yemen, she discusses how intergenerational transmission has served as an effective everyday form of resistance in the independence struggle in South Yemen.

Nina Studer's chapter analyzes and contextualizes French characterizations of drinking habits of the colonized in the Maghreb as inherently childlike. French colonial authors often equated the colonized Muslims in the Maghreb with European children. This infantilization of the colonized can be observed in descriptions of what the colonized habitually consumed, as their drinking preferences and habits allegedly revealed childlike behavior. The texts claimed that the Muslim colonized only enjoyed sugary drinks, such as tea or absinthe; that, "like children," they only copied French bad habits; and that they lacked the mature characteristics that supposedly regulated the danger of overconsumption among French adults. Elites among the colonized also adopted these discourses and placed them into the wider feld of descriptive mechanisms that served to dehumanize and degrade the colonized and, as a direct consequence of this, to justify the continued French colonization of the region.

In both confictual and cooperative negotiation processes, actors communicate through words, symbols, (moving) pictures, narratives, and performances and create meaning through such representations (Hall 1997). As resources of action and organized forms of knowledge, these representations structure the re-confguration of social interaction systems and evolve in the process (Ankersmit 1997; Baberowski et al. 2008). This anthology therefore also focuses on aesthetic representations of rule, resistance, justice, and martyrdom, which, as central themes of political discourse, simultaneously refect and structure political re-confgurations. After all, assignments and negotiations of meaning in social and political space are closely interrelated with aesthetic representation in works of art.

Re-confgurations in politics and society are always refected, questioned, advanced, or subverted in art. In the context of social transformation processes, new forms of literature and flm have drawn a great deal of attention in academia and the media since 2011. Through the prism of popular insurgency movements, some authors view contemporary cultural production in the MENA region as both a harbinger and a catalyst of social change (Sakr 2013). The question of art's relationship to society and politics has been raised with renewed urgency ever since the earliest days of the upheavals (Hyldig Dal 2013; Kraidy 2016). The currency of this question points to an old hermeneutic problem: how can art and the reality surrounding the artwork be considered in tandem? Do social conditions shape artistic works, or do works of art infuence their social context? However you phrase the question, it is rooted in a dichotomous understanding of two disconnected spheres. Now as always, there is a tendency to reduce artmaking to a pure refection of the social relationships surrounding it or to oversimplify it as the medium of a political message. Or, conversely, with an often euphemistic tone, artmaking is ascribed the power of social transformation without any evidence of such power. Our anthology calls into question this line of argument with its basis in a dichotomy of art versus politics. This entails an increased openness of social science approaches to literary and cinematic subject matter, laying important groundwork for a critical examination of the complex of causes and effects in aesthetic production.

Within this context, Walaa Said's chapter tackles the theme of violent death and its refections in dystopian novels, with a close reading of Mohammad Rabie's *Otared* (2014). Although the rates of violence and death in the Egyptian public places have increased dramatically since January 25, 2011, death and mourning have been dismissed as a focus of Tahrir writing, which is inclined to view that eventful day and its aftermath through a euphoric lens. As a counter-response, the rising wave of dystopian novels has fourished to provide a more confrontational attitude toward death as an inherent component of the revolutionary act. For her part, Charlotte Pardey characterizes the post-revolutionary Tunisian literary scene, addressing the ways in which the Tunisian literary establishment wishes for revolutionary events to be reworked in literature. Novels need time: to be written, read, and ultimately recognized as worthy of honors. Some years after the Tunisian uprising of 2010–11, it is time to explore the literary production in their aftermath. Her chapter focuses on novels written in French and Arabic that have found acclaim in the Tunisian literary scene: they were all recipients of the Tunisian prize for fction, the Prix Comar d'Or, and all of the chosen works deal in one way or another with the 2010–11 uprising. This permits various insights. First, this chapter compares the novels and explores trends such as references to past revolutions and autobiographic refections. Second, it asks more structural questions about the context of the novels' production (authors, publishers) as well as about their honorary reception through literary prizes.

To what extent do literature and discourses of theater negotiate norms, values, and rules and critically comment on social re-confgurations? This is the subject of the chapter by Friederike Pannewick. She investigates a crucial turning point in the late 1970s work of Syrian dramatist Saʿdallāh Wannūs (1941–1997). This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose political and artistic self-conception was strongly molded by the question of Palestine. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period marked by signifcant social and intellectual developments triggered by the country's defeat by Israel in 1967, Wannūs provocatively formulated the lineaments of a politicizing aesthetic, which was to make Arab theater into a vehicle of hope, instigating political reforms and propelling processes of democratization. In 1977, when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt became the frst Arab politician to travel on offcial business to Israel, where he outlined his plans for peace in a speech to the Israeli parliament, a world came crushing down for Wannūs. He tried to take his own life on the night of this momentous event and did not write plays for more than ten years. This chapter shows how the plays he published after this self-imposed silence turned away from a politicized didactic theatre and towards psychological studies focusing on the individual, as well as minority and gender issues, which might be considered part of what Fadi Bardawil has described as an "inward turn" (2013, p. 1).

As the current world situation shows us, major re-confgurations of systems of rule and radical social change can also come about through pandemics, major disease outbreaks, and natural disasters (Harper 2018). In his book *Al-Muqaddima,* Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406), who developed an early groundbreaking theory on historical change, described the plague that reached North Africa in 1348, claiming his own parents' lives, as an important factor in the social transformation of his era and more generally in the collapse of an empire. In a matter of months, the current coronavirus crisis has brought an accelerated re-confguration of international, national, and local orders. It has tested not only the resilience of global health systems, but the entire social reality with its at times contradictory discourses and norms. For the MENA region, this global crisis is already highlighting palpable social, economic, and political shifts. The response to the crisis and associated developments mark intensive re-confguration process both on a discursive level (for example discourses of gender and religion) and in regard to power relations as they play out within societies (Alijla 2020) and between civil societies and ruling regimes (Grimm and Fehrenbach 2020).

Thus, the history of re-confgurations in the MENA region does not end with the singularity of a popular uprising such as the Green Movement or the Arab Spring. The saga continues with the effects of the Covid-19 crisis. Here, the idea of re-confgurations again serves as a conceptual foil, an analytical lens, and an epistemic tool for describing a region as permanently subject to processes and fux.

# **References**


Lefebvre, Henri. 1974. *La Production de l'Espace*. Paris: Éd. Anthropos.


Strohmaier, A., and A. Krewani (eds.). 2021. *Media and mapping practices in the Middle East and North Africa: Producing space*. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Tripp, Charles. 2012. The art of resistance in the Middle East. *Asian Affairs* 43 (3): 393–409.


**Rachid Ouaissa** is professor of Near and Middle Eastern Politics at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). His main felds of research are political, economic and societal developments in the MENA region, the rise and transformation of Islamist movements, and rentier states and the role of middle classes. Since February 2013, he served as spokesperson for the research network "Re-Confgurations". Since April 2020, he is also director of the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis.

**Friederike Pannewick** is professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany) and co-director of the research feld "Travelling Traditions: Comparative Perspectives on Near Eastern Literatures" within EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She is co-editor of the book series *Literatures in Context: Arabic-Persian-Turkish* (Reichert) and has published extensively on modern Arabic literature and theatre.

**Alena Strohmaier** is postdoctoral researcher and project leader of the research project "'But I'm not flming! I'm just doing a bit of video...' Cinematic appropriation processes of protest videos 2009-11 in the Middle East and North Africa" (2019-2023; funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Prior, she was the academic coordinator of the research network "Re-Confgurations" and managing editor of *META Journal. Middle East – Topics & Arguments* (both Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies). Her main areas of research are diaspora flm, media and migration, digital archives, and video activism.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Political Re-Confgurings and Transregional Ties**

# **Spatializing Memory and Justice in Transformation Processes**

# Susanne Buckley-Zistel

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the affected countries have been going through various transitions that are signifcantly re-confguring the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In this context, a number of new civil society actors, political elites, and international norm entrepreneurs have been engaging with the long histories of repression in these countries, as well as with the violence that occurred during the Arab Spring, in order to deal with the legacy of human rights abuses (Sriram 2017). As many chapters in this volume testify, these transitions to justice are not without their obstacles and challenges, however. Nevertheless, it is important to ask what processes of dealing with the past have been set in motion and how they relate to the search for justice and the quest for remembrance on a more global scale. The objective of this chapter is thus not to tell the stories of various transitional justice and memory projects in post-Arab Spring countries, but to situate the practice of doing so in time and space.

On a global scale, with the advent of a strong human rights discourse in the 1990s and the initial triumph of liberal peacebuilding, including a strong dose of transitional justice, demands for memory and justice after human rights abuses have become more prominent and turned into an imperative, if not a mantra. Today, hardly confict is ended without a quest to set up an institutional, legal

© The Author(s) 2021

The chapter is based on research in the context of the collaborative research project "Peace and the Politics of Memory" funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. For more information, see www.peaceandmemory.net.

S. Buckley-Zistel (\*)

Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: s.buckley-zistel@staff.uni-marburg.de

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_2

or civil initiative to develop transitional justice projects and to establish a memory discourse. In the MENA region, too, a variety of measures have been implemented, including inter alia a truth commission and trials in Tunisia; two highly contested memorials by the Egyptian government (Barsalou 2017, p. 201) and impromptu murals on Tahrir Square in Cairo (Pannewick 2017); vetting measures passed by the Libyan parliament (Boduszynski and Wierda 2017); and the establishment of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (Fakhro 2017).

Importantly, the demand for justice and remembrance in response to past human rights abuses is no longer exclusively a domain of national governments or local initiatives, but has become part of a discourse on global responsibility and the "internationalization of the commemorative paradigm" (Bickford and Sodaro 2010). Commemorating human rights abuses has been enshrined in the UN Resolution on Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law (2005), which addresses symbolic reparations, international and national institutions, and the "global consciousness" in addition to citing "commemoration and tributes to victims" as an important means of retributive justice.1

The Arab Spring occurred during a period when the feld of transitional justice was refecting on "whether it is most appropriate to adopt readymade and tested approaches or rather to push for more creativity and advancement of locally generated solutions that draw upon other experiences" (Fisher and Stewart 2015, p. 4), a question that speaks to the tension between global and local approaches to dealing with the past of human rights abuses. Against this backdrop, and without going into empirical details, this chapter focuses on the global norm of remembrance and its local translation. The feld of memory and justice lends itself to a spatial analysis as put forward by this chapter, given the signifcant body of literature on the different phases of memory studies and commemoration as a practice, allowing us to trace the origin and spread of these ideas across time and space.

# **Memory and Justice from National to Global and Back to Local**

Finding constructive ways of linking the past to the present and the future is central to dealing with the past of human rights violations. Accordingly, the feld of transitional justice has been devoting increasing attention to memory politics (Björkdahl et al. 2017). This is also highly pertinent to the transformation processes in the MENA region, as explored in this volume, where memorials to violence and repression, intended as symbolic reparations, play a particularly signifcant role (Buckley-Zistel and Schäfer 2014). Moreover, memory initiatives and commemorative events such as anniversaries may contribute to a wider public understanding of the past (ICTJ 2015) and educate civil society about the violence, which may prevent future aggression (Bickford 2009). For victims and their communities, moreover, remembrance might provide some form of acknowledgement—as implied by the UN Resolution—and thus contribute to some form of restorative justice. Whether and how these normative aspirations translate into practice is a matter of empirical research.

Conceptionally, although the practice of remembering past atrocities has quite local origins, it has gone global in recent years—while maintaining its local importance (Winter 2006; Feindt et al. 2014). This development can be delineated into several phases (Erll 2011). Beginning with Maurice Halbwachs (1992) and others in the 1950s, memory studies was primarily concerned with the social and collective aspect of memory; debates revolved around how memory could be transmitted, constructed, and passed on by various societal groups ranging from family to nation. This focus on the social setting is important because remembrance, so one of Halbwachs's key arguments, is always conditioned by the present milieu in which we are situated. In other words, we remember as part of a collective, not as individuals. This is based on an understanding of a social environment as fairly stable and extending over a limited geographic space, which leads to an understanding of social memory as confned by space and time.

Halbwachs's viewpoint was expanded by thinking of memory in terms of material and non-material sites, as introduced by Pierre Nora (Erll 2011, p. 6). In his view, these sites of memory (*lieux de mémoire*) comprise "any signifcant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community" (Nora 1996, p. xviii) and thus include places, objects, and ideas that are vested with historical importance for a particular nation or community. They may include references to past violence such as war memorials or commemoration events, but also national symbols such as fags or national holidays. Importantly, they serve to create some form of bounded community, such as a nation, and thus a coherent identity.

The current thinking, in contrast, leaves behind the physical constraints of spatial limitations, i.e. localized communities or sites, and suggests that memory has gone global, that it has moved beyond national borders to become transnational (Assmann 2014; Erll 2011). Proponents of this contend that while, until recently, memory work and the construction of memorials mostly developed within the confnes of nation-states, global conditions—or the conditions of globalization have had a strong infuence on remembrance (Assmann and Conrad 2010; Levy and Sznaider 2002). In the words of Andreas Huyssen, "temporal boundaries have weakened just as the experience of experimental dimension of space has shrunk as a result of modern means of transportation and communication." (2003, p. 1). Whereas there were solid communities in the past, as in Halbwachs's idea of the social milieu or Nora's notion of sites of memory, under this argument, time and space are compressed. Due to mass media, the internet, and activities such as the promotion of the mantra of transitional justice, memory practices are increasingly going global. Levy and Sznaider (2002) argue that this has led to a global script that promotes a shared morality, the identifcation with distant others, and a desire, if not concrete efforts, to lessen their suffering. This builds a baseline of universal norms: a cosmopolitan morality, a cosmopolitan memory.

Nevertheless, despite the globalization (or transnationalization) of memory, memory remains tied to a locale. For "[a] politics of location does indeed pay rigorous attention to the local—starting from the intimate terrain of the body but it situates such attention in relation to other scales: from the regional to the national to the global" (Rothberg 2014, p. 652; Jebari 2018). For Rothberg, this can be referred to as multidirectional memory, through which different memory projects around the globe mutually affrming one another to their mutual beneft. The emergence of Holocaust memory, he suggests, has contributed to the possibility of other victims of mass violence articulating their demands, and even highlighting or enhancing their memories—and memory itself. Moreover, it has led to a more intensely shared memory—and a sharing of memory—that disentangles individual from collective memory, links victims' groups, and cuts across spatial, temporal, and cultural sites. This is exemplifed by the Mothers of the Disappeared, for instance, an initiative which started in post-Dirty War Argentina and has been adapted to other local contexts such as in Morocco (Menin 2017, p. 36) and Egypt (Mhajne and Whetstone 2018, p. 57) where women use their status as mothers of disappeared political activists in order to keep the memory of their loved ones alive. Similarly, a central memorial to Germany's socialist past—the former *Stasi* remand prison Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen—participated in a two-year project entitled Against Forgetting, in which it engaged with Tunisian stakeholders on issues pertaining to transitional justice, including how to construct a memorial to victims of repression (Stiftung Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, n.d.). Moreover, the international NGO Sites of Consciousness is operating the project Digital Mapping and Documentation in the Middle East and North Africa, which identifes sites of human rights abuses in the MENA region (funded by Germany's Robert Bosch Foundation; International Coalition of Sites of Consciousness, n.d.). These examples illustrate the entanglement of actors, ideas, and resources across the globe when it comes to sharing memory and ideas about memorialization.

Since the Arab Spring, however, there has also been a very localized or regionalized approach, as expressed in cultural production on memory. This is, for instance, expressed in the form of prison writings, i.e. autobiographical accounts of torture and maltreatment in detention (Hachad 2018; Ghachem 2018; Jebari 2018); documentaries and flms about human rights violations (Pierre-Bouthier 2018); and artistic and cultural formats (El Guabli and Jarvis 2018). In contrast to other post-violence countries, these forms of memorialization seem to be more common than those used as transitional justice mechanisms, which mainly comprise memorials (Barsalou 2017).

Rothberg's notion of multidirectional memory has not been without criticism, though. Critiques include that it neglects to take inherent power relations into account (Milich and Moghnieh 2018, p. 6) and leaves unquestioned the asymmetries of a memory discourse that is always highly entangled in both local and global power structures (De Cesari and Rigney 2014, p. 10). Yet how can this entanglement be depicted conceptually? We shall turn to this critique of power structures in the next section by taking a spatial turn.

# **Spatializing the Entanglement of Local and Global2**

The consciousness of the local has acquired relevance both as a backlash to globalization and in regard to the dissemination of global norms and practices (as with memory practices), which are said to at the same time incorporate and marginalize the local. This has led to the local turning into a critical viewpoint from which to assess the contradictions of globalization. At its most basic, the local is often posited as meaningful and authentic in the literature on memory and beyond, and it is often accompanied by words such as "real," "grounded," or "lived" (Massey 2007, p. 4). It thus connotes life-worlds with relatively stable associations and relatively shared histories (Appadurai 1995, p. 215), and, from an anthropological perspective, signifes some measure of groundedness (albeit unstable), some sense of boundaries (albeit permeable), and some sites for constructing identities (albeit contingent; Escobar 2001, p. 140).

In current memory studies, the local has come to signify a site of resistance against (global) power structures. It has been suggested that this wariness toward the global impact on local structures is often couched in post-colonial and post-structural thought, which places great emphasis on the local while voicing suspicion over grand meta-narratives accused of seeking to dominate prevailing discourses (Massey 2004, p. 9). A common concern of these approaches is to acknowledge contingency and particularity, to honor if not celebrate difference and otherness, and to stimulate local capacities (Massey 2003, p. 51). In this reading, current discourse and practice start from the premise that global and local are mutually exclusive entities. Frequently, they understand "the local" either to be sealed off from the global by some form of boundary, or view it as at the mercy of external relations.

In this chapter, I would like to challenge this binary perspective and ask whether and how global and local constitute each other and how this can be conceptualized theoretically. To this end, I will take a spatial turn. I argue that the scalar construction of global and local needs to be re-assessed and their mutual constitution through social interaction brought to the fore when analyzing transitional justice. Yet what does a spatial turn signify? The term *space* refers to areas around, within, and between objects; it marks the expanse in which objects occur. According to Henri Lefebvre (2009, p. 186 f.), space is always social, for it assigns more or less appropriate locations to social relations. Importantly, though, space itself is socially produced; it is a result of interactions and can thus be described as a complex social construction composed of social norms, values, and ascribed meanings (Lefebvre 1991, p. 26). It follows that space is both a complex social construction and the condition under which individuals and groups interact. In a circular way, space provides the structures that enable and constrain agency. There is thus a dialectic relationship between physical space and the societies that inhabit it: space is shaped by social interactions, and at the same time it shapes these interactions.

The term space thus points to the complex social constructions at the level of the local and global. In this sense, it designates not a container—a de-historicized, largely homogenous, fxed and bounded entity in which interaction occurs—but the materialization of social relations that have developed over time and are therefore contingent (Massey 2007, p. 154). Central to this line of reasoning is the assumption that there is a relationship between the local and global scales, which transcends their dichotomy as mutually exclusive concepts. According to Massey:

"if space is a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations, if I make space through interactions at all levels, from the (so-called) local to the (so-called) global, then those spatial identities such as places, regions, nations, and the local and the global, must be forged in this relational way too, as internally complex, essentially unboundable in any absolute sense, and inevitably historically changing". (2004, p. 5 f.)

In other words, if the local is only a congealing of social relations at a particular point and particular time, global and local are not mutually exclusive binary oppositions but rather related to and mutually constitutive of each other. This implies that the spatial combination of social relations that constitutes the uniqueness of any locality is not confned to this place but stretches beyond its (penetrable) boundaries, so that the global defnes part of the local, the outside part of the inside (Massey 2007, p. 5). There is thus an intricate relationship between local and global, as mutually constitutive.

Consequently, the local is not simply the product, or victim, of the global, but there are also elements through which the global is constituted through the local. In other words, there is not only a global construction of the local, as argued by critics of the global infuence of transitional justice at the local level, but also a local construction of the global (Massey 2006, p. 30). The local is therefore not simply a passive victim but also has agency of its own. Because if the local is productive of the global, it has some form of agency and thus transformative capacity. This implies that it is important to analyze how local action and local practices refect back onto global structures, and vice versa.

This is apparent, for instance, in efforts to turn personal memory into public memory, a process through which such memory gains presence in a particular place. This personal memory is profoundly local, for it is internalized in a person who has experienced or witnessed an atrocious event. Nikro and Hegasy (2017, p. 3) illustrate this with the example of former political prisoner Fatna El Bouih who narrates her personal experience in her autobiographical monograph (El Bouih 2008), but in so doing has gone from being a target of repression into an agent of memory politics in Morocco. In the process, her individual memory is transported into a social memory by making it available in print as a book, and then into spatial memory by assigning it a particular (non-material) territory, i.e. incorporating it into institutions that deal with the legacy of the past. This institution is then transferred to a national and global level, at which it gains prominence.

Despite arguments regarding the transnationalization of memory culture, memory thus also remains profoundly local. After all, importantly, the atrocities to be remembered took place in a particular locality, so they directly affect people who live in physical proximity to the events, who have to deal with the consequences of the rupture, i.e. people for whom remembrance serves an important political function. Sites of atrocities that are turned into memorials or memorial museums, for instance, are composed of tangible local relics and material cultural heritage (Mannergren Selimovic 2018) that root the site deeply in place. They give each site an idiosyncrasy that is unique and exceptional. There are thus always local aspects of memory culture and locally vernacularized aspects of a global memory culture.

# **Conclusions**

To return to the criticism of memory practice from a local perspective, we must ask whether current scholarship overly emphasizes the local as a product of the global, inadvertently denying the local of any agency and any potential to contribute to the transformation of (global) structures. Determining whether and how this occurs within memory practices would require an in-depth empirical analysis that goes beyond the scope of this chapter. From a conceptual vantage point, this chapter seeks to contribute to the critical literature on transitional justice and memory studies by offering an alternative understanding of how its key concepts travel. By tracing and assessing the infuence of local practices—in all their heterogeneity—it endows local justice entrepreneurs with a degree of agency in academic discourses that often regard them as solely subjected to global forces. Hence, the argument has a strong emancipatory component, marking "an attempt to get out from under the position of thinking one's identity as simply 'subject to' globalization" (Massey 2004, p. 12) and calling for a rethinking and a concomitant redefnition of the spaces in which memory and justice occur. In this sense, a spatial turn not only serves as a critique but "as a project that is devoted to the creation and construction of new contexts for thinking about politics and the production of knowledge" (Dirlik 1999, p. 38).

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2003. An ethics of the local. *Rethinking Marxism* 15 (1):49–74.


**Susanne Buckley-Zistel** is professor of peace and confict studies and the director of the Center for Confict Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Her research focuses on international relations, peacebuilding, transitional justice, gender and human rights, and she has published widely on these issues.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Tunisia's Re-Confgurations and Transitional Justice in Process: How Planned Processes of Social and Political Change Interplay with Unplanned Political Dynamics**

Mariam Salehi

# **Introduction**

This chapter sheds light on the dynamics of the Tunisian transitional justice process and its interplay with the political re-confgurations after the fall of the authoritarian regime in 2011. Drawing on Norbert Elias's thoughts on social processes, this chapter argues that the dynamics of transitional justice processes cannot be understood solely in view of the international norms and the "justice industry" (Subotic 2012, p. 117) that shape institutionalized transitional justice projects, nor merely by considering the context and the political preferences of domestic actors. Rather, they are shaped by the interplay of planned processes with unplanned political and social dynamics, with a fuctuating political context, power shifts, frictions, and sometimes competing political efforts in other realms. The contribution also shows that a technocratic/institutionalized transitional justice project can develop dynamics that are somewhat, but not entirely, independent from (continuous) re-confgurations, power shifts, and changing political preferences.

The chapter frst provides some historical background on Tunisia's authoritarian rule. It then briefy situates itself within transitional justice research and introduces the heuristic framework for empirical analysis. Next, it presents selective empirical illustrations that are deemed suitable for understanding the dominant processual characteristics at play. It draws on almost half a year of feld research

M. Salehi (\*)

Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: mariam.salehi@staff.uni-marburg.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_3

conducted across a total timespan of two and a half years, during which the author interviewed politicians, members and staff of the Tunisian Truth Commission as well as representatives of civil society, the government, and international organizations and NGOs; and conducted (participant) observation at formal and informal events of the Truth and Dignity Commission and elsewhere.

# **Background: What Past is Tunisia's Transitional Justice Process Confronting?**

To understand the nature of Tunisia's transitional justice process and the frictions surrounding it, it is useful to look at the sorts of repression and abuse Tunisians suffered under authoritarianism. Tunisia was under authoritarian rule from its independence from France in 1956 until the revolution in early 2011. Both authoritarian rulers—the country's frst president Habib Bourguiba who was in power until 1987 and his successor Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali—had a "hard grip" on the country. Bourguiba's focus was on the institutionalization of personal power. His ruling style and efforts to link state and society can be described using Philippe Schmitter's notion of "authoritarian corporatism" (Chouikha and Gobe 2015, p. 20). This entailed the establishment of a single party and eradicating almost all offcial opposition. Ben Ali's period of rule was also marked by massive human rights violations and signifcant limitations of civil and personal liberties. The repressive repertoire of the Ben Ali regime ranged from "arbitrary economic barriers to jailing, disappearances and torture" (Chomiak 2011, p. 72). While the military has historically not played a strong role in Tunisia and was formally banned from politics and even from voting (Grewal 2016), authoritarian rule relied on a strong secret police to exert repression and secure control. Thus, the regime spread a "net of fear" (Hibou 2011, p. 81) over the country.

Both rulers pushed forward the systematic marginalization in the political and economic spheres of their political rivals' strongholds in the country's southern and interior regions. However, Bourguiba was perceived as an "honest ruler" and was (or perhaps still is) reputed to be unconcerned with personal enrichment and focused only on leading the country to "modernity" and serving the best interests of the Tunisian people (Willis 2014, p. 52). In contrast, Ben Ali and his extended family built a predatory "quasi-mafa" state (Ayeb 2011; Cavatorta and Haugbølle 2012). Nepotistic structures, together with a heavy reliance on interpersonal control, made almost everyone at least indirectly complicit, leading to an elusive perpetrator that is "the system" (Fraihat 2016). Thus, victimhood stems from the ruling periods of both Bourguiba and Ben Ali.

Moreover, the Tunisian security forces responded violently to the uprisings in 2010−11. The brutal crackdown on protesters may have startled many and further motivated people who had not initially been part of the protests to mobilize (see for example Allal 2012). At least 132 people died and 1,452 were wounded in the revolution (Human Rights Watch 2015, p. 5).1 These people are commonly referred to as "martyrs and wounded of the revolution."2 Injured survivors, their families, and the bereaved since have been seeking justice and accountability. Thus, authoritarian rule in Tunisia produced victims of physical abuse, but also of socio-economic deprivation. Both violations demanded a response after the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011. Accordingly, in addition to initiating re-confgurations of the political system, Tunisia quickly started introducing justice and accountability measures to address violence, repression, and economic crimes under the dictatorship.

# **Introducing the "Process Gap" in Transitional Justice and a Framework for Analysis**

Transitional justice is essentially about processes. However, the focus in the transitional justice literature is mainly on the goals, outcomes, and effects of transitional justice efforts. The concept is accorded a strong goal orientation both in practice and in the scholarship. Efforts towards transitional justice, which are introduced after confict or violent rule, usually have (explicit or implied) teleological ends, such as societal reconciliation, peace, and democracy (Andrieu 2010, p. 540 ff.). Thus, most of the research either explores, normatively, what transitional justice should deal with and how—or, empirically, assesses the extent to which certain goals have been reached. Examples of the former approach include Crocker's (1999) normative framework for "reckoning with past wrongs," in which he defnes "eight goals that have emerged from worldwide moral deliberation" (Crocker 1999, p. 47); Orentlicher's (2007) work that defnes the goal of victims participation; and Miller's (2008) assertion that transitional justice should address economic issues, inequality, and structural violence. Aside from this, there is also a wealth of scholarship that discusses outcomes and effects of transitional justice measures for peace, human rights records, democracy, and political institutions from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. (For an overview of the literature, see Salehi and Williams 2016). However, the research has paid scant attention to how transitional justice interacts with the "transition," the political processes it ought to complement and render more just. Thus, although the processes are as important to analyze as the substance (cf. Autesserre 2014, p. 9), there is a much stronger focus on the *what* of transitional justice processes than on the *how* and *why* of their processual development (cf. Elias 1977, p. 128).

Against this backdrop, I propose a heuristic framework to analyze transitional justice in process and thus aim to help close the "process gap." The framework is based on Norbert Elias' process sociology, since it is particularly suitable for the analysis of dynamic processes of social and political change (Elias 1977, 2006a). It identifes four characteristics that help explain the development of the transitional justice process in relation to the transition, which is an in-between condition with an unclear endpoint (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986). This dynamic process is shaped by changing fgurations and thereby changing actor and power relations (Elias 2006a). In short, transitional justice processes are characterized by the interplay of planned/institutionalized processes and unplanned/spontaneous political and social dynamics (cf. Elias 1977); by non-linearity and (sometimes simultaneous) trends and counter-trends (cf. Elias 2006a); by international interconnectedness (cf. Elias 2006b); as well as by confict and friction that drive and defne the process (cf. Elias 1978).

Additionally, in order to analyze transitional justice in process, I distinguish between three stages: initiating (2011–12), designing (2012–14), and performing (2014–16) transitional justice. Although these stages are temporally defned, they are analytically informed and named according to the dominant logic identifed for the respective stage. Drawing on the characteristics identifed in the heuristic framework, the next section provides an empirical illustration of the political dynamics at play for each of these stages. Given the limited scope of this chapter, I will concentrate on a few instances that exemplify the processual developments in the respective stage.

# **Tunisia's Transitional Justice in Process: Empirical Illustration**

Transitional justice in Tunisia interplayed with the post-revolutionary political and social re-confgurations in the country, the development of both a "new political architecture"3 and new societal standards of behavior (cf. Elias 1977, p. 144) seeking to transcend the rule of violence and repression. In part, these affected changing power structures and helped determine who could play a part in post-revolutionary politics. At the same time, the continuous re-confgurations the fuctuating political context—infuenced how the transitional justice process developed.

Measures for seeking justice and accountability in post-revolutionary Tunisia were initially introduced ad hoc and only later within the framework of an institutionalized transitional justice project. Examples of ad-hoc measures included trials in military courts for the crimes of killing and wounding protesters during the revolution and in civil courts for economic crimes; ad-hoc compensation measures; provisions for vetting/lustration; as well as the establishment of investigation commissions. For the development of the institutionalized transitional justice process, a "National Dialogue for Transitional Justice" was conducted, which was supported by international transitional justice professionals from both international governmental and non-governmental organizations.4 The dialogue was led by a technical committee composed of civil society representatives and a representative of the Ministry for Human Rights and Transitional Justice.5 It included nationwide consultations with victims and stakeholders, including more than 2000 participants in total (Ministry for Human Rights and Transitional Justice 2013, p. 18) who were asked about their understanding and expectations of transitional justice (Andrieu 2016, p. 282). A hundred of them received specifc "training on transitional justice, on debate moderation, on writing reports," etc., harmonizing their level of knowledge and equipping them with discursive resources.6 The technical committee then led the drafting of the Tunisian transitional justice law. This was an unusually transparent and participatory process: "For the frst time in Tunisia, we found ourselves with a law project that was not developed behind closed doors."7

This participatory process with international support culminated in a quite far-reaching transitional justice project, covering almost sixty years, from the last stretches of the independence struggle in 1955 until the passing of the transitional justice law in 2013. It furthermore covers both physical human rights violations and socio-economic crimes. The transitional justice law provided for the establishment of a Truth and Dignity Commission, specialized chambers within the Tunisian judiciary, as well as a reparations fund. Introducing such a far-reaching transitional justice process was possible due to the specifc political confguration after the fall of the regime. The newly introduced electoral laws functioned as a way to vet those seeking public offce since "in Tunisia lustration has been aimed at altering the electoral landscape" (Lamont 2013). Members of the old regime were banned from participating in the 2011 elections to the National Constituent Assembly, which also functioned as a legislative body until the end of 2014. Thus, the Assembly was essentially vetted, shifting power to those who had previously been powerless (cf. Elias 1978, 2006a) and opening up opportunities for anchoring transitional justice (and thereby also accountability) in the constitution.

# **Initiating Transitional Justice**

The frst stage, initiating transitional justice, mainly deals with the ad-hoc justice measures introduced quickly after the uprisings8 as well as the frst institutionalization efforts. Since these initial steps were introduced so soon after the ouster of Ben Ali, when a new legal and political order was not yet in place, they were mainly based on "old regime" legislation and institutions. For example, trials of members of the police and other components of the security forces (for human rights violations during the uprising) and of Ben Ali's wider family (for economic crimes) were conducted by pre-existing military or civil courts, respectively. The investigatory commissions were technically also a remnant of the old regime, since their establishment was introduced by Ben Ali "as a late attempt to appease public outrage" (Lamont and Boujneh 2012, p. 39).

While this stage was marked by a general willingness to pursue justice and accountability, this trend was countered with a lack of willingness to dismantle some of the deeper structures of "the system." For example, there was no genuine effort to vet the judiciary, although it had been a cornerstone of Ben Ali's rule. This is well illustrated by the two following quotes. While a civil society representative commented that "Ben Ali was a dictator *because* of the judiciary. … So, the judiciary is important. One needs to reform the judiciary", an international advisor to the transitional justice process remarked that "they screwed some magistrates at some points, but there were no clear criteria. They had no clear idea whether they wanted to do a proper vetting."9,10

This stage was furthermore dominated by a factionalist political logic that led to the perception that those newly in power were perpetuating the old regime's practices of favoritism. For example, the ad-hoc compensation measures that were introduced were perceived as having mainly benefted the supporters of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that led the government after the 2011 elections, specifcally those with access to people in power.11 These perceptions did not provoke a sense of justice, but rather fostered a lack of trust in justice and accountability efforts. Also, the initial institutionalization efforts created friction around the question of how best to institutionalize transitional justice. Civil society in particular was very skeptical about the establishment of a transitional justice ministry, as they were afraid "[t]he minister could instrumentalize the ministry for his political or electoral agenda."12 In hindsight, a civil society representative concluded that this skepticism had borne out: "Listen, regarding the transitional justice ministry—that was just a façade ministry."13

To summarize, this stage was marked by a general trend toward justice and accountability that was, however, undermined by a lack of willingness to dismantle repressive structures at a deeper level. This interacted with political polarization as well as frictions between the political sphere and civil society that shaped the further development of the transitional justice process.

# **Designing Transitional Justice**

The second stage consists of designing the planned, institutionalized transitional justice project. International actors played a crucial role in this. They provided the socio-technological offering" by providing guidance and training on what transitional justice should mean and entail. This led to a harmonization of rhetoric among the Tunisian actors involved: "and they all went through the same training on transitional justice, on moderation of debate, on writing reports, on all of this."14

However, there were still divergent opinions on what transitional justice should signify and entail among Tunisian political and civil society actors.15 And while international advice was welcomed, it was not always followed. One example is the exclusion of civil society from nominating truth commissioners: members of parliament decided to keep that prerogative to themselves. This led to cross-cutting frictions. Civil society felt "discarded" and the perception of a partisan bias emerged, including within the parliamentary selection commission, as one member remarked: "We have reached the nomination of the [Truth and Dignity Commission] members with pain. […] There was one party that only wanted partisan members."16

In this stage, one could furthermore observe an interplay between the planned, institutionalized transitional justice project and transitional political and social dynamics. In a volatile political situation, lawmakers did not prioritize transitional justice and the transitional justice law was shelved. Thus, the paradigm of dealing with the past was questioned again (or at least not prioritized anymore) and a counter-trend of elite deal making and political compromise emerged: "[T]here is a lack of will to really seek accountability in these areas. There's a kind of deal."17 At times of confict and unrest, the adversary political factions found themselves in a "balance of weakness",18 marked by an "ineptitude at waging war" and an "impotence to organize peace" (Krichen 2016, p. 264). In this situation, stability was prioritized at the expense of transitional justice. For example, justice and accountability did not play a role in the National Dialogue, a confict resolution initiative to avert political violence and break the deadlock of the constitution-making process. The facilitating Tunisian civil society actors received the Nobel Peace Prize for this initiative in 2015:19

And when the National Dialogue started, the quartet, the four organizations … that initiated the National Dialogue, did not make transitional justice one of the priorities. So … all deputies we met said "not now."20

Thus, in this stage, one could see a further institutionalization of transitional justice that was strongly shaped by international advice and interconnectedness, but one could also observe an interplay between the planned transitional justice process and unplanned political dynamics. In a volatile and violent political climate, acute confict resolution through political deal making was prioritized over justice and accountability, countering the political will for pursuing transitional justice efforts.

# **Performing Transitional Justice**

The third stage, "performing transitional justice," relates to the operations of the transitional justice institutions, mainly the Truth and Dignity Commission, in practice. This stage was shaped by fattening cleavages, the closing of the "revolutionary window of opportunity" for accountability, and a "resurfacing" of "the system." Political adversaries created external challenges, both subtle and direct, to the institutionalized project. The subtle obstacles included limited access to archives or delayed budget payments. These were used to create the impression that the truth commission was not working properly. As a civil society representative observed, "They will also continue to give the impression that the process continues, that the TDC continues. 'Here, the TDC has problems, it is not us but the TDC that has problems … So, we may let [the commission] work, but it is not doing anything.'"21

More direct challenges included the introduction of competing legislation, the so-called "reconciliation law," by President Essebsi. The bill aimed to offer amnesty to corrupt businessmen and administrative staff, and in its original form would have signifcantly curtailed the competencies of the Truth and Dignity Commission.22 Additionally, the transitional justice process was characterized by internal confict and frictions among the commissioners as well as rumors surrounding them. The image of the commission was closely linked to its president, Sihem Ben Sedrine, who was often portrayed in research interviews as a polarizing rather than reconciling fgure: "She is no Desmond Tutu," a member of parliament remarked. 23 And a defector from the Truth and Dignity Commission criticized the president's leadership style as authoritarian: "[The truth commission] is an authoritarian structure … effectively in the hands of Sihem Ben Sedrine."24

During this stage, political preferences were clearly shifting away from transitional justice, with a continuous trend of prioritizing political compromise and elite deal making. However, the transitional justice process visibly developed limited autonomy from these shifting preferences. The president's competing draft legislation, aimed at undermining the process, was not easy to pass, and nobody had planned the altered version that eventually passed (from "economic" to "administrative reconciliation law"). Moreover, the Truth and Dignity Commission conducted public hearings against the preferences of the country's political leadership. Thus, in this stage transitional justice was partially performed despite challenges. In this context, the testimony of prominent fgures from the Tunisian political and cultural realm could lend some credibility to accountability/justice claims. One prominent example is the testimony of writer Gilbert Naccache, who recounted political imprisonment and torture during the Bourguiba years.25 Another is Ben Ali's nephew Imed Trabelsi, who gave testimony from prison and alleged that the nepotistic structures were still in place: "There was a revolution, but nothing has changed to my knowledge. I have my sources and the same system [of corruption] is still operational."26

Frictions between the truth commission and the political sphere continued and some factions in parliament tried to deny the commission an extension of its mandate that was provided for by law through a controversial vote that was both contested in procedure and in substance. The responsible ministry then granted an extension until the end of 2018, which still meant that the commission had to terminate its operations before it could fnish all its tasks. Eventually, the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission published its fnal report in March 2019, presenting results from over four years of work.

To sum up, in the third stage transitional justice was driven and defned by confict and friction from both inside and outside the truth commission. The political trend went against the pursuit of justice and accountability measure. However, the transitional justice process could develop a certain degree of independence from political preferences and shifting power relations and perform their task despite the challenges.

# **Conclusion and Outlook**

After the Truth and Dignity Commission ended its work at the end of 2018, the questions of whether and how the fndings summarized in the report will be disseminated and the recommendations implemented by the government are crucial for transitional justice. However, frictions have continued to grow. A recently circulated draft bill aimed at terminating all cases before the specialized chambers; this was widely perceived as an attempt at an amnesty law.27 Discussions with various experts all invited the same assumption: any steps towards implementation are very unlikely to be taken before the parliamentary and presidential elections in autumn 2019. Even afterwards, barely any imaginable political confguration would empower someone willing to take on that task. Thus, while the planned Tunisian transitional justice process was very comprehensive by mandate and design, it interacted with continuous political re-confgurations and changing power dynamics in the transition. Confict and friction across different actor groups played a crucial role in transitional justice's development within the volatile political context. While the political will for pursuing justice and accountability has been neither linear nor non-reversible, the current trend points to an abandonment of transitional justice. Thus, it remains to be seen whether a counter-trend can develop that places transitional justice back on the political agenda.

#### **Endnotes**


October 2015; own translation.


# **References**


Krichen, Aziz. 2016. *La Promesse du Printemps*. Bordeaux: Editions Script.


**Dr. Mariam Salehi** is A.SK postdoctoral fellow in the Global Governance unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and research associate at the Center for Confict Studies, Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Her research is situated at the intersection of international politics and confict studies. She was a doctoral research fellow in the research network "Re-Confgurations" and her PhD thesis on the Tunisian transitional justice process won the 2019 dissertation award of the German Middle East Studies Association.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Algeria: Between Transformation and Re-Confguration**

# Rachid Ouaissa

Since February 16, 2019, millions of Algerians of all generations and from all regions of the country began protesting the regime that has governed the country since Algeria'sindependence in 1962. The protests began in soccer stadiums, in 2018, before reaching smaller urban centers. Of these, the frst demonstration was held in the town of Kherrata, in the Kabylie region, best known as the site of the May 1945 massacres. The movement spread from there to all of the country's forty-eight districts as well as Algerian diaspora communities in France, Canada, Austria, Belgium, UK, and the United States. (The diaspora's involvement added a new element that had been largely absent from the events of the 2010–11 Arab Spring.) These mobilizations were spontaneous, non-hierarchical, unstructured, and they lacked a set ideology. Hirak, as Algerians call the February 16 Movement, is a popular movement that transcends all party-political structures and crosses regional, ethnic, and ideological lines. Although it spans all social strata and age groups in Algerian society, Hirak is largely championed by students, lawyers, teachers, civil servants, and members of the liberal professions, which makes it a middle-class movement.

In its frst stage, this protest movement arose in opposition to Abdelaziz Boutefika's candidacy for a ffth term as president, opposing his plans to hold onto power. Then, it went to denounce the whole political regime, demanding a new civilian republic based on the rule of law and democratic principles. The slogan *Yetnahaw gaâ* [They All Should Go] was coined by a young Algerian in the local vernacular, who said it into the microphone of a news broadcaster from Abu

R. Ouaissa (\*)

Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: ouaissa@staff.uni-marburg.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_4

Dhabi on the day of Boutefika's resignation, insisting that Classical Arabic was not his native language. The slogan has become a rallying cry for the movement in its appeal for a complete overhaul of the system.

After the army forced President Boutefika to resign on April 2, 2019, he was replaced by Abdelkader Bensalah, as interim president, and a new election was announced for July 4, 2019. On June 1, the Constitutional Council postponed the election. In September 2019, with protests ongoing, the army rescheduled it for December 12, 2019. The fve candidates that remained in November 2019 were fgures from the regime. More than 60% of the population boycotted the election, which also had record numbers, 12,76% of abstentions and blank ballots. Although Abdelmadjid Tebboune was offcially elected in the frst round of voting with 58.13% of votes cast, he remains a contested, illegitimate president in the eyes of Algerians, and the protest movement has been unrelenting in its demands for a real democratic transition. And so, the confict has heightened between the society and *le pouvoir* (literally "the power," the political and military decision-makers de-facto ruling the country). Two contradictory political projects, two visions of the state, and two perspectives on the relationship between the state and its citizens are in competition: on one side, a project to re-confgure *le pouvoir* with a few cosmetic changes, and on the other, a project to radically transform the foundations of the Algerian state and to undertake a genuine democratic transition.

This idea of re-confguration is inspired by the German sociologist Norbert Elias's principle of "fguration," (Elias 2003) which describes the crystallization of mutually dependent relationships between actors, forming interdependent networks marked by an unstable balance of forces. The re-confguration of a political system designates a process of both confictual and cooperative interactions seeking to reestablish or uphold the old order. In this sense of the word, re-confguration refers to the process of changing, co-opting, or eliminating actors in order to build new alliances: "changing everything so that nothing changes." The disruptions that occurred in Algeria's *pouvoir* starting in April 2019, including the choice of a new president, were thus no more than a re-confguration.

"Transition", by contrast, denotes a shift from an authoritarian system to a democratic one. A democratic transition means leaving behind the old political rules of the game and brings about the emergence of new political actors. In the words of Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, "A democratic transition is completed when suffcient agreement has been reached about political procedures to produce an elected government, when a government comes to power that is the direct result of a free and popular vote, when this government *de facto* has the authority to generate new policies, and when the executive, legislative and juridical power generated by the new democracy does not have to share power with other bodies *de jure*" (Linz and Stepan 1996, p. 3).

To understand two conficting dynamics that have dominated Algerian politics since independence—transition and re-confguration—one must understand the internal mechanisms and logics of the Algerian regime. This requires understanding the nature of *le pouvoir*, the workings of the state in Algeria, and the nature of the pact between state and society since the country's independence in 1962.

This chapter will analyze the power structure of Algeria and discuss the background and different stages of the movement of February 2019. My main thesis in this chapter is that the Algerian regime generally outlasts crises of co-option thanks to its nature as a rentier state, but that this time, unlike during previous crises, the regime has lost the support of the middle classes. That has frustrated its efforts to re-confgure the system and increased the likelihood of a democratic shift.

# **The Nature of the State in Algeria**

The German political scientist Hartmut Elsenhans describes what Algerians colloquially call *le pouvoir* using the concept of the "state class." According to Elsenhans, the state class comprises the people at the top levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy who, solely by virtue of their positions, extract a collective surplus in the form of rent (Elsenhans 1996, p. 176). The state class reproduces itself out of its own ranks via nepotism, the education system, and bonds of patronage (Elsenhans 1996, p. 200). The members of the state class are organized into clans. These consist of small groups of actors bonded by underlying trust factors, which, by Khaldounian logic, can include parentage, regionalism, family, having attended the same *zāwiyya* or military academy, and so forth. A clan can include both civilians and military offcers, apparatchiks and businesspeople, members of the independence war generation and members of younger generations. The different clans compete over infuence, income, and prestige. They form coalitions with other clans in the state class, which often causes the state class to grow in number while increasing how many people are connected to those clans through organic, clientelistic relationships. As a function of their political clout, the clans position themselves at various distances from the central clan. The different clans of the state class, despite coming from basically oppositional ideologies, are connected and united by rent and its distribution. As Mahfoud Bennoune has put it, they therefore reach a consensus to ensure "the equilibrium of stagnation" (Bennoune 1998, p. 17).

Without delving into the ramifcations and history of the economic notion of "rent," I will build the rest of my argument around the concept of the rentier state. The lens of rent helps explain the nature of the cyclical crises of the Algerian regime as well as the crisis in the relationship between state and society in Algeria. Algeria is a quintessential rentier state. Petroleum and natural gas comprise 97% of exports, 35% of GDP, and 75% of budgetary revenue (Crisis Group 2018, p. 3).

Rent is the outcome of restrictions on competition, whether caused by natural monopolies or by politically generated restrictions to the market. It infuences political structures and therefore actors' strategies. Unlike proft, capital in the form of rent does not accumulate by market mechanisms. In rent-dominated economies, surplus fnancial resources are not necessarily invested productively in accordance with economic rules. Consolidating revenue from rent at the state level allows the regime to buy the masses' loyalty while preserving a high level of autonomy from society. Through rent, other social groups and classes are linked to the state by bonds of clientelism, which makes it diffcult if not impossible for an autonomous civil society to take shape. Besides breeding clientelization, rent enables the state to build up harshly repressive structures. For Michael Ross, states with large budgets funded by petroleum revenue are more likely to be authoritarian than states with relatively low taxpayer-funded budgets. Unlike other types of rent, petroleum rent calls for a strongly centralized state while encouraging diversity among the ruling elite (Ross 2001, p. 335). The true goal of the ruling class is not development, but a stronghold on maximum power.

The third effect of rent is the dismantling of economic structures, which prevents the development of the capitalism's historical prerequisites: the blossoming of a productive middle class that would pose a social counterweight to the rentier state class. Compared to proft, the accumulation of rent demands different types of monopolies or political access. However, profts in free-market systems ultimately are reinvested because of market competition. As a result, the most powerful capitalists are threatened by any impediments to innovation and quickly leave the market. Businesspeople invest because they expect greater demand from consumers. The innovation-driven competition caused by investments brings not only technical superiority, but real wage growth. Under Keynesian dynamics, real wage growth leads to a rise in demand and therefore gives labor bargaining power. Labor's attainment of autonomy prevents the supremacy of the powerful. It is also the basis of the bourgeois revolution, thus also a prerequisite for the establishment and of democratic structures and civil rights. Large segments of society beneft from the expansion of the market which leads to what Eric Hobsbawm described as the self-disempowerment of the aristocracy (Hobsbawm 1987) after Europe's industrialization. Besides shaping the political behavior of the elites, capitalist structures also determine the cultural behaviors of society. The mobilization of labor via bargaining power—rather than any kind of ethnic, religious, or clan-based solidarity—becomes workers' preferred conduit for asserting their interests. This is what Ferdinand Tönnies described as the transition from community (*Gemeinschaft*) to society (*Gesellschaft*) (Tönnies 2012).

In short, rentier societies are societies in which classes that obtain their privileges by accumulating proft—i.e., from the market—are marginal or nonexistent. Protecting the accumulation of capital by market mechanisms—i.e., by competition and not via bureaucratic mechanisms or arrangements with the political class—would mean participating in the system of production and therefore in job creation. Algeria does not have a social class that accumulates its capital through production. Obtaining bourgeois status, or simply wealth, depends on relationships between businesspeople and the political power.

After 1962, *le pouvoir* in Algeria was upheld by an alliance between the military and the party, with its satellites and its bureaucracy, which made the democratization process twice as diffcult. Since the economy opened up in the 1990s, compradors have joined these groups as economic actors. The alliance of these three groups of actors under the auspices of the military creates what the British anthropologist Ernest Gellner called "the neo-Mamluk state" (Gellner 1981, p. 64). Yet there are three necessary conditions for a transition: divorcing the army from politics, severing ruling parties from their satellite organizations, and wresting rent from the hands of *le pouvoir*.

Thus, like all state institutions, the Algerian army is dependent on rent from fossil fuels, but the army is also the institution that holds the monopoly on violence in the Weberian sense. For this reason, this institution has been the backbone of the Algerian state class ever since independence. That is why each of the different clans is grouped around military actors.

The ruling elite clientelizes social groups by creating jobs—the marginal workforce—and subsidizes most consumer goods. At the same time, social services, free education, health care, and the like all lead to the emergence of large middle classes. However, these new marginally employed middle classes are not oriented to or associated with the market in the Weberian sense: their eyes are on rent. In the Algerian case, I have termed those the "trabendo1 middle classes" (Ouaissa 2018). They consume more than they produce, so their social status depends on the share of the surplus that the ruling class spends on consumption. These middle classes are not the result of an increased consumption dependent on production, but on consumption fnanced by rent. Meanwhile, they exert indirect pressure on the ruling elite to spend even more on consumption. It is those same middle classes, which mostly consist of consumers dependent on rent, who have often played the rebels in Algerian history.

Given their dependence on the international price of hydrocarbons, rentier countries experience cyclical crises. Not only do these crises disrupt the power balance between the clans that make up the state class, and often trigger implosions within that class, but they also cause distortions in the state class's relationship with the middle class.

The clientelistic relationship between the middle class and the state began to erode when oil prices dropped in the early 1980s. Algeria's petroleum revenues fell by half between 1980 and 1992, and the budgetary defcit reached 13.7% in 1988 (Nashashibi et al. 1998). The gross national debt ballooned from 19 billion dollars in 1980 to around 27 billion in 1988. Meanwhile, the Algerian population grew from approximately 18.7 million to 24 million, which corresponds to a very rapid growth rate of 3% p.a. Two other statistics can be seen as key indicators of the political disaster of the 1990s: the roughly 4.8% annual increase in the urban population from 1980 to 1990 and the large share of children under 15, which was about 40% of the national population (Nashashibi et al. 1998). This situation forced the government to launch austerity programs and budget cuts, including slashes to subsidies. Those measures increasingly impoverished the Algerian middle class and led to riots all across the country, culminating in the events of October 1988. The riots were spawned by the gap between the regime and society, but also by an inner split within the regime between the faction of *le pouvoir* that wanted to reform the system and those anti-reformers who wanted merely just to change the rules of the game.

The Algerian state class responded to the 1988 revolts with two different strategies for revising the social contract between the middle class and *le pouvoir*. On one hand, the government adopted a policy of privatization and abandoned the discredited socialist model. On the other, it launched controlled political reforms that paved the way to party pluralism. This development was pioneered by the Islamist movement, which founded a party called the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS for short—here and below, I will use the French acronyms for names of parties). The discontent of big swathes of the middle class played out in a growing support for political Islam, as seen in the legislative election of December 1991, when the FIS attained 47% of the vote and 188 of 430 parliamentary seats. The party became not only a mouthpiece for marginalized sectors of society, but also a gathering place for middle-class Algerians who feared for their status and felt that their progress was being thwarted.

The military reacted to the FIS victory by overthrowing President Bendjedid in a January 1992 coup d'état. The ban on FIS, the radicalization of its component groups, and the *le pouvoir* repression campaign led the country into a civil war that would last nearly ten years. The FIS split along sociological lines: the marginalized elements, who formed the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), and the religious middle classes, who founded the AIS (Islamic Salvation Army). A merciless war began between various factions. Besides the offshoots that seceded from the Islamic groupings, the war also gave rise to assorted resistance groups.

The civil war of the 1990s and the recourse to physical violence enabled the state class to restore itself. The regime shed its socialist and anti-capitalist ideology and opened up the country economically. On a political level, the state class ended the longstanding monopoly of the FLN (National Liberation Front) as the civilian face of *le pouvoir*. The multiparty system increased the number of clusters that the state class could co-opt. Besides the fragmented offspring parties of the FLN itself, such as the RND (Democratic National Rally), there were now Islamist parties such as the MSP (Movement for the Society of Peace) and secular parties such as the RCD (Rally for Culture and Democracy). The 1990s civil war permitted a self-re-confguration of the system.

When Boutefika took power in 1999, sanctifed by higher oil prices, the stage was set for a new economic elite and a new kind of politics. Under Boutefika, an alliance between the military, the business community, and the political wing of *le pouvoir* turned Algeria into a "neo-Mamluk" state, Gellner's term for a system dominated by an alliance of technocrats, the military, and politicians who are segregated from society by their privileges and caste behaviors (Gellner 1981, p. 64).

From 1999 onward, more than a trillion dollars were spent: not on modernizing the economy, but on expanding clientelism networks and reestablishing peace. With Boutefika's rise to power, thanks to the lucky rise in oil prices on the international market, the religious and "trabendist" middle classes completely swung towards *le pouvoir* and became its base of support. The abundance of rent enabled a pragmatic alliance between *le pouvoir* and the religious middle classes. Across the import sector, a group of import barons gathered around the president. Profting from the abundance of foreign currency, they fooded the Algerian market with consumer goods. Surrounding those barons and benefting from them, a stratum of small- and medium-scale merchants became active in the informal and formal sectors. They specialized in reselling imported products at a smaller scale. Thus, in addition to the traditional power centers (the army and the secret service), a new power center was born, this time around the president and the import barons. The country spends around 10 billion dollars per year on imported food products alone. The import sector is a lucrative business for certain circles close to power and plays a stabilizing role that, in times of high rent, keeps all the clans satisfed. According to the national press, 25,000 individuals have a stranglehold on import licenses. In one of his frst speeches, President Boutefika himself claimed that 15 men controlled the entire country. In parallel, an important informal sector emerged. More than half of Algerian commerce is informal. Altogether, the quantity of small shops and retail establishments more than doubled from 2001 to 2010 to reach around 1.5 million.

Thus, a new social contract between the state and society was drawn up that generated a new middle class. This middle class is rent-seeking, as before, but it has a commercial character; I call it the "trabendist" middle class. "Crony capitalism" laid the foundations necessary for an ideological "new deal" between the nationalist profteers of *le pouvoir*. Unlike the middle classes of the 1970s, who acquired their economic status through the labor, housing, and education policies of the state-as-provider, the middle classes of the 2000s drew their status from the direct and indirect distribution of rent, through commerce and public programs such as the youth employment agency. Ideologically, the middle classes of the 1970s took nationalist stances—a nationalism at times tinged with Pan-Arabism, or else Baathism—and were both pro-modernization and pro-development. Starting in the 2000s, the Algerian middle classes went through an interesting ideological mutation. On the one hand, there was a notable re-Islamization of day-to-day practices in a form clearly distinguishable from the traditional Islam as practiced by the previous generation. On the other, there was a rise in individualism and forms of consumption that mimicked Western styles.

This "trabendist" and profteering middle class became an important actor in *le pouvoir*, forging a Trabendo-military-civil alliance in place of the military-technocratic-administrative coalition of the'70 s. "Boutefikism" (Ouaissa 2019a) denotes the initiation of a brand of Trabendo capitalism based on imports. The ideologies of development and socio-Baathism were replaced with a new ideological cocktail. Boutefikism brought Islamo-Baathists, nationalists, and secular Berbers under the same big tent. It is a patchwork ideology, tailored to neoliberalism but combining modernists and conservatives. Henceforth, the presidential coalition incorporates parties with mutually exclusive ideologies, such as the FLN, the RND, the Islamist TAJ (Rally of the Hope of Algeria), and the secular MPA (Popular Algerian Movement).

Besides erecting that civilian façade, President Boutefika struck a wise peace deal with the institution of the military. By accepting his offer of greater fnancial autonomy, the army was overshadowed by politics. However, the budget of the Defense Ministry has seen astronomical increases since Boutefika's rise to power. The 2019 national budget allocated 12 billion dollars to the army: some 320% more than in the year 2000. Military spending now comprises nearly a quarter of the national budget. According to a 2016 ranking by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, based on its military spending, Algeria is the seventeenth strongest military power in the world and the strongest in Africa (Ouaissa 2019b). As such, the Algerian army is one of the institutions that benefts most from rent on natural gas and oil. According to the French Centre de Ressources et d'Information sur l'Intelligence Économique et Stratégique, the Algerian army massively invests its resources in the development of its defense industry (Carol 2018).

Since mid-2014, the price of oil has fallen precipitously, and Algeria is now living through a moment comparable to 1988. Rent from oil is no longer enough to co-opt the deadlocked middle classes, nor can it buy the loyalty of different segments of society. The middle classes are witnessing a slow drop in their living standards. They reject the neoliberal ideology, as it only widened the gap that divides the richest stratum from the middle and lowest strata of society. Once again, the cohesion between the clans in *le pouvoir* is falling apart. In the absence of a shared political ideology, rent is the only common denominator among the clans of the state class. Since February 2019, a recomposition and re-confguration of the structure of the clans of *le pouvoir* has been underway (Ouaissa 2020). And as it has in every rentier crisis, the army has taken control of the political system; its staff has been the political decision-making body ever since the coup that overthrew President Boutefika on April 2, 2019. As in the late 1980s, the middle classes are turning their backs on *le pouvoir*; they have become the driving force behind the Hirak protest movement.

The interim president, under orders from the military arm of *le pouvoir*, is attempting to simulate a transition. In fact, it is merely a re-confguration of the state class. Yet this time the prospect of re-confguring the system seems trickier because the middle classes of Hirak are determined to push through a real transition.

# **Hirak: A New Kind of Protest Movement**

Hirak is a new, atypical kind of social movement that defes traditional theories of social movements (Volpi 2019). Over a few months of protests, Hirak overturned not only the political order of state and society as established after 1962, but also the structure of the clans in *le pouvoir*. What is more, Hirak successfully rewrote Algerian society's collective memory to establish itself as a precursor of a new society to come. Hirak has provoked what Frantz Fanon termed a "double rupture" (Fanon 2002). In the frst rupture, Algerians reject the hatred and distrust that *le pouvoir* had sown among them. In the second, they redirect that hatred against *le pouvoir* itself.

Unlike the base of the previous protest movement during the 1980s, which mostly consisted of culturally and economically marginalized groups such as the "hittists"2 and "trabendists,"3 Hirak's base is made up of middle-class people whose progress had been deadlocked. The actors involved in the movement are linked to the modes of consumption prevalent among the middle strata of society, although this position is more subjective than socioeconomic: by all accounts, the protesters are economically unstable. Thus, the Algerian middle classes seem to be wedged into the space between precarity and individualistic trends (Estanque 2015). The middle classes can be broken down into three identifable segments: the new middle class, generally employed in nonproductive sectors of the economy; relics of the old middle class (farmers, traders, artisan producers, public sector employees); and a "peripheral" population composed of people with little involvement in the labor market (students, homemakers, and retirees).

Characterized by spontaneity and its lack of structure, this movement has managed to bypass the authoritarian regime's attempts at security measures, manipulation, infltration, and co-option. Distinguishing itself from conventional protest movements that are organized by opposition political parties and organizations, Hirak put the regime on the defensive. Moreover, the political elite was unable to regain legitimacy by organizing elections because the movement sweepingly rejects the whole system and all its past practices, including the electoral system. The movement represents a form of collective action, and its repertoire of novel protest methods (songs, poetry, street theater, dance, and humor) paves the way for a fourishing of individual creativity and the popular genius. The middle-class movement frames problems in terms of values, refecting the cultural context of its adherents. Unlike the movement of October 1988, whose actors were guided by dreams of personal advancement and confronted *le pouvoir* head-on, Hirak embodies goals and categories of actions stemming from middle-class culture, imbued with a certain professionalism. Though dominated by the middle classes, the movement is pursuing objectives that are more universal and global and transcend class boundaries. This refects values associated with middle-class culture and education levels.

Unlike traditional social movements, Hirak's cohesion does not rest on serving individual interests. The group is rooted in a collective identity that cuts across specifc ethnic, religious, or regional affliations. Hirak recreates Algerianness in its diversity and all its historical dimensions. In reclaiming historical fgures from the war of independence, in depoliticizing religion, and in proclaiming the Amazigh identity of the Algerian people across the country, the movement strips *le pouvoir* of the narratives that once legitimized its authoritarian rule for a long time. Hirak has endowed Algerian society with a national identity that is the outcome of change, negotiation, and communication among citizens. Collective action and shared experiences are constructing a new consciousness. As an inherently anti-establishment and anti-hegemonic social movement, Hirak is fghting not only to take back the material structure of production, but also to wrest control over socioeconomic development. In other words, it is seeking to reclaim individuals' day-to-day control over their time, space, and relationships (Melucci 1982, p. 219). Unlike the agendas of older movements that have existed in Algeria since 1962, Hirak's stated objectives cross class and regional lines.

Spontaneity lends autonomy and fexibility to the actors of Hirak, making it hard for *le pouvoir* to exert its habitual mechanisms of control or to measure the true force of the movement. The movement is decentralized, with neither a declared leadership nor a declared ideology, so that each citizen, across social networks, feels a personal sense of responsibility and concern. Participation is not tied to a centralized hierarchy. This explains the maturing self-image of the Algerian people and its rejection of Zaimist (elitist) culture. The movement's fuidity enables anyone to take part, to introduce themselves, or to propose slogans. At the same time, this spontaneity fts into weekly rituals that close out the Friday and Tuesday marches: ululations, the sounds of the *mahraz* (mortars and pestles),4 and "casserole"5 sessions on Thursday evenings. This is "ritualized spontaneity," formalized mass responses to the week's events or to decisions by *le pouvoir.* Hirak has inaugurated a new form of political dialogue between *le pouvoir* and the protesting masses: a dialogue across different spaces that is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon's topology of the colonial city,6 built around a spatial and psychological binary. Since February 2019, Algeria has been a compartmentalized realm, bisected into two different living spaces— the world of the incumbent *pouvoir* and the world of the people—which follow different logic and hold different visions of Algeria. Neither of these two worlds knows or recognizes the other: *le pouvoir* in their barracks and palaces, "the people" in their streets and public spaces. The institutions of the state are pitted against the will of the people and against the fulfllment of that will. The parliament, conceived to represent the people, absurdly keeps out of the confict. The army, having missed the opportunity to play a nobler role, cut its umbilical cord to the people with the actions of its late leader. The president, who is nothing but a fgurehead of the system's continuity, emerged out of the surrealism of a theatrical election. Faced with this political backwardness, Hirak is attempting to reconstruct the society it desires: a society built on tolerance, justice, and modernity.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


Gellner, Ernest. 1981. *The muslim society*. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1987. *The age of empire: 1875–1914*. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.


**Rachid Ouaissa** is professor of Near and Middle Eastern Politics at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). His main felds of research are political, economic and societal developments in the MENA region, the rise and transformation of Islamist movements, and rentier states and the role of middle classes. Since February 2013, he served as spokesperson for the research network "Re-Confgurations". Since April 2020, he is also director of the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) in Tunis.

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# **The International and the Construction of Opposition in Iran**

# Thorsten Bonacker and Tareq Sydiq

Iran has a long and storied tradition of protest and revolution. This tradition has been characterized by a range of diverse oppositional activities. The "Tobacco Protests" of the late nineteenth century, for example, brought together a successful alliance of clergy and *bazaaris* against the state (Moaddel 1994). Similarly, the beginning of the twentieth century saw a mobilization of socialist, feminist, and ethno-political groups as well as regionalist and nationalist politicians (Cronin 2007; Najmabadi 2007; Sharif 2013; Atabaki 2003). The 1979 Iranian revolution once again brought the diversity of these opposition forces to the surface when a diverse alliance, united in its desire to see the end of the regime, proved capable of overthrowing the Shah (Foran 1994; Kurzman 2004). During the frst years after the revolution, this oppositional diversity was reproduced within the political elite. This soon became a problem for the new rulers, and groups that differed from the new state ideology were quickly persecuted and marginalized (Schirazi 1998).

Nevertheless, the Iranian political elite continues to be characterized by pluralism, as do opposition groups beyond state institutions. Successive waves of protest since the 1990s have revealed myriad oppositional positions. These target a diverse range of issues, including socio-economic problems, the liberalization of public

T. Bonacker (\*)

T. Sydiq Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: sydiq@staff.uni-marburg.de

Zentrum für Konfiktforschung, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: thorsten.bonacker@uni-marburg.de

morality, or enhanced rights for minorities. The Arab Spring witnessed an equally diverse array of groupings unifed by aversion to autocratic governments, even if this diversity did not necessarily lead to the overthrow of the president, as was the case in Tunisia and Egypt. Collective protest of this kind has been described as a paradigm of contentious politics. Since the end of the Cold War, autocracies in eastern and south-eastern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Africa have not been spared from these "waves of popular discontent" (Gerges 2015, p. 10).

With good reason, political and regional research in this area has traditionally shown a particular interest in the dynamics of regime change. However, the initial euphoria for democratization and regime change has given way to an interest in the resilience of autocracies and the re-confguration of patterns of domination (Carothers 2002). At the same time, there has been an appreciable increase in the number of studies dealing with the diversity of political opposition (Harders and König 2013). For some time, political opposition in autocracies was considered a marginal phenomenon. Since the 2000s, however, a growing body of scholarship has highlighted the role of opposition forces in autocracies. As before, there has been a particular focus on questions around democratic transition and political organizations, such as parties, civil society groups, and social movements. This has resulted in the development of new terminology, such as the term "non-movement" (Bayat 2013), along with the extension of existing civil-society terminology far beyond its original scope (Aarts and Cavatorta 2013).

In autocracies, however, opposition can involve a broad range of different actors, forms, and issues. It can be linked to various demands: for greater political and social participation, for changes in the corridors of power, or for constitutional reforms. However, none of this necessarily has to follow the assumed logic of a democratic transition characterized by greater inclusion and comprehensive participation. Such developments could well proceed according to a rhetoric of exclusion or aggressive nationalism. They may even be embedded in clientelist or nepotistic patterns of social relationships. Likewise, the forms of opposition vary. They may range from parliamentary activity to civic engagement to public or virtual forms of protest. But they might also include private and everyday forms of opposition that are not necessarily limited to what is publicly visible and articulated.

Obviously, depending on its context in an autocracy or democracy, political opposition follows different rules, is subject to different conditions, and has a different function for the regimes in power. All the more intriguing, then, are the manifold ways of constructing opposition in autocracies. So far, this has received little scholarly attention, especially from a conceptual point of view. This article therefore focuses on the construction of opposition by political actors. How is a critical attitude toward the regime explained? How are demands for reform justifed? On what basis does a person identify as "oppositional"? As these questions indicate, we are not as concerned here with the institutional role of political opposition in a given system or the role played by this opposition in systematic change. Instead, we are interested in how actors mark their oppositionality and construct it as a social identity. This does not necessarily happen in public—that is, in the context of contentious politics. Indeed, it often occurs in everyday interactions that take place at the fringes of, or even beyond, the public spaces controlled by the autocracy. This is precisely the focus of our chapter. In particular, we place a special emphasis on internationalism as a symbolic resource for the construction of opposition. To date, this element has generally been neglected in research.

Overall, then, this essay aims to outline a conceptual perspective on the comparative exploration of social and discursive constructions of opposition in autocracies, emphasizing the role of everyday interactions in this process. The next section looks to anchor our perspective in the existing body of contemporary autocracy research. We will then develop the thesis that the development of opposition is in no small part due to externalization—that is, to different references to the "international" real. Next, we will distinguish between three types of international reference points that can be used to mark opposition. We use the example of Iran in order to illustrate these international reference points for the construction of oppositionality. This case study is based on research conducted as part of a dissertation project on everyday politics and participatory mechanisms in autocracies. Data was collected during three research visits in 2017 and 2018 in the form of participant observations, feld notes, and semi-structured interviews. Additionally, impromptu drawings and maps were employed to complement feld notes where appropriate. Our research interest in everyday interactions and private or semi-public discourses resulted in a focus on participant observation in particular, as well as an embeddedness of the researcher in the context being researched, because they allowed for feld access based on trust and interpersonal relations. This paper employs data collected during that research in order to illustrate dynamics of opposition construction.

# **Opposition in Autocracies**

Opposition cannot be taken for granted in any political system. It is by nature relative: "opposition can only be spoken about in the context of distinctions. An opposition differs from what it opposes" (Luhmann 1989, p. 13). Opposition is thus a socially constructed form of political communication. It is distinguished by whether it aligns with the government's position or, in fact, sees itself as an alternative to that position. As Luhmann suggests, this simple coding of political communication allows for a very high degree of complexity and diversity. It also gives rise to some particularly interesting questions. How is opposition constructed in the context of political discourse? How do actors situate their identity in this context, while modifying that identity on a case-by-case basis? Clearly, oppositionality is by no means a fxed subjective position. It is established by and updated in the course of continuous political communication, and it is closely connected with the idea of political alternatives.

Formal and informal rules about the distinction between government and opposition differ according to the political system. For autocracies, Albrecht has stated that opposition can be understood as a "political institution with decisive organizational capacities whose interactions with the regime are of a competitive nature, yet are based on a minimum degree of mutual acceptance" (Albrecht 2005, p. 379). However, this defnition applies only to an authorized and in some ways already incorporated form of opposition, which sometimes can also be co-opted by the government (Buckles 2019). From a broader perspective, however, it is possible to distinguish between different levels of opposition based on what they advocate, from reform to a change of government to a systemic change.

The political science of autocracy research has repeatedly pointed to the variety of institutionalized and informal forms of opposition in non-democratic systems. This applies in particular to the variant of competitive authoritarianism. In such a system, elections play an important role in the legitimation of political rule and the co-option of political elites (Levitsky and Way 2002). To be sure, democratic institutions are circumscribed or damaged in electoral or competitive autocracies. But these institutions must still be taken seriously by incumbents if they wish to avoid a crisis of legitimacy (Burnell 2006).

Iran's political system is this type of competitive autocracy. Elections are central to the legitimacy of the regime, and they are anchored in the constitution, even though the conditions governing them were altered in the regime's favor after the revolution (Schirazi 1998). Moreover, elections in Iran provide an instrument for subsuming various political currents within the system in a way that contributes to the stabilization of that system. "The factional characteristic of the Iranian party system is of more relevance to the electoral process, as the results can balance the power struggle toward more 'reformist,' 'conservative,' 'radical,' or 'pragmatic' factions in legislative, presidential, or Assembly of Experts elections" (Zaccara 2014, p. 158).

In recent research on autocracies, there has been a general shift towards analyzing how such regimes legitimize themselves. The period from the 1990s to the early 2000s was dominated by a paradigm of transition. However, the obvious consolidation of central elements of authoritarian rule in the years after the Cold War gave rise to a new question: how was it possible for authoritarian regimes to secure legitimacy? This body of scholarship has been mirrored by other studies emphasizing the oppositional role of civil society and activist groups in autocracies. As Lewis (2013) has shown, their signifcance is apparent not least in their capacity to produce "counter-hegemonic" and alternative narratives that challenge the regime's legitimacy. In this context, research has also focused on spheres beyond offcial politics, such as "shadow markets" (Dukalkskis and Gerschewski 2017; Joo 2014) or sites of cultural and literary production (Elseewi 2011). Meanwhile, works such as those by Scott (1990) or Bayat (1997) have shown that, in autocracies, opposition in the sense of resistance often occurs beyond the public sphere, taking both private and informal forms (Vinthagen and Johansson 2013).

There thus exists a gamut of studies on everyday politics in autocracies and on the role of counter-discourses that explore actors' maneuvering room beyond formal channels of communication. But this body of scholarship raises numerous questions around how oppositionality in autocracies is constructed in practice. Lewis (2013), for example, speaks of strategies of "re-imagination"—the oppositional process of re-articulating particular narratives. This opens up alternatives to offcial defnitions of problems and the associated policies promulgated in order to tackle them. In effect, these are the kinds of discursive practices that produce opposition to the incumbent regime. Such practices are associated with demands for reform. These demands may be more extensive or less so, and they may be linked to very different political—and indeed, anti-democratic—positions.

Below, we present a conceptual proposal that focuses on a particular form of discursive practice for the construction of political opposition, which consists of making reference to an external, international environment. This international dimension— "the International"—is invoked in order to articulate demands for reform, to frame political alternatives, and thus to mark an oppositional stance. Undoubtedly, constructions of political opposition frequently—perhaps even primarily—draw their discursive repertoire from national discursive traditions. Indeed, they are to some extent compelled to do so in order to *resonate with* a domestic audience. Yet they also refer extensively to the international realm in order to establish opposition within a national political context. In this respect, the International acts as a framework for interpretation and discourse. It serves to render more contemporary the distinction between government and opposition in a national context.

# **The International and the Construction of Political Opposition**

Of course, autocracies are generally characterized by regulation of and restrictions on political communication. Nonetheless, except for in extreme cases, autocracies are not closed political spaces in which politics draws exclusively on narrowly national discourses. In fact, both autocratic governments and the oppositions that confront them use external sources in order to articulate their political programs and positions. They do so within the prevailing conditions of a global political system (Albert 2016). To some extent, such governments are required to invoke such reference points if they wish to avoid the risk of a crisis of legitimacy. Indeed, precisely those states that have arisen out of or are based on a narrative of anti-colonial mobilization frequently anchor their claim to legitimacy in an international dimension. In such cases, the goal of a better state and social life is often based on an international comparison.

Yet an opposition can also legitimize its reform proposals, and its criticism of the government, by pointing out domestic divergences from international standards. This comparison can focus both on wealthy states and on countries in a similar stage of development. The international dimension thus serves as a symbolic resource for justifying political positioning in the domestic domain. Of course, this can happen in many different ways. In autocracies, the degree of asymmetry, in terms of a particular actor's ability to publicly promote certain political positions, is variable.

The apt term "externalization" has been used by Schriewer in the context of his research on the diffusion of education policies. Externalization relates to the fact that domestic *policies* use international references in order to formulate and justify the demands for reform that underpin them. The *International* thus serves as a reservoir for generating political positions in the *national* context. A typical example of this can be seen in reform programs and demands in education policy. In this realm, political actors often refer to international standards in order to legitimate and implement their reforms. Such references to an external international environment are "expected to serve as 'lessons', to provide 'stimulative ideas' and 'new impetus to policy defnition,' or to outline a 'frame reference' for the specifcation of reform options" (Schriewer 2008, p. 97).

It seems reasonable to assume that there is a partly structural need to externalize policy in this way, especially in competitive and electoral autocracies. It is precisely this need which creates an opportunity for the government, but above all for the opposition, to legitimize and even to articular their political ideas. Both oppositional and loyalist forces defne themselves not only in national, but also in international, contexts: as anti-authoritarian, modernist, ecological, anti-globalist or feminist actors. Moreover, there exist limited international forces, such as cross-border ethno-nationalist or religious actors. The International is therefore not necessarily constructed and imagined in a uniform manner. These processes undoubtedly transpire in unique national environments traversed by particular government and opposition forces, which will be highly selective in their invocation of the International, endeavoring always to refect national political discourses (Kluczewska 2019). The purpose of externalization, however, is primarily to avert legitimacy crises, or to gain legitimacy by invoking the International in the context of national political conficts (2004, p. 204).

In summary, references to an international environment serve to establish oppositionality in several key respects. Above all, they legitimize demands for reform, whether limited or more far-reaching. In so doing, they facilitate the construction of an opposition to the government by formulating political alternatives that can be deemed both nationally and internationally acceptable. In the next section, we will draw on the relevant literature in international relations and transnational policy diffusion in order to distinguish three modes of externalization. These modes are used to construct opposition in the light of different "reference horizons" (Schriewer and Martinez 2004, p. 32) of the International.

# **The International as a "Generalized Standpoint" and Provider of Norms**

The socio-constructivist literature of international relations has furnished us with the argument that states acquire and develop their identity, at least in part, through socialization (Finnemore 1993). For international relations, Mead's sociological perspective (1934) is adopted here. Mead argued that identity is developed through the engagement with signifcant others who convey norms of appropriate behavior. In this respect, the International appears as a normative referent horizon for actors to draw on in order to develop their identity and related political positions through the internalization of internationally institutionalized norms. It is well known, especially from human rights research, that this applies not only to states, but also to social actors. These actors behave as "norm entrepreneurs" (Keck and Sikkink 1998).

Oppositionality can thus be constructed by externalizing international norms that serve as the basis for a negative assessment of national governance. Classic examples of this include human-rights-based demands for political reform, but they also include demands that extend to the fulflment of international standards in different policy felds, such as education or health. In this context, the International acts as an external "generalized standpoint" (Mead 1934, p. 138) from which reform demands appear legitimate. For example, the Khatami government's (1997–2005) conception of civil society was characterized by the norm that such a phenomenon is accompanied by political liberalization and democratic opposition. However, the promotion of such an ideal was brought to a halt after it turned out to be too regime-critical (Rivetti and Cavatorta 2013).

The Revolution of 1978 marked a turning point in Iranian politics. In the revolution's immediate aftermath, various models of collective living were heatedly discussed and differentiated (Schirazi 1998). Democracy, democratization, modernization, and social justice remained hot topics long after the consolidation of the Islamic Republic, even as discussion of more fundamental change was increasingly eliminated from the formal system and relegated to oppositional circles within civil society. The promotion of democratization through the strengthening of civil society became a concrete policy goal for loosely organized, intellectual oppositional circles. The prospect that this might develop into a more formal opposition to Khatami was one practicable strategy for keeping democratization systemically relevant even though it was a largely discredited political issue.

One of the main reasons for the success of this strategy was the broader establishment of a civil society in favor of democratic processes as an international norm. This was agreed upon by both moderate informal oppositional groups and by the reformist, institutionalized opposition (Rivetti and Cavatorta 2013). Both the formal and the informal opposition invoked international norms in order to articulate and legitimize their political goals. The formal opposition hoped to mobilize large groups of voters through such international legitimacy. Conversely, the informal opposition appealed to international norms in order to circumvent government attempts to delegitimize them.

However, the Iranian opposition was riven with profound disagreements over the envisioned nature of their reformed society. The opposition encompassed secular atheists and radical Islamists, pro-market capitalists and communists alike. Some looked to a reformed Islamic republic, others to a re-establishment of the Shah dictatorship, and still others to the establishment of a Western-oriented democracy. Within this normative melting pot, international norms offered a possibility for formulating content-related goals beyond ideological differences. Moreover, by referring to such "established" international norms, it seemed possible to avoid small-scale and ostensibly trivial discussions over details.

# **The International as a Space of Belonging**

In the case described above, oppositionality relates to a generalized reference horizon. But the difference-constructivist literature of international relations has also mapped out an alternative mode of identity construction. According to this literature, identity does not come about through identifcation with a generalized other. Instead, identity is constructed through the "discursive necessities that make identity dependent on difference" (Rumelili 2004, p. 33). What this means is that identity results from the construction of an otherness defned in negative terms.

Said (1978), for example, pointed out that stereotypes of the "Orient" have historically been essential to the construction of Western identity. The Orient serves as the cultural Other for the enlightened, liberal societies of the West. For the construction of European identities, the signifcance of a discursive juxtaposition of geopolitically or culturally defned outgroups has often been emphasized. Such outgroups might include the "East," "Islam" or even "America" (Diez 2004). Moreover, research on collective enemies has shown that identity can be based on the devaluation and securitization of others (Hansen 2006; Hagström 2015).

The International appears in this context as a reference horizon for the construction of specifc, often transnational, "imagined communities" (Anderson 2006). Oppositionality can be built up through acts of identifcation with such imagined communities as opposed to the state's hegemonic identity constructions. This gives rise to cultural conficts over the symbolic defnition of national unity and belonging. These often play out between culturally defned groups, and between majority and minority groups.

A typical example of this are transnational religious communities. The narratives of such communities provide a source for opposing the state's hegemonic identity constructions. In Iran, such internationally informed constructions of identity often intermingle with ethno-national constructions to form oppositional identities. A clear example comes in the form of Sunni opposition to the predominantly Shia state. This is incorporated into Arab, as well as Kurdish and Afghan political identities. Indeed, such oppositional identities can be actively promoted by external patronage states. This is particularly the case if such identities are constructed through a sense of belonging to external collectives, and if these external imaginative spaces come to replace the formal state as the central point of reference. Consequently, demands for a re-imagination of the state are characteristic of such oppositional identities, as are demands for autonomy or secession.

In conversations with Iranians, frequent references are made to Iranian peculiarities *and* to Iran's similarity with Western states. Phrases such as "Iran used to be like France" are commonly heard in taxis, for example (Field Notes).

A sense of connection to France or Germany is common among those Iranians who have lived there or have family members who migrated there. Indeed, remittances from these émigré Iranians often stabilize the socio-economic status of those family members who remained in Iran. As such, the social background of the speaker comes into play, as those with access to international travel and family networks are disproportionally better off socio-economically. At this point, a differentiation of the international reference horizon is already apparent. Some of those Iranians we spoke with made concrete references to their own (international) family history; to a sister in the US or an uncle in Sweden, for example (e.g. female student, September 4, 2017; male student, March 16, 2018). Such linkages seemed to enable explicit political comparisons, with the aforementioned countries serving as concrete points of reference.

However, in cases where a personal relationship to a specifc country became more remote or non-existent, the political comparison was correspondingly more abstract. Instead of the Swedish social system, for example, "Western culture" served as a node of comparison. In a loyalist narrative, such references served to accentuate Iranian peculiarities (and thus the impossibility of implementing "Western" policies). Conversely, in a dissident narrative, "Western culture" became a basis for drawing similarities with Iran, and thus for identifying political goals.

Equally striking among those Iranians we conversed with was the evident lack of personal and discursive reference to neighboring countries. To be sure, those who had made pilgrimages to or had family links with Iraq made comparisons to it. Similarly, Afghanistan served as a notable benchmark, partly due to the presence of Afghan refugees, as well as the researcher's own Afghan roots, which prompted questions and guided conversations towards Afghani comparisons. However, Central Asian countries, or peripheral regions of the Near and Middle East, were rarely mentioned or scarcely present in conversations.

These communicative processes are more complex at Iran's periphery, where membership in the Iranian state is not necessarily a settled political issue. Ideal reference spaces can take the form of national and international communities, neighboring states, or other non-state communities. At the peripheries, distance from and affliation to the nation-state is used to develop and articulate agency within a locally defned identity. This creates much more striking lines of confict than in Teheran.

For example, a basic confict confronts the Kurdish communist who is in favor of centrally organized schooling, but at the same time approves of greater regional autonomy. This confict can be resolved by referring to Iraqi Northern Kurdistan and the political model which prevails there. The availability of media, such as PKK/YPG television broadcasters, promotes such affliations with neighboring countries. In such settings, then, oppositionality becomes multi-scalar and addresses the abstract nation-state through a local or trans-regional (e.g. Kurdish) identity. Meanwhile, it is also directed against local rulers who are considered excessively nationalistic or reactionary. There are the places where European political practices, or practices in a neighboring country, are most often invoked.

# **The International as a Comparative Horizon**

A third reference horizon of the International is the focus of discussion in the literature on policy diffusion. As we have seen, the frst such horizon presents the international as a kind of universalized empty canvas on which the internal social construction of opposition is projected. The second, meanwhile, takes specifc international or transnational affliations as the point of departure for opposition. The third, however, concerns itself with inter-societal comparisons.

As early as the 1960s, Bendix (1967) pointed out that the implementation of modernizing policies was closely linked to the fact that, since the nineteenth century, industrialized societies such as France and Britain have served as "reference societies," in Europe and across the world. In essence, these were examples to be followed. According to Bendix, in certain societies, such international comparisons gave rise to a perception of local backwardness. Consequently, the *policies* of the reference societies were increasingly adopted in order to achieve a similarly successful outcome. As a result, Bendix argued, this frequently led to externally induced social change in the "follower societies": "However, once the two eighteenth century revolutions had occurred, subsequent social changes were characterized by a precipitous increase in the speed and intensity of communication. Ideas and techniques have passed from 'advanced' to 'follower' societies …. Within a relatively short historical period there are few societies which have remained immune from these external impact upon their social structures" (Bendix 1967, p. 331).

Reference societies thus provide other societies with role models for formulating domestic political objectives and appropriate measures. Research on policy transfer has adopted his idea. Scholars working in this area have shown that the adaptation of policies in particular societies can be explained with reference to their role models. But determining which societies function as reference societies requires taking many societal and cultural factors into consideration. Cross-border, seasonal migratory movements in the Caucasus, for example, caused particular groups in Iran (especially in the northwest) to be especially infuenced by Russia—frst the Tsarist Empire, then the Soviet Union. However, these infuences diminished signifcantly after the establishment of Iran's national borders (Atabaki 2003).

Schriewer and Martinez (2004) have pointed out that, in the context of social change, the models of reference societies can lose their plausibility and give way to processes of reorientation whereby new role models are established. In the follower societies, references to such external models can underpin the articulation of reform demands and alternatives to the status quo across a range of socio-political felds. This applies both to the government, which can orient its policies toward such models, and to the opposition, which uses such comparisons to plausibly legitimate its calls for reform. Such comparisons frequently point to the perceived "success" of the reference societies.

In this respect, the otherness of the reference societies serves as an attractive reference point for the construction of opposition. The perceived political, cultural, or economic superiority of the reference society is used to construct opposition to a regime that appears woefully backward by comparison. And it is precisely the open and subjective nature of such perceptions that allows the opposition to draw on the reference society in order to formulate supposedly objective policies which are in fact riddled with preconceptions and assumptions. One of the earliest examples of this phenomenon was the *Nahḍa* cultural movement, which translated an often distorted image of European societies and European modernity into its own agendas and demands (Kurzman 2002; Kassab 2010).

However, such references need not be detailed or realistic. In fact, the invocation of reference societies as a comparative horizon for one's own political goals positively invites the idealization of these same societies. This can be with respect to, for example, the reference society's true economic power or the capacities of the state. In recent years, this tendency has been buttressed by the ostentatious display of luxurious lifestyles in social media. A few snapshots of a life in Los Angeles uploaded to Instagram are not infrequently taken as somehow representative of life in "the West." But when such images originate from the "Rich Kids of Tehran," they generate not exaltation but disapproval over their displays of conspicuous luxury.1 Iranians from beyond elite circles perceive this as offensive and unfair (Faghihi 2018). Yet little is changed with respect to the fundamental perception of the reference society.

The otherness of reference societies is thus of considerable utility for oppositional constructions. Furthermore, however, especially radical opposition can be based on especially radical reference societies. The painting of an Israeli fag on a Tehran street was one such reference to an Other that is perceived as radically different. One actively reformist Iranian woman we conversed with remarked to me that she knew some especially radical (and thus, in her opinion, dubious) Iranians who exalted Israel as the most radical alternative to the existing regime. Members of these circles would hope to see a bloody overthrow of the Iranian regime, complete with "the hanging of the clergy," prompting a positive view of the USA as a possible interventionist power (female activist, March 17, 2018).

However, it is not only a reference society's difference that is relevant; its perceived "progressiveness" is also highly signifcant. Arab reference spaces hardly exist here. This is despite the fact that, as neighboring societies with historical, ethnic, and religious overlaps, Arab states positively invite comparison with Iran. In the West, such parallels are indeed drawn within the parameters of Middle Eastern Studies. But in Iran itself, such comparisons are marginal. Similarly, Central Asia provides yet another obvious ethnic and religious point of comparison. Yet hardly any of the Iranians we spoke with referred to this region. In fact, the mere mention of it tended to provoke surprise or indifference.

I discussed this later with some left-wing students at the University of Tehran. According to them, the "Sunni world" is taken into consideration only as a kind of supplicant (students, October 30, 2017). Otherwise, it hardly plays a role as a point of reference—in contrast to Western states. A telling example comes in the form of a reference to Turkey made by a family from the southwest of Iran whom we spoke to. They all agreed that they had once looked down upon Turkey, but that this was gradually changing because Turkey has become more progressive, more "European" (family conversation, March 8, 2018). In fact, the decisive factor here was not Turkey as an independent reference point, but the alleged proximity to a much more important reference point: Europe.

# **Summary**

In autocracies, oppositionality can be constructed in various ways. Using the example of Iran, we have tried to show that international relations play an important role in allowing opponents of the regime to construct themselves as "oppositional" without resorting to institutionally prescribed mechanisms. A domestic context of acute authoritarianism provides few resources for the construction of opposition. In such circumstances, the International seems particularly important. Against this backdrop, we have distinguished three reference horizons that can be used by opponents in order to differentiate themselves from the regime in their communication. These include the construction of affliations, references to international standards, and comparison with reference societies whose model they want to follow. Furthermore, these reference horizons are actualized via differing international communities and reference societies, with perceived proximity, progressiveness and otherness infuencing who makes use of them and how. To what extent this translates into differences of program and practice, and whether the chosen points of reference impact these political programs, remains subject to future research.

In autocracies, these processes especially play out in everyday situations, beyond the realms of offcial political discourse. In this respect, the International provides symbolic resources for the articulation of reform demands not only *within* but *beyond* public space, in private or semi-public discourses. Research on opposition in autocracies has generally focused on conspicuous and spectacular examples of opposition, or on its integrative and stabilizing role. However, an exploration of the everyday construction of opposition is equally important for grasping the political dynamics of autocracies beyond the more glaring questions of regime change or regime consolidation. The article has attempted to outline a conceptual framework for carrying out such an exploration.

#### **Endnotes**

1. See https://www.instagram.com/therichkidsoftehran/?hl=de.

# **References**


Carothers, T. 2002. The end of the transition paradigm. *Journal of Democracy* 13 (1): 5–21.


Zaccara, Luciano. 2014. Elections and Authoritarianism in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In *Elections and democratization in the Middle East. The tenacious search for freedom, justice, and dignity*, Eds. M. Hamad and K. al-Anani, 153–178. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

**Thorsten Bonacker** is professor of peace and confict studies at the Center for Confict Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). He studied sociology, psychology, cultural studies and philosophy and holds a PhD from Universität Oldenburg (Germany). His research brings together perspectives from sociology and political science in the feld of international relations. His work focusses in particular on postcolonial and postwar political conficts, the role of victims in transitional justice as well as on sexual and reproductive rights as a global feld of confict.

**Tareq Sydiq** is a visiting fellow at the Center for Relational Studies on Global Crises at Chiba University as well as a researcher at the Center for Confict Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). He studied political science and sociology and is working on a PhD on Bottom-Up politics in authoritarian systems using Iran as a single-case study. His research interests include authoritarian states, protests and contestations as well as state formation.

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# **Tangier's Current Re-Confgurations from a Multi-Scale Spatial Perspective: Emerging Transregional Ties and Local Repercussions**

Steffen Wippel

# **Introduction: Local and (Trans-)Regional Re-Confgurations**

The northern Moroccan urban agglomeration of Tangier has experienced rapid, spectacular changes over the last decade, mainly as a result of urban megaprojects and the expansion of transport infrastructure. Not only has this effectuated important local transformations, but it also holds wider repercussions and fts within larger re-confgurations, each playing out on several spatial scales. The enhancement of far-reaching regional and transregional links is an important aspect of this.

This chapter presents a few insights from a research project within the research network "Re-Confgurations: History, Remembrance, and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa" at Philipps-Universität Marburg from late 2015 to early 2019. Accordingly, the chapter views "re-confgurations" as complex, varied, and open-ended transformation processes, which are not necessarily purposive1 and are sometimes fragmentary, inconsistent, and confictual. These processes are indicative not only of changes to one particular element in a given setting, but in fact refect entire constellations of actors, structures, spaces, and fows. In particular, I will endeavor to show the historicity of current developments that go beyond the widely observed and analyzed ruptures in the aftermath of the 2011 "Arab Spring." Concurrently, the aforementioned project integrated the research feld on "transregional entanglements"

Berlin, Germany e-mail: steffen.wippel@t-online.de

S. Wippel (\*)

during the network's frst stage, then merged into the analytical axis on "space" in the second stage. This perspective recognized that ongoing re-confgurations also encompass important spatial aspects. Just as the entire network sought to challenge prevalent research practices, this particular study set out to scrutinize conventional spatial and scalar preconceptions in established systematic disciplines and area studies by understanding space and scale as historically produced and continuously changing geographies and by looking beyond established containers, such as the "MENA region" or the "national" methodological approach.

Hence, this chapter will adopt a predominantly spatial perspective on important current re-confgurations of a specifc city and the development of (trans) regional entanglements emanating from this place; more generalized results of the same research have been published in a separate edited volume (Wippel and Fischer-Tahir 2018). The chapter begins with a brief overview of Tangier's development and the current projects. It will then shed light on fve aspects related to the ideas described above, which transcend the purely local dimension: actors, programs, entanglements, positionings of the city, and, in a return to the local, the city's fragmentations. The conclusion will present a more conceptual outlook and sum up the fndings.

# **Contemporary Mega-Projects Re-Confguring Tangier**

In the distant past, Tangier was already an important transshipment center connecting trans-Saharan (overland) and trans-Mediterranean (maritime) trade. In the nineteenth century, the city increasingly came under international administration and evolved into Morocco's main trading port (Stuart 1955). Major European shipping lines began to call at Tangier on their way to Africa, Latin America, and even the Dutch East Indies (Fig. 1). During this period, the city prospered, and its population was a cosmopolitan mixture of Moroccan Muslims and Jews, Spaniards, and other Europeans. After Moroccan independence, King Hassan II deliberately neglected Morocco's northern provinces for political reasons. Tangier stagnated and lost its exceptional position. Only when Mohamed VI ascended to the throne in 1999 did existing plans and new programs begin to be physically implemented. Since then, new economic and transport infrastructure has been established, and Tangier has undergone a considerable urban restructuring process (Figs. 2 and 6).2

The most visible result was the 2007 opening of the enormous Tanger-Méditerranée Tangier-Mediterranean container port east of the city,

**Fig. 1** Tangier as a Transport Hub during the International Zone Period (1923–1956); Source: Propaganda and Tourism Section of the Tangier Zone. 1929. *Tangier: Winter Resort, Summer Resort*. Paris: Horizons de France, 32. Retrieved from http:/interactiveworlds.blogspot.com/2006/12, 16 April 2019.

which has the capacity to process three million standard containers a year (see also Barthel and Planel 2010; Ducruet et al. 2011; Mareï 2012). It is currently being expanded to more than triple its capacity.3 The TangerMed platform also encompasses cargo, oil, vehicle and passenger terminals, as well as free trade zones, logistical areas, industrial parks, and an important "automotive city" scattered across the Tangier Peninsula. The second large project, Tanger Ville Tangier City, is focused on transforming the old inner-city port area into a luxurious tourism, leisure, and consumer-oriented waterfront (cf. also Benabad 2012). This is supplemented by the Tanger Métropole Tangier Metropolis plan, which supports local efforts to enhance urban social, cultural, and environmental infrastructure. The most recent large-scale project is a gigantic technological, industrial, and residential complex called Cité Mohammed VI TangerTech. Likewise, other new towns on the city's southern periphery are expected to help improve the pressing housing shortage.

**Fig. 2** Major Projects on the Tangier Peninsula since the Late 2000s; Concept and English legend: Steffen Wippel; cartography: Sabrina Henschel 2017.

These major projects have been supplemented by the construction of numerous integrated tourism complexes and luxury hotels along the Bay of Tangier and the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. Transport infrastructure within and leading to the Tangier Peninsula has been extended, is under construction, or is being planned. This includes a regional airport, several motor ways and expressways, and new railway lines, including a high-speed rail TGV, in French parlance link to Casablanca. These Tangier-centered projects are embedded in larger programs, networks, and corridors pursued by a wide range of actors on and across different spatial scales.

# **Intervening Actors and Institutions**

First, various outside individual and institutional actors, with their respective interests, ideas, and strategies, intervene in the planning, fnancing, construction, and usage of diverse locally implanted projects.

At the national level, superordinate project planning and realization mostly fall to central government departments and their specifcally established special agencies.4 In a kind of public-public partnership, such agencies group several state and para-state entities. Among them, the Agence pour la Promotion et le Développement économique et social des provinces du Nord (APDN, Agency for the Promotion and the Economic and Social Development of the Northern Provinces), under the direct control of the Prime Minister's offce, gives fnancial and technical support to projects such as the Tanger Ville program, the TangerMed industrial and logistic platforms, and the high-speed rail link. The TangerMed Special Agency (TMSA) and its affliates exercise state prerogatives in the planning, implementation, and management of the entire Tanger Méditerranée project. At the same time, the TMSA acts like a private company without the constraints of public administration, and represents several ministries including the APDN. Several state institutions also jointly own the Société d'Aménagement pour la Reconversion de la Zone Portuaire de Tanger Ville (SAPT, Planning Society for the Conversion of the Tangier City Port Zone), which is exclusively responsible for piloting the reconstruction of important inner-city areas surrounding the old port. In addition, further public development agencies are supporting and marketing several major investment projects for residential and tourism purposes. A young guard of highly educated technocrats with experience in private and international business is centrally placed in such public entities to implement the neoliberal, pro-business urban development agenda.

Beyond the spin-offs and partnerships of the public sector, we also observe an increasing shift of responsibilities and competencies for local projects and infrastructure to transnational and private actors. Affliates of the above-mentioned agencies involve additional private companies. Internationally important operators, among them APM Terminals and Eurogate, have assumed the management of TangerMed container and oil terminals. The world's biggest container-shipping lines (such as Mærsk Line and CMA CGM), partially under the ownership of the same holding companies, are using the new port facilities to establish globally integrated transport networks. Foreign companies also control ferry services between Europe and the ports of the Tangier Peninsula. International planning and architecture offces, developers, and sales companies (notably of Spanish and Gulf Arab origin) design, build, and market exclusive tourism and real estate projects. To construct TangerTech City, the regional administration has established a joint venture with a major internationally operating Moroccan bank and a Chinese holding company.

In addition, several European, Euro-Mediterranean, African, and Arab regional organizations and development funds as well as national and subnational cooperation agencies from Western Europe, the Gulf states, and Japan provide fnancial support and planning expertise for numerous infrastructure projects. In particular, diplomatic representatives from the EU and its member states hold seats on the APDN's advisory board.

# **Integrating Policies, Programs, and Infrastructure Networks**

The projects and programs for Tangier listed above are embedded in much larger and overlapping infrastructure schemes, development plans, and economic strategies conceived with various geographical reaches.

Hence, new infrastructure largely results from a number of national agendas to enhance the Moroccan transport systems by 2030 or 2040, such as several national highway initiatives that have been expanding since the mid-1990s; national programs to modernize the conventional rail network and to build a high-speed rail system; and, fnally, a series of port extension and construction projects within the national port strategy. Overall, these plans and other projects ft into a wide range of mid- to long-term national development plans aimed at boosting logistical competitiveness, integrated industrial platforms, emerging industries, and notably trade and tourism.

In a wider context, Tangier's new infrastructural links are considered parts of transnational schemes and corridors established by regional institutions and arrangements in order to facilitate regional trade and mobility (Wippel 2012a; Fig. 3). Accordingly, infrastructure centering on Tangier immediately connects northward to the EU's expanding Trans-European Networks for multimodal sea, road, and rail transportation. In the context of the Euro-Mediterranean cooperation, these networks have already been extended southward with supplementary trans-Mediterranean transport links. Among them, the construction of the Rocade Méditerranéenne (National Route 16) from Tangier to the Algerian border was the EU's biggest infrastructure funding project outside Europe. At the same time, road and railway infrastructure integrates Tangier into trans-Maghrebian transport schemes adopted by the Arab Maghreb Union. Tangier also constitutes the north-

**Fig. 3** Tangier at the Intersection of Multiregional Transport Systems; Concept and cartography: Steffen Wippel, 2019.

ernmost end of Pan-African traffc corridors, which converge towards the city along the Atlantic coast from the south and along the Mediterranean coast from the east. Notably, the Tangier-Dakar Highway integrates the larger Cairo-Dakar route and connects to further trunk-road projects in western Africa (cf. also Marfaing and Wippel 2005). Several bilateral as well as Mediterranean, African, and UN programs also include the long-planned tunnel across the Strait of Gibraltar to connect Tangier directly to Spain (cf. also Wippel 2000). Furthermore, Morocco intends to develop the Tangier Peninsula into an energy hub. The power lines and gas pipelines with Algeria and Spain connect to larger European grids and, in the future, are intended to integrate Pan-Arab, circum-Mediterranean, and West African networks.

Last but not least, current development efforts, which open Tangier to international capital and spark far-reaching connections, are an excellently ft for larger national macro-policies related to foreign trade and regional integration (Wippel 2012a, 2012b). Hence, during the Euro-Mediterranean rapprochement in the 1990s, Morocco rediscovered its long-neglected "Mediterranean façade" (Zaïm 1990). Accordingly, the city's transformation integrates the government's endeavors for a privileged partnership with the EU. In parallel, the kingdom started to intensify its African policy, including a strengthened economic presence, notably in the feld of strategic investment and frm cooperation. This is part of an institutional turn towards a "multidirectional regionalism" that allows for membership in several overlapping free-trade agreements and regional economic organizations and also includes enhanced transatlantic cooperation. Morocco's foreign trade relations, still very much concentrated on European markets, are likewise diversifying. These largely correspond to Tangier's developing links, presented in the next section, but are not fully congruent with them.

# **Emerging Connections, Entanglements, and Flows**

Based on the current infrastructure megaprojects, Tangier has become a hub for important border-crossing entanglements and circuits of various scopes. Notably, the new TangerMed port promoted the deployment of new regional and transregional traffc fows. Starting from zero in 2007, ten years later 430 weekly shipping lines connected the existing container terminals with 174 other ports in 74 countries worldwide (Tanger Med Port Authority 2017; Fig. 4). Europe is still the most important destination, but now nearly a quarter of all connections lead to ports along Africa's Atlantic coast, from Mauritania to Angola; a decade ago, Morocco's lack of maritime links to sub-Saharan Africa was still frequently lamented (cp. Wippel 2012b, p. 1131 f.). The Mediterranean constitutes another regional focus, alongside further noteworthy links with the greater Middle East, Latin America, and southern and eastern Asia. In contrast, passenger traffc from Tangier travels nearly exclusively to European, and mainly Spanish, ports. The vehicle port terminal also ships cars as far as Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and Australia. Logistic frms at TangerMed primarily serve European markets but have also started to transport goods overland via the new road to West Africa.

More than six hundred foreign companies, among them internationally prestigious frms (such as Renault-Nissan, DHL, Lear, Huawei, Siemens, Danone, and Decathlon) have established a base in the TangerMed industrial and logistics platform. Most of these enterprises come from the European Union, with


**Fig. 4** Container Shipping Links from TangerMed (Import and Export, June 2017); Source: TangerMed Port Authority 2017. Author's calculations.

more than one third being of Spanish origin, but there are also frms from the US, Arab states, and, more recently, China. From here, they are mostly exploring European and increasingly sub-Saharan and North African markets—such as the Renault-Nissan plant, which exports nearly its entire car production, mostly to European countries, but also to African and Arab countries. The new tourist infrastructure aims at attracting international visitors, especially from Europe, including Moroccans living abroad, and from Arab Gulf states (Berriane 2011). Correspondingly, with increasing attractiveness, international tourism fgures in the Tangier region have increased steadily in recent years.

In addition, Tangier remains a central departure and transit point for intercontinental migration. Every year, about fve million passengers to and from Europe, mostly Moroccan expatriates during the holiday season, cross the Tangier Peninsula. At the same time, the region has become an important transit hub for irregular migrants from Morocco, sub-Saharan Africa, and recently South Asia and the Middle East (e.g. Alioua 2007; Mouna 2016a, 2016b). Conversely, the economic crisis in their home country temporarily caused Spaniards to look for work in the boom town across the Strait.

Besides being an established platform for the trade in cannabis from the nearby Rif Mountains, Tangier has become a hub for hard drugs arriving from Central Asia and Latin America and destined for European markets.5 In the other direction, the informal import of consumption goods from the nearby Spanish enclave of Ceuta constitutes another lucrative business, and the trans-Saharan road has given West African customers access to used European vehicles via Tangier.

# **Strengthened Competition and Strategic Positioning**

In accordance with neoliberal logic, Tangier is being regarded primarily as an economic project and has entered ferce national, regional, and global competition with other places for port traffc, investment, tourism and overall attention, notably in the Western Mediterranean, but also on the African continent. Actors strategically exploit Tangier's exposed geographic position on the northernmost tip of Morocco and Africa at the edge of Europe as well as its location along the world's most important shipping lane, connecting East Asia through the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the American East Coast. This motif of the city's advantageous location is repeatedly invoked in the multi-level branding of projects, frms, and the city. Responsible persons and institutions—from local authorities and associations, national tourism, and investment agencies to international companies and developers—explicitly emphasize Tangier's continuing role as a "gateway to Europe" as well as its emerging position as a "gateway to Africa."

The TangerMed container port rapidly became the busiest Moroccan harbor. It is about closing ranks with Algeciras, a regional forerunner of container transshipment at the opposite side of the Gibraltar Strait, and has now advanced to rank 46 worldwide in annual throughput (Lloyd's List 2018, p. 12; Fig. 5). In 2017, it was the busiest container port in all Africa and the fourth in both the MENA region and in the Mediterranean. It will be the largest port in the Mediterranean region after completion of phase II. The opening of the new terminals will push the port to the Top 20 worldwide compared with current volumes. Also, the world's biggest shipping lines have made Tangier a major hub in their global networks; for example, CMA CGM uses it this way for its Euro-African


**Fig. 5** TangerMed in the Global and Regional Port Hierarchy (2017); TEU: twenty feet equivalent unit (standard container). Note: Ports with annual throughput greater than 2.7 million TEU. Source: Lloyd's List 2018, p. 12 f.

connections. Simultaneously, this has contributed to a great increase in Morocco's global connectivity.6 Tangier now hosts Africa's biggest car production plant, and its large free zone was recently rated the most competitive on the continent (fDi 2015). The agglomeration, with about one million inhabitants, has become Morocco's second economic pole, and the World Bank (2015) listed Tangier as one of six model cities for economic growth and competitiveness in the "Global South." Among African cities, Tangier received the third-most foreign direct investment (FDI) and experienced the fourth-highest FDI growth in the years 2003–16 (UN-Habitat and IHS 2018, p. 45 ff.).

# **Increasing Fragmentation, Territorialization, and Other Problems**

However, Tangier's current development increasingly exhibits problematic aspects. Not all projects have been completed on schedule, and many are still in the planning stages. Harsh political realities, notably international conficts and issues of security and migration, have impaired many transport schemes. Other projects face geophysical and fnancial challenges. From international trade to tourism, current strategies involve sectors reacting rather sensitively to political and economic crises elsewhere in the world and to ferce competition from other emerging places. For example, political and economic calamities in the investors' home countries, such as Spain and the Gulf, have delayed several tourism and real-estate projects.

Some of the major local consequences of these new outward-oriented mega-projects and entanglements have included the reinforcement of territorial and socioeconomic fragmentation inside the urban agglomeration. Thus, the new port and export-oriented free zones are typical examples of locally disembedded fragments that are much more closely connected to international economic hubs and circuits than to their immediate urban and national hinterlands. Accordingly, about 95 percent of the container throughput at TangerMed is pure transshipment between different container vessels, one of the highest shares worldwide. The free zones, too, predominantly work on an import–export basis, and interlinkages with the local and national economies are developing only gradually.

The institutions established by the central state have far-reaching executive (and even legislative) powers over important areas of the metropolitan area to the detriment of local competencies, interests, and needs. This is despite a process of "advanced regionalization" adopted in recent years to devolve more decision-making power to subnational entities. The TMSA alone was allotted a 550 square-kilometer special zone near the port for infrastructural extension and socio-economic development (Fig. 1). Similarly, the SAPT has at its disposal a contiguous planning area in the city center, where it can act mostly autonomously (Fig. 6). At the same time, the numerous megaprojects are characterized by an "ad-hoc urbanism," with project-related master plans largely overruling comprehensive and structured urban planning.

The projects also have led to the spread of territorial exclaves across the peninsula. Large sites like the TangerMed port complex, the special economic zones, gated communities, and all-inclusive tourism complexes are surrounded by walls and fences, accessible only through guarded gates or with special permits. They

**Fig. 6** Major Urban Projects in the Inner City of Tangier since the Late 2000s; Concept and cartography: Steffen Wippel, 2018.

block access to hitherto open spaces, like formerly popular beaches and agricultural land. Other projects, such as the new shopping malls and the upgraded old port district with its marina, luxurious residences, shopping, and leisure facilities, are under private control. Large portions of society simply cannot afford to take advantage of them—despite repeated public declarations aiming to "return the sea to the city."7

Workplaces in central parts of the city have been displaced to the periphery or replaced by highly automated processes. This also creates huge transport problems. Simultaneously, in the medina, gentrifcation has set in as more and more wealthy foreigners settle there (Chattou 2011; Peraldi 2007, p. 116). Meanwhile, the established population does not beneft much from increasing cruise tourism based in the old city's adjacent port. Consequently, large segments of the local society do not seem to be benefting suffciently from the current processes, and even its elites feel excluded from the current planning processes and development opportunities.

It is therefore unsurprising that the tendency to ignore local concerns and social needs, even while integrating the city regionally and globally, has triggered repeated protests over the last decade, from demonstrations against land expropriation, socio-ecological impacts and working conditions related to the new port (Mareï 2012, p.7 f.; Planel 2011; Barthel and Planel 2010) to protests against the high building costs of the high-speed rail line (Lahlou 2016) and the displacement of frms from the inner city. Therefore, it is probably no coincidence that, two years after the 2011 demonstrations, the king announced the Tanger Métropole program, which focuses much more on local progress than the more prominent mega-projects did.

# **Conclusion: Re-Confgurations of an Emerging "Secondary City" with Transregional Links, Embedded in Multiple Scales**

Purposefully "developing" Tangier is part of a long-term strategy which started at the turn of the millennium and integrates much wider national, regional, and global re-confgurations. The advancement of some projects was impacted by the 2008–09 international fnancial and economic crisis, mostly due to its effects on partners' countries, notably in the tourism and real estate sectors. This effect was much more visible than that of the politically and socially motivated demonstrations in 2011 and the years after, despite strong participation of the local population. These events did not fundamentally alter the Moroccan political system, including the opaque dual structure of offcial state administration and the parallel *makhzen* system surrounding the royal court. Compared to pre-2011 Tunisia, for example, Moroccan authorities already had retained more power on project execution in relation to Gulf investors and paid more attention to the local contextualization of megaprojects (Barthel 2014). But since then, more formal civil society participation in urban development has not really come about. In fact, a series of centrally installed project agencies is still shaping pivotal urban and infrastructural developments, catering the interests of global actors as well as transnationally oriented middle- and upper-class segments of the national society. As Beier (2016) demonstrated, Tunisia turned to more inclusive urban development strategies after the events of 2011, whereas Morocco remains caught in the dilemma between the megaproject based creation of world-class cities and a counteractive "urbanism of urgency" for the urban peripheries. Consistently, in Tangier, large-scale projects still dominate (or at least shape the cityscape) while targeted small-scale interventions remain too tentative and are generating insuffcient results. Nevertheless, the 2013 Tanger Métropole program can be interpreted as one conciliatory response to widespread discontent in the city.

Conceptually, there are various ways to grasp the current development of a city such as Tangier. This chapter shows that, frst, like many MENA cities, Tangier has experienced signifcant neoliberal development (e.g. Heeg 2019; Al-Hamarneh et al. 2019). This extends beyond pure laissez-faire liberalism, which would leave urban development exclusively to the private sector, as indeed happened during the International Zone period (Nieto and El Idrissi 2009). Instead, state institutions have strongly committed to developing a competitive, outward-oriented city, to following the logic of the market, and to actively laying the groundwork for the strong involvement of global frms. Extended islands of neoliberal transformation and postmodern development have at the very least penetrated the agglomeration and are contributing to a "splintering urbanism" (Graham and Marvin 2009). This goes along with additional postmodern endeavors to attract worldwide attention through distinguished landmarks and extensive marketing (Soja 2000).

Second, it is not only established and emerging "global cities" (Sassen 1991) or "world cities" (Friedmann 1986) that achieve central positions in global networks. Tangier is not yet included in this new meta-geography of global cities, and it is even not listed in the most inclusive of such rankings (GaWC 2018). But even such a "secondary city" by national, regional, and global standards is intensively globalizing and neoliberalizing, increasingly integrating far-reaching networks, and occupying a central position in specifc circuits, for example as a major transshipment hub in maritime world trade.8 Moreover, we fnd characteristics of contemporary port city development, with the main port activities shifting outside the city proper, whereas the old port's premises are undergoing exclusive waterfront development and upgrading (Hoyle 2000). Tangier also exhibits some specifc features of a border city, formerly between different colonial zones and today between states, continents, and institutionalized regional blocks. It therefore confronts all the challenges, opportunities, and obstacles such a border position entails for human and material mobility and urban and economic development (e.g. Sohn and Licheron 2015). Accordingly, these borders act as barriers and impediments to human and material cross-border fows and, in the past, they exacerbated socioeconomic marginalization and political neglect. But, at the same time, the border situation has lent itself to creative exploitation for establishing (formal and informal) types of mobility and exchange and for fostering economic progress as a showcase to the outside world and a gateway for border-crossing connections (see also Flynn 1997; Becker 2005). It can also be used for branding the city to the wider world to attract visitors, investors, and others.

While the multiple facets of urban development require a multi-conceptual approach, they all show important spatial dimensions. Consequently, the focus here has been on a spatial perspective. In this regard, from an urban perspective, "globalization" does not mean that the city is equally connected to all parts of the world. Rather, we observe regional densifcations of contacts and exchange. Tangier is often placed into spatial containers such as the nation-state and the Maghreb, Arab, or MENA world regions. Accordingly, it has developed a multitude of translocal, transnational, and transregional links that transgress the established spatial confgurations and segmentations that are widespread in the political, academic, and public realms.9 Indeed, based on material infrastructures and actors' strategies, Tangier's own city-centered regionalizations have emerged. They mostly display rhizomatic and archipelago-like (Veltz 1996) forms with fuzzy limits and oscillating extensions along threadlike lines of transport and mobility, connecting to other specifc places and hubs, rather than corresponding to spatially and temporally contiguous areas. Conversely, these links transgressing urban and other borders are not developed from all places in the city equally. Rather, heavily globalized—or better, "regionalized"—enclaves are intensively linked to the "outside world," specifcally other global places and regional hubs. This kind of uneven urban development creates severe spatial fragmentation across the cityscape, while participating in a "fragmented globalization" reproduced across several spatial levels from the local to the global scale (Scholz 2004, p. 221 ff.; see also Robinson 2002).

Finally, this chapter has also demonstrated that actors, infrastructures, programs, fows, networks, and positions on different scales are what make and shape the city:


In sum, there is an important multi-scale dimension in Tangier's current urban re-confguration with interventions, connections, and repercussions that jump across scales. Like regions, scales are socially constructed. This entails a continuous rescaling of relevant actors, activities, and fows as well as competencies, responsibilities, and effects. But as transnational actors act on a local level, cities form direct regional networks beyond territorial hierarchies. At the same time, locally oriented measures push transregional infrastructures and mobilities (cf. Sassen 2003). Thus, different scales are not sharply separated, but increasingly interpenetrate, progressively blur, and become diffcult to distinguish analytically.10 Hence, although Brenner's focus (e.g., 1997) is still primarily on global metropolises, he understands cities in the course of continuous reterritorialization and rescaling processes as interfaces between multiple, overlapping spatial scales.

In the end, a predominantly spatial perspective on Tangier's current re-confgurations is more than an academic exercise. It refects important political, social, and economic processes that take shape through several spatial scales and embed Tangier within multi-scalar networks.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Steffen Wippel** was a researcher at the research network "Re-Confgurations" at Philipps-Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany) until January 2019, and currently is an associate researcher with the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at that same university. He studied economics and Islamic studies in Freiburg i.Br. and Aix-en-Provence, holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and a habilitation degree from Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). His research focuses on processes of regionalisation, including a transregional perspective, and contemporary urban development in the MENA region.

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# **1968 and the "Long 1960s": A Transregional Perspective**

Claudia Derichs

# **Historicizing the 1960s**

Anniversaries motivate and invite refections and interpretations of events after the fact, regardless of how many years, decades, or centuries have passed. The 1960s, and particularly the year 1968, are no exception, as seen once again in Germany in 2018, the fftieth anniversary of that legendary year. Numerous publications have refected on the events of the year 1968 in ten-year intervals, with essays demonstrating contested understandings of who possesses the prerogative of interpretation and which legacies are to be appreciated or discarded (Bührer 2019a, b for the case of Germany). Colvin and Karcher (2019, p. 1) call 1968 an *annus mirabilis*, quoting from Gilcher-Holtey's view of that year as one that "marked the climax of protests, capturing almost all Western industrialized countries simultaneously" (2014, p. 2, cited in Colvin and Karcher 2019, p. 1). Attempts at historicizing "sixty-eight" started in the late 1980s, relating the events to meta-theoretical concepts of modernization, revolution, and liberation (e.g. Arrighi et al. 1989). On balance, the 1960s in general and 1968 in particular are a codeword for social, cultural and—at least to a certain extent—political change in Western European societies, the USA and some countries of the "Global South," such as Mali, Mexico, El Salvador, Tanzania, and Bolivia. We might see the period as one of re-confgurations as defned by the Re-Confguration Network (see the Introduction to this volume). In historical perspective, the predominant

C. Derichs (\*)

Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: claudia.derichs@hu-berlin.de

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<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_7

connotation of the said *change* or re-confgurations is positive, associating change with progress, political liberties, liberation from constraining moral norms (e.g. norms regulating sexual orientation and behavior), emancipation from oppressive social structures, an almost glorifed revolutionary sheen exemplifed by the student movements, and an equally romanticized peace movement ("fower power") on the other. Crackdowns by government forces on reform movements, such as the response to the Prague Spring, do not perfectly ft the narrative of liberalization, but in retrospect, the upheavals in then-Czechoslovakia are at least signs of a transnational mood in which dissenters were taking to the streets for change and reform. Ideologically and politically, left-wing affliations fgured prominently in the discursive narrative (sometimes overshadowing non-leftist developments that drew less attention, as we will discuss below).

Perhaps the still-dominant view of the 1960s as a decade in which civil society actors organized and pushed for similar goals in numerous countries around the world is what provoked the notion of "the global sixties." Moreover, the shared belief in the power of international solidarity added to the feeling of belonging to a mass movement that rejected all sorts of imperialism for the sake of national liberation—particularly nations in postcolonial states of the "Third World." The movement against the US-led war in Vietnam (1965 to 1973) is emblematic of this impression and expression of international solidarity. Photographs taken during that war became iconic;1 music and literature addressed the theme as well. The year 1968 saw student protests against the Vietnam War that culminated in oftentimes-militant clashes with state police and security forces. Besides anti-war sentiment, national issues such as coping with the fascist past in West Germany, building solidarity between students and labor unions in France, struggling for civil rights in the USA, and denouncing the oppressive regime of Iran's Shah (though only from outside the country) fgured high on protest movements' agendas (Ali 2005).

Historians are thus pondering the valorization of "the global sixties" as a heuristic concept (Klimke and Nolan 2018). While the concept has been framed as "an inevitable by-product of the trend toward global history that has captured the profession [of historians; C.D.] in recent years," the category of "global" has itself been problematized: "Was it a native category and if so which actors used it and how?" (Klimke and Nolan 2018, p. 3 f.). This question leads us to expand the view beyond the default landscapes of movements of the sixties. How about the 1960s in the Arab world or the wider MENA region? How about the "long 1960s" as a period of events and phenomena that were formative for important developments in later decades—phenomena that drew less attention than the protest movements of the political left? How about transregional connectivities based on movements that originated in MENA countries? The subsequent sections offer some entry points into an empirically driven and conceptually under-analyzed notion of the global sixties and the peak year of 1968. However, a disclaimer is in order. Neither the term "global sixties" nor the term "long 1960s" is meant to denote a precisely delimitable period. The sixties did not begin sharply with the year 1960, nor did they end in 1969. Rather than demarcations by decade, the boundaries of this time interval appear fexible, for some beginning as early as 1954 and ending as late as 1975, while others confne the era more narrowly from the late 1950s to the early 1970s (Klimke and Nolan 2018, p. 5; Hodenberg and Siegfried 2006). Whatever periodization is preferred, we will not arrive at reliable inferences by limiting the sixties to a numb and rigid timeframe.

# **Deciphering the "Long 1960s" and 1968**

Let us start out by asking whether "sixty-eight" would resonate in the MENA region, and if so, how? Certainly, there was an active "Arab Left" on the region's political stage. Intra-regional and, increasingly, international solidarity movements mobilized for the liberation of Palestine. Pro-Palestinian activist groups (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP]; Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine [PDFLP], and others) enjoyed solidarity from other countries overseas, including Germany. Currents of the New Left in Europe aligned themselves with the Palestinian struggle, with some spin-off activist groups opting for militant training in the Middle East in order to prepare for an envisaged (imagined) revolutionary battle. Regionally, the establishment of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY, 1967−19 90) symbolized the widespread affection for Marxist ideas on the government level. Nonetheless, the PDRY was and remained the only Marxist state in the Arab world. Civil society struggles for both the liberation of Palestine and the Dhofar revolution in Oman coincided with the peak period of the Arab Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Egypt (1962–1967) and the guerilla warfare in Southern Yemen (Matthiesen 2018, p. 96 f.). In Bahrain, a major uprising "centered on the national oil company was cracked down upon heavily, leading to several casualties" in 1965 (Matthiesen 2018, p. 97). In the course of the battle for breaking Israel's power over occupied Arab territory, Egypt (together with Syria and Jordan) was defeated in the Six-Day War of June 1967—a blow that also heralded the end of the regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia's monarchy and Nasser's republic. The *Naksa*, or the defeat of Arab forces in the war against Israel in 1967, signifed frustration if not disillusionment on the Arab side. Ever since, 1967, not 1968, has been the year that captured many Arabs' collective memory. In view of what Toby Matthiesen calls the *Red Arabia* (2018, p. 94), the years 1965 and 1967 resonate comparatively strongly in the regional collective memory. There is thus not much to put forward in terms of a "revolutionary sixty-eight" in the MENA region, since the critical junctures date back to preceding years.2

If this were all that merits refection in regard to the long 1960s in the Middle East and North Africa, we could end here and thank you for your kind attention. However, there is more to the story, and a critical conceptual assessment should dig deeper and take a closer look. Two vantage points come to mind when we shed light on specifc dimensions of the 1960s on a regional level. One is informed by the Cold War constellation that affected the non-Western parts of the world as so-called proxies for the two polarized Eastern and Western powers. In this regard, I want to refer less to the MENA region but more to Southeast Asia as a case in point—notably not primarily because of the war in Vietnam, but because of a massacre (some call it genocide) in neighboring Indonesia, which caused up to a million deaths and has the sad reputation as the most brutal massacre since the Second World War (Cribb 2001; Farid 2005; McGregor 2009). The other is inspired by currents of Islamic and Islamist movements that unfolded considerable mobilizing strength in the "Muslim world" (please pardon the pragmatic use of this label here). The two vantage points speak to each other in that the Islamist Movements reached out to Southeast Asia and Indonesia in particular after the said massacre of 1965. If the subsequent "Islamization" of Indonesia's public life, academic institutions, politics, the economy, and other spheres of human interaction were to be traced back to its ideational sources, the international branches of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood had a vast infuence on this development (cf. Fealy and Platzdasch 2005; Hefner 1987; Fuller Collins 2007; van Bruinessen 2002; Platzdasch 2009; Machmudi 2008; Derichs 2017). The Brotherhood exerted a clear political appeal as a repressed movement struggling against an authoritarian regime. Indonesia's post-1965 system incorporated all the ingredients of an autocracy, making it similarly diffcult for opposition forces to organize there. Although the Brotherhood's direct infuence gained momentum in the late 1970s and early'80s rather than during the decade of 1960, its appeal forms a concrete transregional link between Muslim activists. Similarities in forms of organization, repertoires of actions, and the study of guiding scripts were the result of enhanced transregional mobility (e.g., Indonesian students studying in the Middle East), the consolidation of a widespread international network of Brotherhood branches, and an increasing number of occasions that allowed for meetings of individuals from various regions (e.g., international *Qurʾān* recitation contests and events sponsored by the Muslim World League and the like). A faith-based identity was fostered in Indonesia by two Muslim mass organizations, *Muhammadiyah* (approx. 40 million members) and *Nahdlatul Ulama* (NU; approx. over 60 million members). The latter had played a signifcant role in the crackdown on communists in 1965 (McGregor 2009; Feillard and Madinier 2011, p. 26).

Considering the tremendous international wave of solidarity that was triggered by the Vietnam War, during which many leftists favored the northern Viet Cong over the South Vietnamese forces, it is puzzling why the brutal elimination of communists in Indonesia, in 1965, hardly moved the world's left. Was it because of Indonesian president Sukarno's tainted image among overseas leftist activists (Ali 2005, p. 125 ff.)? Or was it because of a smart cover-up of Western (especially US) support for the systematic purge of communists?3 In the logic of the Cold War, human-rights violations apparently did not matter much when the noble cause of impeding the "domino effect" was at stake.4 A few hundred thousand deaths seem to have been regarded as collateral damage rather than a worrisome fact. Until today, it is open to speculation why the political genocide (Cribb 2001; Marching 2017) in Indonesia caused so much lesser outrage in the rest of the world than the fght against pro-communist forces in Vietnam.

Equally puzzling, we might say, is the considerable neglect of the fipside of international solidarity with the struggle in Vietnam and Palestine, which was shaped by the almost parallel movement activities of Muslim activists around the globe. Again, the transregional relations between Muslim Indonesia and MENA are cases in point.

# **Trans-MENA in Southeast Asia—The "other 1960s"?**

"The main ideological weapon used against the leftists, political Islam, had proven successful as an anti-Communist ideology not just in the Middle East but also in Africa and Central, South, and Southeast Asia," Matthiesen notes (2018, p. 102). I fully agree with this assessment, including the author's assertion that it was mainly the administrations of the United States and the United Kingdom pulling the strings in exploiting political Islamic movements for anti-communist goals. Yet the reference to Western powers is a limited view, and perhaps one informed predominantly by classical international relations (IR) theories. Attending to Muslim civil society organizations and social movements in various countries of the MENA region and Southeast Asia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it appears that focusing too strongly on inter-governmental relations glosses over the importance of non-state actors in the course of the "long sixties." By way of example, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Indonesia's Masyumi party merit closer attention. In the pivotal year of 1965, Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser executed an unprecedented arrest of high numbers of Brotherhood members in Egypt, legitimating this act with the "discovery of conspiracy" of the Brotherhood against him (Kepel 1995, p. 75). While the mass arrest reduced the strength of the Brotherhood considerably, its ideational appeal among common people only grew stronger. Two years later, after the defeat of the Six-Day War, Nasser's regime gave in to the mounting pressure of "the street," realizing that the nation's patience had reached a limit and reforms were overdue. On university campuses, students supporting the Brotherhood had organized clandestinely and were able to quickly mobilize fellow students, forming a remarkable political force (Kepel 1995, p. 141; Rosefsky Wickham 2013, p. 27 ff.). The subsequent vicissitudes of the Brotherhood's appearance on the political stage under different national presidents' rules and regimes are well documented and do not require further attention.5 What is more interesting for my argument here is the similarity of events in Egypt and in Indonesia (and in Malaysia, albeit less so because of the Malaysian government's much more liberal stance towards political Islam).6

After the 1965 massacre, the "forces of political Islam entered the New Order (the government of President Suharto, 1966–1998) with similar hopes: to be recognized for their role in the elimination of the communist threat" (Feillard and Madinier 2011, p. 24). Their hopes were swiftly dashed; the leaders of the Masyumi movement remained in prison.7 Sukarno had banned the Muslim Masyumi party in 1960, trying to contain political infuence by faith-based forces. The considerable "help" of NU members in the hunting and killing of communists in 1965 had raised expectations among the Muslim population to be acknowledged as credible supporters of the new regime. Hence, the jailed Masyumi activists also hoped for their release. However, Indonesia's new regime was far from favoring any inclinations of political Islamic activism and curbed attempts at organizing such immediately. It appreciated "cultural Islam" instead, introducing compulsory Islamic education in schools as early as 1966 (Feillard and Madinier 2011, p. 27 ff.). As in other post-confict contexts, religious identity was appropriated for regime-stabilizing purposes. Typically for an authoritarian system and akin to the situation in Egypt under Nasser, the post-1965 military government in Indonesia sought to prevent any challenges by political Islamic and Islamist forces. "To this end," Feillard and Madinier recall, "the party system had to be changed and Islam depoliticized without, however, reining in its growth as a religion" (2011, p. 27). Not surprisingly in this situation, a new generation of Muslim intellectuals emerged and encouraged a revival of Masyumi ideas in a format besides party politics. They founded the Indonesian Islamic Propaganda Council in 1967 and promoted efforts that would inspire vast numbers of students in the years to come: "With Islamization via politics henceforth impossible, the leaders of Masyumi thus decided to engage in politics via Islamization" (Feillard and Madinier 2011, p. 32). With propaganda activities—legal and illegal—on the agenda, this was the period within the 1960s when transregional linkages between Muslim youth in general and Islamist youth in particular fourished across national and regime boundaries, a trend that would only grow in later decades.

Propaganda or *dakhwah* activities (from the Arabic *daʿwa*) in Indonesia spread during the New Order period. Elizabeth Fuller Collins has traced some of these activities, and shows that *dakhwah* leaders gradually built a network of Islamic study circles, known initially as *usroh* (nuclear family or cell), and later as *ḥalaqa* (Arabic for a circle of students and their teacher) or *tarbiya* (the Arabic word for education under a teacher who provides moral guidance). She recalls what Hermawan Dipoyono, an early activist of Salman Mosque, told her: "I myself started the frst *usroh* in Salman Mosque, maybe the frst *usroh* in Indonesia. I was sent to Malaysia by Imaduddin, where I found books by the Muslim Brothers. I brought them back and started translating them into Indonesian. This was in 1976–1977. It was a dangerous time to do *dakhwah*. I would translate a few pages, and they would be copied and passed around. We studied these in our *usroh*" (quote from Fuller Collins 2007, p. 156).

The transregional outreach of Brotherhood ideas is patently obvious in the activist's quote. It underscores the remarkable international mobilizing capacities of the Muslim Brothers in the 1960s and beyond. Southeast Asian students became familiar with the works of Sayyid Qutb, Hassan Al-Banna, Mustafa Mashhur, and Sa'id Hawwa (Fuller Collins 2007, p. 156).8 Study-abroad programs for Southeast Asian students in Arab countries, particularly Egypt, provided the language skills to read and translate this literature into their respective native languages. Writing often made its way to Indonesia via Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, where politically inclined Muslim organizations enjoyed a comparatively liberal and tolerant climate (as long as certain "red lines" were not crossed). The early secret *dakhwah* activities of the 1970s expanded in the 1980s, when the *tarbiya* movement gained mobilizing power on secular campuses. The transmission of Muslim Brotherhood infuence into Indonesia occurred in two stages. According to Yon Machmudi, the frst stage took place in the 1970s with the translation of Brotherhood literature into Indonesian language. The second evolved in the 1980s, when increasing numbers of students returned to Indonesia and combined their *dakhwah* ideas with Brotherhood training and organizational hardware (Machmudi 2008, p. 180).

The example of transregional connectivities between the Middle East and Southeast Asia may showcase the argument that Islamic movements in the MENA region and elsewhere established contacts that were similar in strength to those of their leftist counterparts. Legal as well as semi-legal or illegal organizations managed to communicate across huge geographical distances and instill a sense of belonging in a particular faith-based community. The "Suf links" (Machmudi 2008, p. 169) allowed for the use of a particular vocabulary (e.g. *usroh*/*usrah* for the activists' cells) and identifcation with a particular exegetic tradition. Mona Abaza (1994) believes that the increased student mobility of the 1960s and 1970s exposes an indirect result of the Islamization of Indonesian society, whereas others would view the Islamization of Indonesian society as a result of more mobile students.9 Regardless of one's preferred chronology, it is quite apparent that Islamic political activism produced numerous cross-national and cross-regional offshoots of well-organized movement organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which became "local expressions that follow the socio-political and religious dynamics of their respective countries" (Machmudi 2008, p. 170). Can we apply this observation as we refect on re-confgurations of the legacy of the "long 1960s"?

# **Re-Confgurations**

Browsing through pieces of scholarly literature that offer a "non-Western view" on the decades since the 1960s, it appears that the dominant codeword of "sixty-eight" must be put into perspective—maybe even "provincialized" (to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty's prominent term). In non-Western contexts, it is stunning how often the year 1965 brought about a critical juncture in politics and society.10 However, there is little heuristic value in exchanging one year for another in the pursuit of broadening signal words such as the long or global sixties. The re-confguration I am seeking refers to the calibration of the movement landscape of the sixties (and seventies). The movements of the period are conventionally studied against the backdrop of a left–right, religious-secular, and progressive-conservative matrix. Such dichotomies and binaries are to my mind not always helpful for comprehending similarities, differences, distinction, and connectivity. When we conceptualize the Islamic political movements and networks of the mid-sixties as actors rising up against authoritarian national regimes on faith-based ideological platforms, their commonality should not be reduced to "Islamic/Islamist," but rather should be seen as shared political motivation, one they oftentimes share with movements designated as politically left/leftist. The left–right and the religious-secular lenses lose their bite. Equally worth attending to are the incidents and occurrences that preceded and triggered the emergence of organized Islamic political protest, or, as Ayesha Jalal has dubbed it, "Islam's second globalization" (Jalal 2010, p. 326). What were the windows of political opportunity? What kind of resources for mobilization could be drawn on? What characterized the repertoires of action, organizational structures, symbolic integration, and so on? In sum: Applying the analytical toolbox of social movement research, irrespective of the above matrices and binaries, would probably reveal much more than the codewords of the long/global sixties and "sixty-eight" connote at frst glance. The mid-sixties formed critical junctures for many soscieties, even if they were sometimes overshadowed in international attention, and these trends had context-specifc trajectories that converged into something we now view, quite one-dimensionally, as an "Islamic resurgence" or "Islamic revival" in the years to follow.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Claudia Derichs** is professor of transregional southeast Asian studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Germany). Prior, she worked as professor for comparative politics and international development studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). She has studied Japanese and Arabic in Bonn, Tokyo and Cairo, and holds a PhD in Japanology. Her main research interests are transregional studies on Asia and the Middle East, including social movements, gender and development studies. Current studies pertain to a critical assessment of global knowledge production.

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**Social Re-Confgurings and Generational Challenges**

# **The Survival of the Kurdish Chicken: Uneven Development and Nationalist Discourse in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq**

Andrea Fischer-Tahir

# **Research Question and Positionality**

In the spring of 2016, the Iraqi government banned the sale of poultry from the Kurdistan Region to the center and south of the country. Some months before, Baghdad had already banned the import of poultry from more than twenty countries after reports on the outbreak of avian infuenza in other parts of the world. In the same vein, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) banned poultry imports, including from other parts of Iraq, and repeated this ban in January 2017 after cases of avian infuenza had been detected in the Iraqi province of Diyala.1 A colleague of mine, living in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya, keeps chickens on the roof of her parent's house. Her birds were highly affected by the infuenza, as she writes: "Initially there were twelve, but the bird fu took half of them. Now I'm crossing my fngers that others survive."2

After the long years of economic crisis, poultry production in Kurdistan has grown over the last decade, including an increase of 40% in just the last fve years (Abdullah 2018). According to offcial statistics, more than 1300 poultry farms produced 108,000 metric tons in 2017, and experts believe that the region "could technically sustain its own demand" (Abdullah 2018). However, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) promotes food imports; in 2017, it imported an additional 60,000 metric tons.3 Foreign companies, above all from Turkey, sell their goods for lower prices while being legally protected as international

A. Fischer-Tahir (\*)

Institut für Erziehungswissenschaften, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany e-mail: andreatahir@gmx.de

businesses. As a result, Kurdish producers are forced to sell their poultry to other parts of Iraq. Thus, Kurdish chickens have three major enemies: humans, viruses, and the capitalist mode of production. In this chapter, I will proceed to discuss the following questions: In which ways are uneven development and neoliberalism inscribed in the Kurdish project of independence? Is foreign trade with Turkey at odds with Kurdish nationalist sentiments? Finally, why do people raise chickens on their rooftops?

This chapter deals with political, economic, and social re-confgurations and their interplay with representations of identity and taste. In using the term "re-confgurations" according to the conceptual framework of this volume, I am referring to reproductive, cumulative, and transformative processes that are both interdependent and overlapping (Boudon 1979). A notion of human experience that involves spatial and temporal dimensions makes it possible to highlight the dynamics of change (Koselleck 2000, p. 12 f.). The chapter's argument also builds on a notion of "representation" that refers to the cultural practice of constructing meaning (Hall 1997). "Representations" can be understood as resources for action and forms of organized knowledge that shape how social systems of interaction are re-confgured; at the same time, representations are subject to change (Baberowski 2009). This applies to more than abstract political symbols, narratives, power structures, and economic concepts and performances. It also extends to the modes of dressing, eating and drinking, furnishing, gardening, or of consuming art that comment on political and economic change (Newcomb 2006; Deeb and Harb 2013; Dimitova 2013). Hence, this chapter will consider the act of "keeping chickens on the roof" as a performance from the realm of everyday life so as to refect on order and disorder in the Kurdistan Region.

I must admit that this chapter was written without conducting formal feld research on the particular topic of "urban farming." However, my argument is grounded in long-standing research experience in Southern Kurdistan since 1993. Apart from that, I have had the chance to work in Kurdistan with foreign and local NGOs and as an employee and scholar in the higher-education sector. These activities, as well as my social relationships there over the last twenty-fve years, have shaped and reshaped my political position on Kurdistan. Therefore, my academic writing on Kurdistan is far from any kind of imagined objectivity, but is instead guided by empathy and the spirit of critical solidarity. The idea for this paper was born after a friend of mine, another researcher in the feld of Kurdish Studies, returned from Sulaimaniya and told me about "chickens on the roof." This provoked me to ask Kurdish friends and family about this on the phone or by email, and I began searching for more information in Kurdish media. Well-structured feld work informed by practice theory (Bourdieu 1977) that involves participant observation, interviews, conversation, and refexivity would lay better groundwork for discussing localized, positioned, and situated knowledge, as advocated by Donna Haraway (1988, p. 589; see also Sultana 2007). However, for personal reasons, I have not been able to visit Kurdistan in recent years to see and observe, to ask questions and to listen. Therefore, my chapter appears as a sort of "family-and-friends paper" written from a privileged spatial distance.

# **The Chicken on the Roof**

Across class and spatial divisions, contemporary Kurdish households tend to consider chicken an integral part of their diet.4 In addition to kebabs made of minced lamb meat, fried chicken is one of the most popular dishes in restaurants and is routinely served to guests in private homes. However, the dominance of chicken is rather new: it results from modernist development and globalized commodity exchange. Thus, Henny H. Hansen's account of *Kurdish Woman's Life* suggests that, by the late 1950s, mutton was slightly preferred to fowl such as chicken or turkey (Hansen 1961, p. 49), and when asked what they consider to be "typical Kurdish food" (*čêşt-î kurdî*), Kurds in Iraq tend to mention several dishes involving lamb or mutton in some form (cf. 2009, p. 164 ff.). It was the "modernization" projects of the 1970s pursued by the Iraqi Arab-nationalist Baath regime that introduced industrialized poultry farming. "Poultry farms" (abbreviated as *dawājin*) were state-owned enterprises located in small towns or the outskirts of cities, whereas in villages they were quasi-socialist co-operation projects according to the agrarian reform law of 1970 (Gabbay 1978; Dzięgiel 1981; Genat 2017). These cooperations were, however, abolished by 1988, when the regime launched its genocidal Anfal campaigns against the Peshmerga and village population (Middle East Watch 1993).

During the 1970s and 1980s, the agrarian sector underwent contradictory transformations. Thus, the oil boom of 1973 facilitated an expansion of food imports to Iraq. However, this led to the neglect of the domestic agrarian production. Based on food imports, the regime and welfare state established a food distribution system aimed at courting the support of low-income households and approval of the government's policies, but when expanded to the whole population the system became a means of discipline and control. At the beginning of the 1980s, tendencies to liberalize the economic sector emerged and intensifed with the continued war against Iran (2003, p. 74 ff.; Springborg 1986; Leezenberg 2006). Due to the international embargo of Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, poultry production declined as the whole Iraqi economy collapsed; prices of major commodities such as four, rice, sugar, tea, meat, gasoline, and kerosene exploded (Natali 2010, p. 29 ff.). The success of international humanitarian aid and rural reconstruction proved limited due to the embargo, Baghdad's ban on Kurdish insurgents, and the persistent climate of insecurity (Ofteringer and Bäcker 1994; Winter et al. 2002).

Since 2003, the reintegration of the Kurdistan Region into the Iraqi oil economy led to growing international capital investment and a multitude of business opportunities, which signifcantly improved the availability of basic food and meat in the market. Even eggs on sale in the new supermarkets often stem from poultry production in other countries, especially Turkey and Iran. Shops located in the old bazaars, the urban periphery, or small towns also sell eggs and chicken from local and national producers as well as from individual farms. At the same time, people pursue alternative ways to obtain eggs and "white meat." Thus, the city of Sulaimaniya is witnessing a revival of chicken-raising in courtyards and on the roofs of single-family dwellings. Recently, the above-mentioned colleague of mine from Sulaimaniya sent me pictures of these friendly animals on her roof and in the courtyard of her parents' house, a middle-class household with well-educated daughters. She wrote:

We keep them for their eggs and for our happiness.[…] I feed them cucumbers and bread in vegetable soup.[…] I feed them whatever scraps of food are left over from us. We never throw food away. … We always fnd it hard to kill them to eat, but once or twice a year […] my sisters ask someone to kill a chicken and they eat it while they speak of its happy days.5

This is interesting on four levels: nutrition, care for animal welfare, responsible use of resources, and the appropriation of nature for human pleasure. When discussing this specifc practice with other Kurdish friends and relatives living in Sulaimaniya, I heard several statements of validation, approval, and further explanation. For example, "Kurdish chicken tastes better than imported frozen chicken; the eggs are healthier than those of the *dawājin.*" Another said: "This is our culture." Within this context, I also remembered elderly women from my husband's family saying at various occasions over the last twenty-fve years: "Kurdish chicken (*mirişk-î kurdî*) tastes better than any other chicken in the world." Of course, they were referring to chicken raised by relatives in the village. This is "Kurdish chicken" as a marker of quality, taste, and identity. According to Bourdieu (1987), taste preferences are a result of social practice; they are class-based and represent cultural capital. Taste not only marks one's place in social hierarchies but it also reproduces social difference. Embedded in other performances of lifestyle, taste also can be displayed as a comment or critique of social hierarchies and injustice. This conceptual link raises the question: What kinds of hierarchies and injustices is this specifc case referencing?

# **Nationalism, Uneven Development, and Neoliberalism**

Since the popular uprising of March 1991, the Kurdistan Region underwent major political re-confgurations. Today, it is a semi-independent territorial entity. This "unrecognized state" (Caspersen and Stansfeld 2011) is ruled by a democratically elected government enacting domestic sovereignty over the four governorates of Dohuk, Erbil, Sulaimaniya, and Halabja. In September 2017, a referendum for independence showed that 92.7% of the voters supported separation from Iraq.6 The regional elections in September 2018 showed approval of the ruling parties: 44% for the Barzani-led Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and 20.5% for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Among the parties who had formed a governing coalition with these two in 2014, it was 12% for the Sulaimaniya-based Change Movement (Gorran), 7% for the Islamic Group, and 5 for the Islamic Union of Kurdistan.7 Kurdish nationalism is still the dominant ideology in the region, and these three oppositional forces were incorporated into the previous government in order to silence resistance and to avoid armed confict among Kurdish parties. In regard to international relations, the KRG maintains diplomatic ties and negotiates military arrangements with foreign powers; it also contracts with oil companies from such countries as China, Russia, the United States, Norway, and Turkey.8 At the same time, Kurdish factions have been part of the Iraqi parliament and government since 2005, and the appointed president of post-Baath Iraq has always been a Kurd from the PUK leadership, from Jalal Talaban and Fuad Masum to Barham Salih. Nevertheless, the relationship between Baghdad and Erbil remains fragile. In particular, disputes over territory and the control of hydrocarbon resources have caused serious conficts and led to armed confrontation. Thus, Haidar al-Abadi's government reacted to the referendum by re-conquering the oil-rich area and the city of Kirkuk, which the Peshmerga have controlled since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.9

When Kurds transformed their decade-long struggle for self-determination into a semi-state, they had to cope with the experience of war and genocidal persecution (2003; Mlodoch 2014). After 1991, the climate of violence persisted due to invasions of the Turkish and Iranian neighbors, the Kurdish militia war, the intervention of the Iraqi regime, the US-led invasion, and, recently, the war against the quasi-fascist "Islamic State" (IS). Nevertheless, the Kurdistan Region has managed to implement some sort of "late-modernist" development, focusing not only on the oil sector, but also on urban reconstruction, transport infrastructure, communication, international trade, higher education, leisure, and tourism. As in other parts of the world, this development has resembled a sort of "megalomania," and the ruling elites established the narrative of Kurdistan as the Iraqi Dubai (Sama 2015). In this transformation, government investment is hardly distinguishable from private domestic capital. Leading political fgures and their relatives also perform key roles in the economy and are fnancial sponsors of media, art, and higher education. At the same time, there is no transparency at all about the state's fnancial plan. Harsh measures against journalists investigating corruption and maladministration exemplify the increasing authoritarianism of the ruling parties (Watts 2014, 2017).

Since 2003, the Kurdistan Region has been witnessing the disintegration of the post-revolutionary distribution system that had been partly based on the old Iraqi welfare state. The government supports the neoliberal transformations through legal regulations. The Law of Investment issued in 2006 was designed to advance economic change; its articles pledge to facilitate economic activities such as capital transactions and buying or leasing land while exempting international investors from all taxes (except tariffs) for the frst ten years.10 Economic experts stress that the implementation of the law has successfully promoted integration into the global economy (Heshmati 2010). The Kurdistan Region, with its booming center of Erbil, became "a place to see" attracting foreign capital as well as tourists. The former periphery of Iraq transformed into a center of development. However, it is uncertain how long Kurdistan will remain attractive for capital investment; today's privileged situation is mainly due to lasting insecurity in the "rest of Iraq." In addition, development is not equally "distributed." Instead, spatial differentiation between governorates is growing. As the most powerful parts of the political elites (KDP) reside in Erbil and Dohuk, these cities are most favored, whereas Sulaimaniya and Halabja beneft less from the "boom"—even though Halabja is widely recognized in Kurdish discourse as the most powerful symbol of genocidal persecution (2012; Watts 2017). These inner peripheries greatly suffered between 2014 and 2018, when the KRG repeatedly ordered the suspension of public-sector salaries, presenting the war against IS and the uncooperative government in Baghdad as justifcations. Meanwhile, business seemed to be proceeding as usual for the political-economic elites.

Peripheralization is not a new phenomenon in Kurdistan. European colonialism and Iraqi inner colonialism put the region at the margins of both the global and the national socio-economic and political orders. The novelty is the concurrence of the Kurdistan Region's de-peripheralization on the national scale (of Iraq) with re-peripheralization on a sub-national scale (Kurdistan). However, neither the old nor the new forms of peripheralization should be seen as a mismatch for (late) "modernization." Rather, as critical geographer Neil Smith (1984) would say, they result from the logic of capital accumulation and "normal" capitalist development, which is uneven in space and time.

According to the re-confgurations outlined so far, neoliberalism's "pervasive affects … on ways of thought and political-economic practice" (Harvey 2007, p. 23) are also true for other sectors as health care and higher education. Over the past decade, a growing number of private hospitals have opened, reinforcing a notion that health care is tied to social class. At the same time, medical treatment became more costly in state-run hospitals and dramatically exceeded a household's monthly income and savings especially in cases of cancer or renal diseases. Kurdistan had three universities in 2003. Today, there are ffteen more, half of them private, among them two American universities, one controlled by the Barzani family, the other by Barham Salih. Private universities require tuition fees denominated in US dollars and the "right" social and political contacts. Due to the focus on commercial and business studies, the use of English as the language of instruction, and staff comprised of "Westerners" and highly qualifed Diaspora returnees, their degrees are more valued than those of state universities, which improves private students' prospects. Thus, the re-confguration of higher education has led to new social injustice while reproducing older social hierarchies.

Neoliberalism also affects other spheres of life. For example, neoliberal techniques have changed patterns of media production and journalistic representation with signifcant effects on political and social discourses. Interestingly, Kurdish nationalism remains the hegemonic narrative in the media (2017). Similarly, Schluwa Sama's (2015) research on shopping malls shows that the neoliberal ideology of success, exclusivity, and self-presentation is perfectly compatible with Kurdish nationalist narratives of moral superiority over "the Arabs" and migrant workers. In addition, another aspect of urban reconstruction indicates that nationalism is not a contradiction to neoliberalism. As elsewhere in West Asia and North Africa, "late-modernist" development can be combined with the desire for celebrating cultural heritage. Thus, selected historical sites and buildings (most prominently the citadel of Erbil) have become subject to revaluation, restoration, and integration or interconnection with other projects such as luxury hotels or shopping areas. At the same time, the cities have seen a proliferation of cafés and restaurants offering "Kurdish food" at "Western" prices, to be enjoyed in new buildings or in renovated old city houses, both with folkloristic interior decoration. These are exclusive spaces for consumption, social networking, political discussion, business, and self-presentation. During my last visit to Kurdistan, in spring 2016, I was in the courtyard of such a re-functioned city house

in Sulaimaniya when I had the opportunity to meet an unexpected coeval—the free-range chicken. When I asked why chickens would be kept in such places, the answer was "This is part of our culture."

# **Change, Continuity, and the Chicken**

The Kurdistan Region's two major functions within contemporary global capitalism are as a market and as a supplier of natural resources. As indicated earlier, this has serious effects on Kurdistan's domestic production. In 2015, for example, government offcials stated that about 90% of food available in the local market was imported, while at the same time the government allocated only two percent of the annual budget to the agricultural sector (Abdullah 2015). As for poultry production, local enterprises as well as individual farmers face diffculties selling their chicken in local markets because companies from Turkey, Iran, France, China, South Africa, and elsewhere sell chicken and eggs at lower prices. The import business in Kurdistan is in the tight grip of Kurdish merchants who are entangled with ruling elites, explaining the lack of legal measures to regulate prices in a way that would strengthen the position of local "meat producers" (Handani 2017). The neglect of the agricultural sector while pinning all hopes for a great future on oil and gas refects a sort of *rentier*-state mentality, partly inherited from Iraq and partly adopted with Kurdistan's increasing integration into the global economy. As far as I could observe on previous visits, public opinion in Kurdistan considers dependence on imported goods to be a threat to domestic food production. In the media, agricultural experts and other economists criticize the lack of proper planning and warn of consequences for the domestic agriculture. Farmers and city dwellers make similar arguments, as Katharina Lange (2016) has shown for the province of Dohuk. However, interviewees several years earlier were already pointing to the dangers of oil dependency, and specifcally United Nations the "oil-for-food" program implemented in 1997 to absorb the dramatic effects of the embargo against Iraq. Whereas humanitarian aid after 1991 had aimed at rebuilding villages and rehabilitating agriculture, the "oil-for-food" program partly stopped this process and reanimated the Iraqi food distribution system (2011). Hence, dependency on food imports is not new. What has changed are the major players in food imports, and in general the economic dominance of Turkey. In recent years, I have often heard rhetorical questions such as "Why do we allow the Kurds' enemies to food our bazaar with their goods? Don't we have our own tomatoes, potatoes, eggs, and meat?" Such questions merge a critique of dependency with Kurdish nationalist discourse. At the same time, the prevailing dependency shows that re-confgurations involve both change and continuity.

Turning to the level of food consumption, chicken presents more evidence that change and continuity are simultaneous. In comparison to the "Kurdish chicken" from the village, frozen animals delivered through transnational commodity chains seem to offer advantages besides their lower prices. For one thing, they are easier to get—for example, when driving home from work, passing by a shop in the neighborhood, or one of the new supermarkets. This avoids a time-consuming visit to the central bazaar in the heavily traffcked downtown where fresh meat and local goods are sold. Women in particular prefer not to go to the "meat market," as it is considered "dirty," "unhygienic," and "male." Interestingly, the standardized chicken also changes cooking and eating habits. As far as I observed in the past, Kurdish women used to cook the feet for little children; this not only provided them with extra calcium, but also kept them busy and silent for a while. However, the standardized chicken arrives in Kurdistan without its feet. In addition, due to the destructive character of capitalist "meat production," imported chickens are female, and so men miss the cock that is considered a delicacy. Last but not least, relations of commodity circulation affect the ways chicken is consumed: either on the table or on a table-cloth spread on the foor. The parts of a chicken used to be distributed according to social hierarchy, the cultural value of innards and outer parts, and socially defned needs. Accordingly, taste preferences were constructed und justifed in social discourse (2009, p. 164 ff.). The standardized chicken disturbs this order because of the specifcity of the chicken's body in terms of proportions, inner organs, head and feet, but it does not lead to abolishing inequality at the table under male domination. Either way, special guests will be served a "Kurdish chicken," for it seems to be consensus that the village-based chicken is much better. Moreover, "Kurdish chicken" is said not to be contaminated with antibiotics or biogenetic amines, defects predominantly to be found in imported chicken (Murad 2013).

My colleague in Sulaimaniya who keeps chickens on the roof confrmed the concern for healthy food, referring to "frequent media and private conversations about the nutritional value of fresh free-range eggs and meat."11 She thus addresses one of the multiple reasons for urban people to keep their own chickens instead of being very dependent on imported food that might be a threat to health. Indeed, this health discourse is infuenced by global discourses on healthy and organic food as well as the revaluation of "the natural" and moves of re-turning to nature. In connection with these discourses, middle-class city dwellers have rediscovered the urban garden or begun to buy plots of land outside of town for planting vegetables, fruit trees, and fowers. These people seek rest and relaxation from the city, which they see as overloaded with traffc, construction noise, noxious substances, a hectic pace, and political struggles. I often heard relatives and friends justifying these "returns to nature" by referring to village and agrarian society as genuine aspects of Kurdishness. In the same vein, an agrarian scientist published an encyclopedia of herbology aiming at preserving knowledge about the nutritional value and healing powers of herbs in general, particularly those growing in Kurdistan (Ghefur 2012). In addition, my colleague stressed that keeping chickens in the city is a tradition, and writes:

[I]n our neighborhood on the upper side of town (known as the traditional neighborhood), families have always kept animals. I remember seeing some of neighbors and others closer to the mountain of Goyzhe even keep sheep and goats until the late 1990s.12

Later this practice disappeared somehow, but "lately it has become trendier … perhaps due to the fnancial crisis," that is, the suspension of salaries when Erbil and Baghdad quarreled over the budget of the Kurdistan Region. Past, present, and future have a pervasive infuence. Meanwhile, coping strategies merge with narratives of Kurdish identity to produce critical comments on what the ruling elites promote as "development."

# **The (A-)Political at the End**

The return to nature—be it the chicken on the urban roof and courtyard, the urban garden, or the urban part-time farmer—also seems related to structural problems with the political culture in Kurdistan. The KRG is well-trained in channeling political opposition. Long before the Arab Spring, Kurds in Iraq regularly took to the streets to protest maladministration and corruption. A strong civil society developed that includes a broad spectrum of social, political, economic and cultural interest groups. However, two main structural aspects of Kurdish society and political culture have so far prevented successful social revolutionary upheaval. First, there is the incorporative power of the post-revolutionary system and *rentier*-state; in one way or another, the individuals are placed within the system through kinship and other social networks. This helps them survive and improve their own situations and positions. Secondly, Kurdish narratives of victimhood and the historically grounded legitimacy of the Kurdish right to self-determination have persistent mobilizing power. Thus, conficts with external forces (outer enemies) are invoked to activate the Kurdish anti-colonial refexes. To give an example, the referendum of 2017 was widely considered a success by the ruling elites and international media; as mentioned, more than 90% voted in favor of separation. However, the referendum for independence was held primarily in order to postpone regular elections in Kurdistan, to prolong Masud Barzani's presidency and power, and strengthen Erbil's position in relation to Baghdad. Even though Kurds have been aware of this, relatives I have heard criticizing the KRG often voted "yes" or even volunteered as polling clerks. Apart from that, a closer look at numbers is revealing: the referendum was characterized by a total voter turnout of 72%, with Halabja only 55.6% and Sulaimaniya city only 47%.13 A longtime friend of mine, herself a left-wing activist since the 1970s, said: "I cannot vote 'yes' because it is all in the interest of the Barzanis. But neither can I vote 'no' because I am a Kurd. I have struggled my whole life for our self-determination."14

During my most recent visit three years ago, this friend was also very much concerned with her garden, and we both agreed that planting and caring for fowers is a perfect escaping strategy in a disordered world that seems impossible to change in a profound, and not only superfcial way.

At this point, let me return to the initial question: Why are there chickens on the roofs of houses in a Kurdish city? As I have tried to show, the answer lies in the dynamics of economic, political, and social re-confgurations and in various discourses at work in these processes that involve both change and continuity. I would interpret this particular practice as an appropriation of nature, a comment of transformation processes, and a critique of "megalomania," alienation, and dependency on "the enemies of the Kurds". At the same time, this practice is in dialogue with global discourses on healthy nutrition, sustainability, and protection of the planet. It represents an attempt to change something in this disordered world, if only on a small scale.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Andrea Fischer-Tahir** studied arabic and oriental studies, anthropology and the history of religion. In Kurdistan-Iraq, she conducted extensive feld research on political history, memory, genocide in Kurdish historiography, gender, and media. She worked at Koye University Kurdistan, the ZMO Berlin, as well as in the research network "Re-Confgurations" at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Her dissertation discussed martyrdom, mobilization and memory in Kurdistan.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# **The Infantilization of the Colonized: Medical and Psychiatric Descriptions of Drinking Habits in the Colonial Maghreb**

# Nina S. Studer

French doctors and psychiatrists traveling through or working in the colonial Maghreb during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries commonly reported in their publications that the colonized they encountered reminded them of children.1 They also described practically every aspect of the behavior of the colonized as childlike in some respect. While this equation of the colonized with children was by no means restricted to the medico-psychiatric source material and can be found in a variety of different colonial publications,2 this chapter will focus on publications by doctors and psychiatrists, as their status as widely accepted experts and as alleged pillars of science and modernity made their statements, in the eyes of their French readership, more authoritative than those of other authors. Though this is usually not stated explicitly, the children imagined in these comparisons were presumably European, which accords with a long tradition of European medical and psychiatric experts comparing the colonized to an imaginary European normality. Yet comparisons of the colonized with children in the publications of French doctors and psychiatrists were more than just colorful and anecdotal descriptions of life in the colonies; they were part of an implicit, ongoing process of diagnosing the behavior of the colonized as intrinsically different from French behavior. These comparisons implicitly suggested that colonized adults and European children were roughly on the same developmental level,3 and concluded that both groups had a similar relationship to French adults: that is, receiving education from them, following their lead, and letting them make important decisions

N. S. Studer (\*)

Institut für Islamwissenschaft und Neuere Orientalische Philologie, Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland e-mail: nina.studer@islam.unibe.ch

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_9

on their behalf. The framing of the colonized as children highlights the colonial understanding of there being a clear power imbalance in the colonies—with France as the undisputed paterfamilias, so to speak, and with the colonized unable to reach French levels of reason and modernity on their own.

The conceptualization of the colonized as children was connected to the European notion that the colonies represented, as Joseph Massad put it in his 2007 book *Desiring Arabs*, "an earlier stage of Europe, the childhood of Europe itself, which European colonialism would shepherd to adult maturity" (Massad 2007, p. 55).4 French colonial doctors and psychiatrists often explained this childlikeness of the North Africans using contemporary theories about a clear hierarchy of races, implying that the colonized were on a lower evolutional level than the French colonizer, or, applying Massad's vocabulary, that the region as a whole was roughly at the stage of France's childhood.5 While the colonies as a whole were described as childlike, many of these comparisons of the colonized with children were gendered and applied with varying degrees to men and women. Even though there are a variety of casual descriptions of Muslim men as children in French publications, such descriptions, both implicit and explicit, were a nearly constant feature when it came to Muslim women. French colonial authors described Muslim women as childlike and compared their intellectual capacities, reasoning, and behavior to those of children (Lemanski 1900, p. 94; Ibid. 1913, p. 19, 166; Igert 1955, p. 651).6 This gender bias in the infantilization of the colonized should also be seen in the context of hysterical women often being described as "child-women" in Europe and America in the nineteenth century, and in view of the widespread nineteenth-century theory of women in general being closer to children than to adult men (Smith-Rosenberg 1972, p. 677; Pick 1989, p. 105). Hence, these comparisons of colonized women with children corresponded to the broader paternalistic views of the colonial doctors and psychiatrists studied for this chapter.

While such descriptions might appear, at frst glance, to be run-of-the-mill indications of colonial paternalism, this tradition of comparing the colonized to children had more harmful consequences. Some twentieth-century colonial psychiatrists openly diagnosed the colonized in the Maghreb with *puérilisme mental* (mental infantilism). The psychiatrist Sextius Arène, for example, stated in his 1913 dissertation on criminality in Tunisia: "The Arab has a (psychological) foundation of mental infantilism," before further explaining that this "mental infantilism" manifested as, among other things, a "taste for fbbing" and a joy in storytelling. He concluded: "In short, he is a great child, lazy and improvident" (Arène 1913, p. 137). This notion, that the childlike nature of the colonized was so intense that it made sense to claim all colonized people were affected by "mental infantilism" (or sometimes just "infantilism"), became widely accepted in 1918, when the famous psychiatrist Antoine Porot, the founder of the infuential school of psychiatry known as the École d'Alger, adopted "mental infantilism" as a useful diagnosis for the colonized in what would become the founding text of French colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb, *Notes on Muslim Psychiatry* (Porot 1918, p. 383).

While "mental infantilism" was an accepted psychiatric diagnosis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, describing a European adult with pathologically childlike behavior in speech, gestures, and mindset,7 colonial psychiatrists like Arène and Porot did not apply it in this sense to the colonized populations.8 In the context of the colonies, "mental infantilism" was not an individual diagnosis applied to a specifc person suffering from a mental problem, but instead a generalized description of the behavior of all the colonized. Using the term "mental infantilism" to defne the colonized was a form of pathologization of normal, everyday behavior and a cornerstone of colonial psychiatry in the Maghreb (Studer 2015, p. 31 ff.).

Thus, under the auspices of Antoine Porot, French colonial psychiatry had come to apply a very specifc clinical diagnosis ("mental infantilism") to the healthy masses of colonized people. This chapter analyzes the process that led to this outcome and investigates earlier, colonial, medico-psychiatric comments about all North Africans being childlike, a pejorative attitude which clearly infuenced the psychiatrists of the École d'Alger and was the principle underlying mechanism that led to their generalized diagnosis. Arène and Porot's sweeping diagnosis can only be understood against the backdrop of generation after generation of French doctors and psychiatrists in the Maghreb discussing and reinforcing the trope of the childlike behavior of the colonized.

This chapter contextualizes both the specifc diagnosis, by proponents of the École d'Alger, of North Africans suffering from "mental infantilism," and the more general descriptions of the colonized as perpetually and habitually childlike, by looking at one context in which the medical and psychiatric source material regularly described the colonized as children: the consumption of alcohol. This context is particularly interesting because French sources assumed that the introduction of alcohol into the region and the conversion of formerly abstinent Muslims into alcohol consumers and alcohol abusers amounted to a profound transformation of the region initiated by the French—not a direct goal of the French "modernization project" in the colonies, but rather a necessary side effect, as French modernity was unimaginable without alcohol. This chapter seeks to demonstrate why descriptions of alcohol consumption, a French everyday habit adopted by some of the colonized, provides a case study of three different layers of infantilization: the frst apparent in descriptions of the habit itself, the second related to theories about the physical reactions of the bodies of the colonized, and the third present in regulations proposed by the French. This chapter will examine these three layers in the French colonial sources and present specifc examples for each. It will also examine how French offcials reacted to the alcohol consumption of the colonized and analyze the deep colonial power imbalance behind the equation of alcohol-drinking Muslims with children, which culminated in the psychiatrists around Antoine Porot diagnosing a whole region with "mental infantilism" in the frst half of twentieth century.

# **Levels of Infantilization**

French colonial doctors and psychiatrists described the alcohol consumption of a very specifc group—colonized adult Muslim men—as childlike in their publications.9 These descriptions only concerned actual adults, as colonial doctors and psychiatrists almost never commented on the drinking habits of colonized children or adolescents. Even though references to childlike behavior and attitudes can also be found in some medical and psychiatric descriptions of North African Jews,10 childishness was never associated with their drinking habits. While colonized women were more commonly compared to children than men, alcohol-drinking Muslim women were rarely reported on in the colonial sources. In those exceptional cases when their alcohol consumption was described, their behavior was not compared to that of children.

The infantilization of these colonized adult Muslim men in the colonial source material operated on three general levels: 1) French colonial doctors and psychiatrists argued that the colonized drank alcohol "incorrectly": in ways that were deeply and problematically childlike and for childish reasons. This "incorrect consumption" had various alleged manifestations. French authors claimed, for example, that the colonized only enjoyed sugary alcoholic drinks such as absinthe (Coudray 1914, p. 47) and described the spread of alcohol among the colonized Muslims as not being motivated by adult reasoning. Additionally, French doctors and psychiatrists often did not concede that the colonized turned to alcohol for reasons of taste or company. Rather, they viewed it as a case of the colonized childishly mimicking the behavior of the colonizers, but without possessing the necessary maturity to copy French habits productively. 2) The second layer of infantilization concerned the reaction of the bodies of the colonized to alcohol, which was in many ways likened to that of people who had not reached full adulthood. The French colonial doctors and psychiatrists analyzed for this chapter saw these alcohol drinkers among the colonized as being in a metaphorical state of childhood, as it was believed that Muslims had not consumed any alcohol before the French military conquest of the region. In the French worldview, the colonized had only just been "won over" by alcohol and French observers assumed that, like French children of the time, they were at the very beginning of a life with alcohol. Due to this "newness," or lack of habituation, the bodies of the colonized were believed to react differently to alcohol than French bodies. 3) The fnal level of infantilization did not concern the alcohol consumption of the colonized itself, but the French reaction to it. A variety of colonial doctors and psychiatrists argued that, like children, the colonized had to be taught how to drink in a civilized and responsible way by the French.

These different levels of infantilization were, of course, interconnected in colonial publications and allusions to several levels can often be found in one single report. For example, one doctor, Édouard-Adolphe Duchesne, exclaimed in 1853 how, in the frst twenty years of French rule, the Algerian colonized had only adopted France's bad habits. According to him, the consumption of alcohol was foremost among them. He bemoaned that, when it came to the colonized sex workers whom he studied in his monograph, it was alcohol that guaranteed their ultimate corruption. In his eyes, these women had been introduced into the "refnements of debauchery" by European sex workers, but "Wine, rum and absinthe did the rest." He then went on to describe the habits of all the colonized, claiming: "Similar to our young children, who remember with such excellent memories the bad words that they hear, and who practice with such ease the bad examples that are given to them, it seems that the Muslim population [of Algeria] readily took from our civilization only that which is vicious and troubling" (Duchesne 1853, p. 83 f.). Duchesne clearly believed that the colonized consumed alcohol incorrectly (as he described the sex workers turning to spirits, such as rum and absinthe, rather than "hygienic" drinks, such as wine and beer) and that by starting to drink alcohol, they had copied the worst behavior of the French. He believed this had only begun after the colonization of the region by France. In the colonial worldview, this meant that, like French children, colonial subjects were still relatively unused to the substance. While Duchesne did not allude to the French teaching the colonized how to drink correctly, his framing of the situation clearly suggests that he believed France to have been neglectful in its duties as teacher and guardian by "allowing" the colonized to begin drinking alcohol.

# **Drinking Incorrectly**

Like Duchesne, many French authors were of the opinion that Muslims in the Maghreb favored strong spirits over wine. One doctor P. Remlinger, for example, wrote a 1912 article about the spread of alcoholism in Morocco, in which he claimed that "Arabs display a preference for absinthe, cognac, whisky and gin." According to him, this penchant for strong liquors was due to Europeans drinking "in general for the pleasure of drinking, despite the intoxication which may result from it," while "the Arab never or almost never drinks by taste. It is drunkenness that he looks for. The more easily it is obtained, the more satisfed he is. […] The ideal, evidently, would be for him to be drunk without drinking" (Remlinger 1912, p. 750). However, it was not just this preference towards particularly strong drinks that was seen to be problematic and deeply immature: in the eyes of the French observers, colonized Muslims also drank too much altogether. The French doctors and psychiatrists described the colonized as lacking rationality and moderation in all aspects of their lives, which led to the claim that the colonized were incapable of a normal, reasonable level of alcohol consumption as allegedly practiced by French adults.11 Directly after the passage cited above, Remlinger simply stated that "the Arab does not know any moderation in the consumption of alcoholic beverages." According to Remlinger, this fact made it easy to spot alcohol drinkers among the colonized Muslims. "He [the Moroccan Muslim] drinks or he does not, and if he drinks, he is drunk" (Remlinger 1912, p. 750).

A very similar sentiment about the lack of moderation in the colonized can be found in Pierre Pinaud's 1933 medical dissertation on alcoholism in Algeria. He explained this connection between excessive consumption and, so to speak, excessive non-consumption of alcohol, by writing that, upon starting the research for his dissertation, he was immediately struck by the "immoderation" of consumption among Algerian Muslims. He claimed: "With him [the Algerian Muslim], there are no half-measures: either he respects the wise precepts of the Qur'an and will abstain all his life from lifting any fermented beverage to his lips; or, if he starts drinking, he will soon exceed fair and reasonable measures. There are only very few Arabs who follow a rational and moderate consumption of alcohol akin to that of many Europeans" (Pinaud 1933, p. 11). Although they are not comparing the colonized to children in these passages, both Remlinger and Pinaud clearly interpret rationality and moderation as adult characteristics that Muslims lacked. The implicit conclusion of such statements is that, in the minds of these French commentators, colonized adults' alcohol consumption proved they were "not quite" adults.

Finally, the vocabulary used to describe this notion of the spread of alcohol being not an act of adult self-determination, but a mere consequence of the growing infuence of France in the region, provides further insight into how colonial publications both infantilized and dehumanized the colonized. In 1907, for example, the psychiatrist Camille-Charles Gervais stated in his dissertation on the treatment of mental patients in Algeria that "the Arab" is "easily won over by the vices of our civilization" (Gervais 1907, p. 47), before specifying alcohol as one of these vices. Similarly, Jean Coudray described this whole process in his 1914 medical dissertation about the state of surgery in Tunisia as follows: "Indeed, since the natives [started to] mingle with the life of the Europeans, since our moralizing civilization has fooded them with its benefts, they gradually let themselves be won over by the sweetness of absinthe imported from France" (Coudray 1914, p. 47). In both cases, the colonized could not help themselves: alcohol "won them over." In this context, the habit of drinking alcohol was framed as having greater agency than the Muslims who consumed it. We can therefore conclude that the alcohol consumption of the colonized was fully attributed, by popular belief, to the spread of French infuence and not to self-determination among the colonized. It was out of childlike obstinacy, French observers claimed, that this French infuence only included emulation of potentially detrimental French habits, such as alcohol consumption, and not what they judged to be nobler Western

The beverage choices of the colonized, their motivation for starting to drink, and the amounts they consumed were all infantilized by the colonial doctors and psychiatrists. Lack of agency, rationality, and moderation were all symptoms of the "mental infantilism" that the French doctors and psychiatrists of the École d'Alger diagnosed in all Muslims they encountered in the Maghreb. Antoine Porot himself defned the "mental infantilism" of normal Muslim adults in 1918 as being dominated, like the minds of European children, by "credulity and stubbornness," before adding that, unlike European children, they lacked both curiosity and a real "scientifc appetite" and were therefore only capable of arriving at simple conclusions (Porot 1918, p. 382 f.). These mechanisms of infantilizing the consumption of alcohol by the colonized allowed French observers to artifcially distance the colonized from the "French" habit they had adopted.

# **Immature Bodies**

ideals and behaviors.

While the French authors believed that most, if not all, of their compatriots consumed alcohol regularly, just like their parents and grandparents before them, the colonized were perpetually understood to have just been "won over" by alcohol, as seen in the quotes by Gervais and Coudray discussed above (Gervais 1907, p. 47; Coudray 1914, p. 47). Each generation of alcohol-drinking Muslims was described by French observers as being among the frst to have turned to alcohol. This also meant that each generation was treated as unused to alcohol and, consequently, as metaphorical children.

Based on this assumption, it was perpetually expected that the physical and emotional reactions of the colonized to alcohol drinking would be fundamentally different from those of the French. The aforementioned French psychiatrist Antoine Porot described in his 1918 article his personal experiences with Muslim Algerian soldiers during World War I by claiming: "*Alcoholism* has caused much havoc on these virgin organisms and these men, who, for the most part, have never tasted fermented beverages and liquors before [military] service, sometimes indulged in it with that immoderation specifc to the primitives" (Porot 1918, p. 383 f.). Porot's term "virgin organisms" implied that these soldiers had only been introduced to the pathological behavior of alcohol-drinking and alcoholism by copying the actions of the French soldiers, while also suggesting that their reaction to alcohol was biologically different from that of the non-virgin French. By additionally calling them "primitives," he turned their alcohol consumption into something inherently different from that of the French.

Antoine Porot expanded on this idea of alcohol consumption having biologically different effects on the North African soldiers versus other soldiers in a 1932 article. In this article, Porot and his student Don Côme Arrii repeated this articulation and then added: "The native is hypersensitive to alcohol because of his individual or ancestral non-habit [of drinking]" (Porot and Arrii 1932, p. 600), in other words, alcohol produced a stronger reaction in the colonized because they had only recently been "won over" by it. According to Porot and Arrii, this lack of generational acclimatization regarding alcohol had serious physical consequences. Those Muslims who started to drink lacked the supposed benefcial genetic experience of generations of alcohol-drinking ancestors, which made their reactions to alcohol supposedly more violent.

The same argument was also made by Doctor Pierre Pinaud in his 1933 medical dissertation, "Alcoholism amongst Arabs in Algeria." Pinaud described the considerable amount of anisette consumed by both European settlers and Algerian Muslims after the 1914 ban on absinthe, and added: "But the natives seem more particularly affected. This is, we believe, the result of a particular idiosyncrasy, and of a weaker resistance to this toxin combined with an exaggerated consumption" (Pinaud 1933, p. 27).12 It appears that Pinaud understood this "idiosyncrasy" and "weaker resistance"—as well as the "exaggerated consumption"—to be racial characteristics shared by all Algerian Muslims and marking them as different from Europeans. The weaker resistance towards alcohol that Pinaud alleged in this quote seems to be comparable to Porot's idea of Muslims as "virgin organisms" (Porot 1918, p. 383 f.).

As these quotes by Porot and Pinaud show, the less-than-adult status of the colonized was, for French observers, apparent in their physical reactions towards alcohol. It was claimed that their bodies reacted differently and did not tolerate alcohol as well as those of the French, in whose veins alcohol had fowed for generations. Judging by physical reactions to alcohol, both Porot and Pinaud ascribed to alcohol-drinking Muslims an evolutionary level beneath French adults. These descriptions of distinct physical reactions towards alcohol among the colonized are also reminiscent of French people's attitudes at the time toward alcohol consumption by their own children. Watered-down wine was often the recommended drink for children in order for their young bodies, not yet capable of handling alcohol in the same way as French adults, to become accustomed to alcohol.13 The childlike colonized, with their alleged predilection for strong drinks, had sidestepped this stage of acclimatization, which explained why, in the eyes of many French experts, alcoholism was so rampant among them.

# **Lessons on Drinking**

As mentioned above, the framing of Muslims' alcohol consumption patterns as deeply childlike also introduced the idea that the French, in their "role" as the adults in the colonial situation, needed to teach the colonized how to drink correctly. A report concerning a discussion of the Higher Council of Government in Algiers on June 28, 1911 demanded just that, calling for urgent measures against the uncontrolled consumption of aperitifs among both the colonizers and the colonized in Algeria. With reference to the colonized, the report stated: "They [King Absinthe and Queen Anisette] have penetrated, these deadly sovereigns, into the heretofore recalcitrant territory of Islam—in Mecca, alcohol has been found, smuggled in oil drums, and, in Algeria, islets of alcoholism have been formed. It is time for a cry for help and for measures to protect our indigenous populations [who are] a little childlike" (Saliège 1911/1912, p. 154). Two sets of measures were recommended in the report: either a strict prohibition of both absinthe and anisettes, or a combination of abstinence education, restriction of sales, and surveillance of places that sold alcohol (Saliège 1911/1912, p. 155 f.). However, neither option was fully implemented in Algeria.14 Had they been implemented, these measures would have been imposed by the French government against the express wishes of the settler population in Algeria, many of whom loudly protested against such actions, stating that they very much enjoyed their aperitifs. This report clearly framed France's role in all of this as having to be the adult in the room—imposing unwelcome restrictions on those unwilling or unable to voluntarily limit their own consumption. This report further stated that France had a duty to protect the European populations in Algeria from absinthe and anisette: "We have to protect, like an attentive mother, the young Algero-European race" (Saliège 1911/1912, p. 155), and thus keep them from destroying themselves.

France, the motherland, assumed the role of the parent and assigned the settler colony that of the child, which fts into standard romanticized conceptions of the relationship between citizen and state. France's attempts to restrict the consumption of aperitifs by the French settlers in Algeria should be interpreted as an act of parental care. In contrast, this same report described the relationship between the colonized and France in a slightly different way: "With respect to the natives, of whom we are, to a degree, the guardians, we need to have a deep and serious conception of their needs, of their faults, of the duties that both impose on us" (Saliège 1911/1912, p. 155). The French term *tuteurs*, which is translated here as guardians but also means mentors, demonstrates a rather different relationship between the French government and its colonized subjects—one of teacher and student rather than parent and child. It was out of duty, not love, that France had to step in with the proposed measures. Yet the French observers clearly believed that through legal measures, education, and surveillance, as well as by French settlers being better role models, the colonized would learn how to drink in a more mature and reasonable way. Like children, they had to be taught how to be more like adults.

# **Conclusion**

In conclusion, little evidence of adulthood or self-determination can be found in the colonial descriptions of the alcohol consumption of the colonized in the Maghreb. The narratives of the French colonial doctors and psychiatrists writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggested that, when it came to alcohol, every aspect of the drinking habits of the colonized was infuenced by factors outside their control, so to speak. Colonial subjects only started to drink because the French had introduced alcohol into their region; they only continued to drink because they were trying to imitate the French; character traits allegedly shared by the whole "race" pushed them towards particularly sweet and strong alcohol; their innate immoderation made them unable to control their consumption; their bodies themselves reacted uncontrollably to alcohol as a substance; and their only hope of moderating their own alcohol consumption was if they obediently followed strict measures enacted by their guardian, France.

This infantilization of the colonized by the medico-psychiatric profession is itself patronizing and problematic, but it also had political implications. If the colonized were childlike and without agency, even in minor, everyday issues, how could they ever hope to successfully govern themselves? How could the colonized ever hope for a change in the colonial situation, when their lack of modernity and rationality was proven "scientifcally" by their "mental infantilism"? These various reports by French doctors and psychiatrists, which framed the drinking habits of the colonized in the Maghreb as inherently childlike, must be placed into the wider feld of descriptive mechanisms that served to dehumanize and undermine the colonized in order to deny them their right to self-governance. The colonial doctors and psychiatrists did not dispute the humanity of the colonized in the Maghreb when they constantly referred to them as metaphorical children, but this framing certainly suggested that their childlikeness, their "mental infantilism," demonstrated that they were below the level of rational French adulthood.

All of these allusions to the childlikeness of Muslim alcohol drinkers should also be read within a broader discourse of the time that questioned the general ability of the colonized to "assimilate," that is, become French. Most of these colonial doctors and psychiatrists understood themselves as crucial cogs in the mechanism of France's wider *mission civilisatrice*. Their mindsets (and consequently their publications) were deeply infuenced by the central message of France's colonial project: France had a duty to modernize the colonies, to civilize the colonized under "its protection," and to guide them until they had reached a certain level of civilization. French colonial doctors and psychiatrists believed that they were helping France to civilize the colonized and to assimilate them into French civilization, but without any clear defnition of what exactly this process entailed. The colonial psychiatrists believed that they, with their expert knowledge of the minds of the colonized, were the ones to determine whether or not assimilation was possible. They interpreted the spread of alcoholism in the Maghreb as one of the main indicators of the inability of the colonized to assimilate, as proof that even when they began to adapt French habits, there were deleterious consequences. This, fnally, is how we must interpret the diagnosis of "mental infantilism": as a response by twentieth-century French colonial doctors and psychiatrists to the question of whether the North African colonized would ever be able to assimilate. By diagnosing all of them with "mental infantilism," these colonial experts clearly denied their ability to assimilate into French civilization.

Descriptions of the colonized in the Maghreb as suffering from "mental infantilism" provided, as a direct consequence of this devaluation process, a quasi-scientifc justifcation for the continuation of the French colonization of the region. It was obvious to the French readerships of these medical and psychiatric texts that this childlike state of the population as a whole justifed the region's colonization, as people on or even below the level of children could not be expected to effectually govern themselves.

In this chapter, alcohol drinking served as a case study for far larger political questions, as the alleged childlikeness that the colonial doctors and psychiatrists observed in the habits of the colonized showed both their inability to assimilate and that they could not be trusted to look after themselves and consequently needed "adults" to govern them. Hence, this narrative of the colonized Muslims behaving and reacting like children when it came to alcohol further proved, in the eyes of French authors, the innate superiority of the French.

#### **Endnotes**


somebody without a psychological problem) with European "retarded children". Wintringer 1955, p. 55.


occasionally did reports differentiate between the drinking habits of Arabs and Amazigh—for instance, the psychiatrist Camille-Charles Gervais, who stated in 1907 that Arabs were far more likely to become alcoholics (Gervais 1907, p. 47). Most of the reports on the alcohol consumption of the colonised, however, ignored ethnic and regional differences and described all of them simply as "musulmans", "indigènes" or even "mahométans". For examples of this colonial vocabulary chosen to describe the colonised, see: Bouquet 1909, p. 26 f., Remlinger 1912, p. 749, 752, Coudray 1914, p. 47, Pinaud 1933, p. 39.


# **References**


**Nina Studer** is a historian and arabist, and has published on gender and medical/psychiatric questions focusing on the French colonisation of Arabic-speaking regions. She wrote her PhD at the Universities of Zürich and Oxford on how French colonial psychiatrists described Muslim women in the Maghreb. Her PhD was published in 2016. She was a guest scholar at the research network "Re-Confgurations" and has since worked on the drinking habits of different groups in the colonial Maghreb, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Universität Bern (Switzerland), analysing the participation of women in protest movements in mandate Syria and Lebanon.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **National Memory in the Making: Gendered Re-Confgurations of Martyrdom in Post-revolutionary Tunisia**

# Perrine Lachenal

A large rose-tree stood near the entrance of the garden: the roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious thing, and she went nearer to watch them […]. "Would you tell me," said Alice, a little timidly, "why you are painting those roses?" (Carroll 1865).

Almost ten years after the Tunisian revolution, narratives of the event are still vividly debated. History textbooks are still awaiting new chapters, and memorials and monuments have yet to be inaugurated. The "transition period," associated with the disappointing process of transitional justice, seems to be extending longer and longer without clearly easing the memorial tensions related to the 2011-revolution. Competing narratives coexist and the disagreements are visible in public spaces all over Tunis. They are perceptible on the walls of the city: on the colorful murals that have stood the test of time since 2011 and under the corrective coat of white paint covering certain facades. They are personifed through names: some of them engraved on elegant marble stone in front of the Interior Ministry, others handwritten on banners waved in demonstrations every January throughout Tunisia. They are represented by bodies: proudly posing, victorious, on billboards in downtown Tunis or shown injured or dead on posters displayed during gatherings of associations of victims' families. In the fght over the revolution's political meaning, images and terminology are crucial and are strategically used to play one narrative against another. Any post-revolutionary society must deal with the crucial question of the authority to recount what has happened. Who should have the power to choose the words with which the history will be nar-

P. Lachenal (\*)

Tunis, Tunisia

e-mail: lachenal@staff.uni-marburg.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021 R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_10

rated and the names and faces who will symbolize that history? In this chapter, I will focus on the re-confgurations of the uses of the word "martyr" (*shahīd*) and of associated graphical representations. I seek to analyze the processes through which, in post-revolutionary Tunisia, some dead are offcially and publicly honored while some others remain invisible and doomed to oblivion. Drawing from a gender perspective, I shall show that rival masculinities each of them associated with different political and moral meanings, compete within the national memory and shape the strategic labeling of "martyrs of the revolution" (*shuhadāʾ al-thawra*).

After some introductory comments about masculinity studies, the "Arab Spring," and some methodological remarks about my own position as researcher in the feld, I will describe ways in which the issue of martyrs took on major political importance in post-revolutionary Tunisia. Families and local collectives frst used the label before authorities took charge of the project of listing the "true" martyrs of the revolution, providing an illustrative case of the selective processes through which national narratives are constructed and implying the marginalization of subaltern experiences. In public spaces and on offcial memorials, "martyrs" appeared to have no faces besides those of uniformed policemen and soldiers, whom offcial institutions portray as powerful, muscular, and heavily-armed paragons of masculinity.

# **Arab Masculinities in Question**

There is no need to bemoan the lack of research in gender studies about the 2011 revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Some recent academic works demonstrate that sex categories are social constructs and privileged tools for organizing and performing specifc social orders; thus, these structures help us to better understand the re-confgurations in the MENA region since 2011 (Ryzova 2011; Ghannam 2013; Salime 2015; Kréfa 2016). Yet Tunisian society largely remains understudied in the numerous special issues, papers, and conferences devoted to the topic; the underrepresentation of the Tunisian case among academic work on the MENA region is a preexisting tendency and in fact nothing new (Dakhlia 2011). Of the few insightful papers written on the 2011 Tunisian revolution from a gender perspective (Khalil 2014; Kraidy 2016; Kréfa 2016; Gronemann 2017), an even smaller number deals with masculinity. Existing studies give the impression that gender is synonymous with "women." This classical misconception, as Maya Mikdashi argues in a recent piece published in the online magazine *Jadaliyya,* has damaging effects: it creates a false dichotomy between gender and politics, reinforcing "a framework within which sexual or gendered violence happens to women and sexual minorities while political violence happens to men" (2017). Some analyses describe the uprising as an occasion for Tunisian men to prove their "virility" and show the whole world that they are "real men" (Piot 2011). Journalists report that Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation triggered the Tunisian revolution, was supposedly slapped by a female police offcer before he set himself on fre in December 2010, interpreting this sequence of events as an illustration of the over-importance of "honor" for Tunisian men (Belhassine 2011) without mentioning the social and political crisis Tunisia was facing at that time. Whether or not this famous slap ever occurred—it likely did not (Larguèche 2011)—this approach demonstrates the prevalence of the "masculinity crisis" interpretative frame with respect to Arab societies (Amar 2011). Masculinity studies has fortunately shown that its academic and critical ambitions are more sophisticated than simply corroborating stereotypes about Arab men (Inhorn 2012). Researchers involved in that feld follow feminist scholars' invitation not only to pay attention to the power relations between men and women but also to question the hierarchies within each category. They examine men's experiences and develop intersectional analyses that take into account criteria besides gender, such as class, race, sexual orientation, or age (Crenshaw 1991; Connell 1987; Ghannam 2013). "Multiple masculinities coexist in relations of power, contestation, and negotiation," Maya Mikdashi asserts, outlining what she considers to be one of the major premises of masculinity studies (2017). Following these approaches, I will explore the gendered dimension of narratives linked to the revolution, investigating the processes through which different models of masculinity have been framed and re-confgured in post-2011 Tunisia. My main argument is that they do indeed inform the political challenges faced by the post-revolutionary Tunisian society.

# **Fieldwork: Investigating a Polarized Context**

This chapter draws on empirical research conducted in Tunis during several stays in the feld between 2016 and 2018. In addition to observational work conducted at political meetings and demonstrations, I interviewed twenty people representing the main groups engaged in the debates regarding the public recognition of the "martyrs of the revolution," including representatives of martyrs' families, human rights associations, political parties, transitional justice institutions, and governmental commissions.

As a researcher, I have been affected by my feldwork, just as I have infuenced it myself. Acknowledging this reciprocal dynamic is one of the premises of social anthropology (Favret-Saada 1977). In the feld, my own gender, experiences, and emotions constituted sources of knowledge, and I particularly paid attention to the ways my informants used my presence, understood my requests and interpreted my interactions with them. Despite my frequent clarifcations, I was generally perceived as a French journalist whose imagined objectives varied depending on the position of my interlocutors. The institutional representatives saw me as an opportunity to demonstrate their efforts to overcome challenges of transitional justice for an international audience; political leaders tried to defend their own strategies and alliances; human rights activists frequently suggested that there were more important issues to focus on; and members of associations for martyrs' families saw me as a potential ally—my gender drove them to call me "sister" or "daughter"—in their fght against national amnesia, expecting me to publicize their struggle in Europe. Gaining families' trust and collecting their stories under such conditions often made me feel uncomfortable, and I repeatedly confessed that I seriously doubted my research could have any positive impact on their situation. As a researcher investigating the issue of the "martyrs of the revolution," whether I liked it or not, I became a part of the debate. My image was invested with suspicions and hopes. My picture was posted on Facebook walls, combined with different public and private comments. One of my informants had a dream about me and her deceased brother, while another tried to extract details of what other interviewees had told me. All sides warned me about the risk of the others manipulating me. In any feld, there is no such thing as a neutral position and this is probably even truer in a polarized context such as the environment I found in post-revolutionary Tunisia.

# **The Early Days of the Revolution: The Impulsive Designation of "Martyrs"**

The Tunisian upheaval started with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi-Bouzid in December 2010, and his death a few days later. As demonstrations multiplied in several Tunisian cities and social movements intensifed in December 2010 and January 2011, the death toll increased. Repression was especially brutal in the marginalized governorates deep inside the country, where the confict began. The longer the list of victims grew, the more the commemoration of the "martyrs of the revolution" became visible in public spaces all over Tunisia. From the frst days of mobilization, memorials were erected in city centers to honor local "martyrs." Streets, schools, and squares were spontaneously renamed after some of them, usually in their families' neighborhoods where they had lived (Fig. 1).

These commemoration processes, including the use of the label "martyrs," reached a national level in March 2011, when the Tunisian postal service released a stamp bearing Bouazizi's face, commemorating his "martyrdom" and the "revolution of dignity" (*thawrat al-karāma*)1 (Fig. 2).

In downtown Tunis, a square previously known as the "Seventh of November," the date Ben Ali's regime came to power, was renamed "Fourteenth of January, 2011," the day he resigned. The celebration of the uprising implied the material destruction of the previous symbolic system, a phenomenon Bernhard Giesen describes in his major piece on martyrs and heroes (2004, p. 34). In a few weeks, one could observe Ben Ali's portraits disappearing from the walls of shops, administrations, and restaurants, sometimes replaced with faces of local "martyrs."

If the vast scientifc literature devoted to "martyrdom" insists on the polysemy of the category (Mayeur Jaouen 2002; Verdery 2004; Blunden 2006; Buckner and Khatib 2014; Bozarslan 2015; Mittermaier 2015), the ways it was used in revolutionary Tunisia in fact suggest clear nationalist and secular dimensions.2 Indeed, the word "martyrs" (*shuhadāʾ*) was usually followed by the phrases "of the revolution" or "of the nation" (*al-thawra*/*al-waṭan*). This specifc use is not surprising since the word is historically ingrained in the Tunisian national vocabulary

**Fig. 1** "Martyrs' Square," Gabes, April 2016 (P. Lachenal)

**Fig. 2** Stamp dedicated to the "martyr" Mohamed Bouazizi. March 11. Screenshot from the author

(Bendana 2018), especially since the pro-independence struggles. The political function of the martyrs of the "Arab springs" nevertheless differed slightly from that of their predecessors, as Elisabeth Buckner and Lina Khatib assert (2014): the 2011 martyrs were used to unify a people against an oppressive regime, not to construct a collective identity against a foreign occupier. For the family members I interviewed, and in line with what Ieva Zakarevičiūtė (2015) witnessed in 2011 Egypt, the word "martyrs" served as a common reference point with the capacity to lend meaning to violent and unfair disappearances, integrating them into a national liberating narrative. Using the word "martyr," I was told, implied recognizing that the person did not die in vain but for a cause, and that his or her death ought to be collectively honored.3 The religious dimension of the "martyr" category was rarely invoked during my feldwork, although, in intimate spaces and informal discussions, my informants sometimes wished that God would accept the deceased as a "martyr" and offer them post-mortem rewards and peace.4

# **A Strategic Cause on the Post-Revolutionary Stage**

In the months that followed the fall of Ben Ali, the issue of the "martyrs of the revolution" acquired major political importance. The frst trials of people accused of killing demonstrators were accompanied by both national and international media coverage and street gatherings. Press conferences had to be held in very large hotel conference rooms to accommodate crowds of journalists, and tribunals did not have enough space to welcome all the "martyrs'" families wanting to attend the adjudications. "Martyrs of the revolution" became a strategic source of legitimacy for those who wanted to play a role during the so-called "transitional" period. They served as a rhetorical tool and from 2011 on, any public speech regarding the revolution started and ended by referring to them and reminding listeners of the obligation to honor their memories and sacrifces.5 An activist told me jokingly that, in 2011, "It looked very good to appear among the martyrs' families and to explicitly support their cause. Each political group wanted to have its own martyr!".6 This quotation refers to the question of "ownership" of martyrs and their images. "It is not always obvious who 'owns' a martyr," Andy Blunden argues; "A social movement or institution is going to be able to claim 'ownership' of a martyr if it shares the icons and symbols of the subject" (2006, p. 51). Contradicting interpretations could challenge each other, as was the case for Mohamed Bouazizi, who was sometimes incorrectly presented as an "unemployed graduate" in order to strengthen the demands of this specifc demographic group (Desorgues 2013). Other appropriation attempts were aimed at the family members of martyrs. The sister of a "martyr" told me that as soon as she decided to begin wearing a hijab in 2011, she was approached by several religion-based groups who offered to take on the case of her brother's death.7, 8 More generally, families had to distinguish potential allies from profteers who tried, as I was told, to "make money off the cause"9 and to transform the martyrs into a business, as Kinda Chaib (2007) describes in great detail for the case of Lebanon.

During the period that followed Ben Ali's resignation, several associations of martyrs' families were established in Tunisia. One of them was Lan Nansākum (We Won't Forget You), which developed into a powerful mobilizing force and soon became a major participant in the debate over the "martyrs of the revolution"' cause. It distinguished itself with its creativity, mobilization strategies, and political statements. This was especially remarkable considering that almost none of its members had been politicized prior to 2011 (Mekki 2017). The association organized regular marches in Tunis, occupying the front lines of demonstrations carrying the portraits of their deceased relatives. Mothers dressed in black were particularly visible among them.10 The demands were clear: the truth about the people's repression had to be voiced and the individuals responsible for the killings had to be judged and punished, both those who had issued the orders to open fre on the demonstrators and those who had obeyed said orders.

# **Suspicious Masculinities: In Search of the "Fake" Martyrs of the Revolution**

Given the sensitivity of the topic, offcial measures were soon taken regarding the "martyrs of the revolution." In October 2011, a decree was published in an effort to regulate the ways in which post-revolutionary Tunisia would approach them (Ben Ghozi 2012). The decree's frst fve articles focus on the "national memory" and on the collective duty to honor the people who died during the revolution with memorial sites. The decree also introduced the project of publishing an offcial list of the "martyrs of the revolution." Having the names of their relatives on that list would be a prerequisite for the families to beneft from some compensation measures. This project of listing the "martyrs" immediately appeared problematic since it implied that, among the 338 people who were reported dead during the revolution,11 not all of them would be recognized as such. Samir Dilou, as the head of the Ministry of Human Rights and Transitional Justice, asserted this in 2012, publicly expressing doubts about the validity of the frst list and the veracity of some victims' stories. A few years later, when I asked the head of the General Committee devoted to the "martyrs" about the necessity of creating such a list, she expressed a similar suspicion mentioning that "not everyone told the truth" during the initial investigation into repression by the police and the army:12

There are people who died, but not in the context of the revolution, and their families would like to beneft from the social advantages accorded to the martyrs' families! … This revision will take some time because we have to check every single case in order to identify the *fake martyrs*. I understand the families' impatience; it has already been fve years since the revolution occurred and the names of their children are still not public. For the families of the *true martyrs*, this must be disappointing. [Emphasis added].

Later on in the same conversation, my interviewee once again stressed the importance of identifying the "true martyrs" and removing the names of those who do not deserve the title, calling them not only liars but also "thugs": "We have to tell the truth and who the *true heroes* are. There is no way thugs' names should appear on the list" [emphasis added].

If the decree specifed the composition of the commission in charge of the martyrs list, which included representatives of civil society and of seven ministries, it remained silent about the concrete criteria according by which a person should or should not be recognized as a "martyr of the revolution." Only the chronological criterion is publicly known: a "martyr of the revolution" should have died between December 17, 2010 and the February 28, 2011. The few interviews I conducted with some members of the commission did not help me to better identify the other criteria. Indeed, the selection process seemed largely to be shaped by the commission members' subjective perceptions of heroism and heroic masculinities. For example, the circumstances of death played a major role in the selection process and it seemed problematic, as I was explained, to recognize as "martyrs" any young men who were killed while attacking the police or who died during a fre at the prison in which they were detained.13 Actors' social status determined the ways their violence and political commitment could be publicly depicted, and the meaning of their death. Beyond the political dimension, which one could have reasonably expected in the context of a revolution, it seemed that ultimately the social actors' "good morals" or lack thereof was the decisive argument determining whether or not they would be labeled "martyrs." If the young men who died while in jail or fghting the police were not publicly remembered as "martyrs," it is because they embodied models of masculinity that were suspicious due to a lower class status. Because their social and gender performances were framed as immoral and violent, and their actions were perceived as threats to the social order by those in charge of determining the offcial revolution narratives, their names would remain unknown and their faces invisible.

The focus on the morality of the "martyrs" was particularly visible in the discourses surrounding the cases of the many prisoners who died in 2011 during the destruction and burning of their prisons. These accounted for almost a quarter of the casualties of the Tunisian uprising.14 As various people in charge of generating the "fnal" list told me in interviews, it seemed problematic to publicly assign prisoners, who were probably sent to jail for committing crimes, the prestigious status of martyrs. The same reservation was expressed regarding the young men who were killed at the margins of the protests. In these cases, the disqualifcation was often based on the probable immorality of the youngsters, embodied through the suspicion that they had died while drinking. When I met him in his offce, in September 2016, one of the members of the Bouderbala commission explained to me:

Someone who was reported dead, burned alive inside the *Magasin général*, a supermarket, at midnight, was not expressing any political discontent—in the middle of the night, in a supermarket, in the spirits section! (*laughs*) With someone who died outside the trade union center or the Interior Ministry, it is totally different.15

Using gendered rhetoric as a tool, the authorities contributed to removing entire social groups from offcial Tunisian history without having to acknowledge any embarrassing exclusion process. Their choices were justifed through terms such as "troublemakers," "drinkers," "vandals" and other references to problematic and suspicious models of masculinity.

# **Subaltern Voices and Alternative Narratives**

Confronting the state's attempts to monopolize the public making of martyrs in post-revolutionary Tunisia, other narratives were constructed and circulated through unoffcial channels and family networks. The more visible the suspicion regarding the "good" morality of the young men who died during the revolution became, the more the "martyrs' families" publicly stressed the political dimension of their relatives' deaths. Intentionally or unintentionally, they argued, those young men died while participating in the Tunisian revolution and took part, albeit indirectly, in its successful ending: the resignation of the former President. Contesting the top-down nature of the labelling of "martyrs," "martyrs' families" resisted the depoliticization and the moralization processes of the revolutionary subaltern experiences. The interviews I conducted with some of them stressed the decisive nature of the rhetorical dimension, expressing concerns about how the Tunisian revolution was starting to be publicly depicted. Terminological debates had clear political meanings, as I was told; for example, the word "victim" was strongly contested by the "wounded of the revolution." According to Bachir, a 28-year-old man who was seriously burned in 2011 and partly lost the use of his hands, being called a "victim" is insulting:16

I am one of the "wounded of the revolution" (*jarḥā al-thawra*). To say "wounded" is to recognize that we were actors of the revolution, we were fghters who got injured. But "victim" (*ḍakhiyya*) is not a political category. The word is pejorative; it implies passivity.

Bachir's words expressed the opposition of agency versus victimhood, defending the political rationality and intentionality of working young men who took part, sometimes violently, in the movement against the previous regime and were injured or killed.

These alternative narratives had graphic translations. Martyrdom's political dimension was for example aesthetically asserted through the portraits "martyrs' families" and relatives carried with them and waved in public events, illustrating the determination to link the killings of their relatives to the revolution. Such portraits could be seen as tools to build a "durable biography," an expression used by Farha Ghannam about the "technologies of immortality" aiming to shape the public afterlives of martyrs (2015, p. 640). The following picture, taken in January 2018 during a gathering of martyrs' families, the face of Qaïs Al-Mazlini, killed on the 13th of January 2011, appears on an expressive background: an image of a demonstration on Bourguiba Avenue, a Tunisian fag and the sentence "Tunisia is free" (Fig. 3).

These symbolic references are tools to engrain the individual story into the national one, if there was any doubt about that connection. Taoufc Haddad identifes similar aesthetic choices when analyzing a large corpus of posters depicting Palestinian martyrs (2016): it is common for the families or the poster designer to make the deceased person appear as an armed fghter, even if he was not, so as to include him in the core of the national struggle.

**Fig. 3** "The martyr Qaïs Al-Mazlini. Martyrized on the 13th January 2011″. Families' exhibition, Tunis, January. (Foto by author)

In post-revolutionary Tunisia, the state was not the only actor to build and broadcast martyrs' iconographies. The role of non-state actors in the production of alternative narratives and collective memory is partly based on practical considerations such as the democratization of access to technologies for designing and printing. If disagreements have always plagued memorial practices, this recent technological shift has given them exceptional visibility (de Georges 2013), and has demonstrated major re-confgurations in the public making of martyrdom.

# **"Martyrs of the Nation": The Consecration of Militarized Masculinities**

While families continued to request the release of an inclusive list remembering their own children as "martyrs of the revolution," other kinds of martyrs were being publicly identifed. Their faces were displayed by the Tunisian army and police in public spaces and their names carved on commemorative plaques: these were casted as the "martyrs of the nation" (*shuhadāʾ al-waṭan*), meaning the members of the Tunisian security forces who lost their lives not only during the 2011 revolution but also in the years that followed. The terrorist threat that emerged in the country in the wake of 2011 and the concomitant state of emergency were incorporated into the process of re-confguration and securitization of the national narratives, paving the way for the celebration of martyrs from the police and military. Progressively, uncertainty seemed to have helped set the stage for celebrating victorious and heavily armed masculinity models that were perceived as reassuring.

In 2016, the name of the governmental commission devoted to the "martyrs and wounded of the revolution" was signifcantly extended to include the words "and of the terrorist attacks." Madjouline Cherni, a sister of a soldier killed in a 2013 terrorist attack, was chosen to direct it. Since 2011, intensive campaigns have glorifed the commitment of the security forces to the Tunisian nation. Advertisements popped up all over Tunis. The picture in Fig. 4, which was distributed mostly in 2017, illustrates the process just described.

By mixing together different repertoires, applying the well-known slogan "Dégage"—an iconic fxture of the "Arab Spring"—in reference to "terrorism," the fght against terrorism was integrated into the story of the revolution itself and military "heroes" were placed at its forefront. Doing so seemed to absorb

**Fig. 4** You are the hero. We fully support you. Terrorism "Dégage" Mohamed V Avenue, downtown Tunis, September 2017. (Photo by the author)

the revolutionary moment into state hegemonic narratives. These kinds of catchy advertisements contributed to the processes of depoliticization and securitization—as well as virilization—that attended the commemoration of the Tunisian revolution. According to Daniel Gilman, a state's ability to build and glorify conservative martyr fgures, such as those embodying order and security, mainly depends on a prior depoliticization process that is necessary to "set the stage" (2015, p. 693).

# **Conclusion**

By determining those who should be offcially honored and those who should be forgotten, drawing on gendered repertoires of morality and respectability, the Tunisian state sought to frame not only the history but also the meaning of the revolution, and the reasons why it occurred. In this chapter, I have shown that the public designation of "martyrs" infuences how the 2011 uprising is narrated and understood, but also, more importantly, affects its political direction. Narrating and labeling is never only about the past. Behind the objective of writing history lies the question of the present and future exercise of power.

As I complete the fnal version of this paper in August 2019, the fnal list of the "martyrs of the revolution" has still not been published in Tunisia, eight years after Ben Ali resigned and several months after the responsible commission delivered it to the government. The issue of the "martyrs of the revolution" obviously remains delicate. Omitted deaths continue to haunt the post-revolutionary society through the mobilization of their families, relentlessly weakening offcial attempts to standardize revolutionary narratives.

#### **Endnotes**


them being her seemingly problematic refusal to wear a headscarf. Some of her photos were manipulated to cover her hair, bringing her appearance in line with Egyptian Islamic standards and enabling social groups to use her portrait (Armbrust 2013).


# **References**


Mekki, Ali. 2017. *Lan nansākum*. Sfax: Dar Samed.


**Perrine Lachenal** is a social anthropologist researching in gender studies. She obtained her PhD in 2015 from Aix-Marseille University (France). Her thesis addresses the gender and class dimensions of the Egyptian revolution, through ethnographic study conducted between 2011 and 2012 in self-defence trainings for women that have emerged and multiplied in recent years in Cairo. She then worked as a post-doc researcher within the research network "Re-Confgurations" at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Her post-doctoral research project investigates contemporary representations of martyrdom in Egypt and Tunisia in order to clarify how communities morally rationalize violence and justice after 2011.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Teachers' Resistance to Educational Change and Innovations in the Middle East and North Africa: A Case Study of Tunisian Universities**

Sihem Hamlaoui

# **Materials and Methods**

The research was conducted linearly and non-linearly and was comprised of several phases. The research employs a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches: questionnaires (which include both open-ended and closed-ended questions), interviews with students, teachers, and e-learning decision-makers in the country. The frst stage of the research was a thorough review of the literature. The second phase of the research design employed surveys with more specifc and targeted questions and considered various variables to measure the extent to which ICT is currently applied and how students and teachers perceive teaching and learning with ICT.

# **Populations**

A total of 250 responses were returned by the participants. The target population included students from the selected locations in Tunisia. With the aim of collecting quantitative data, all students were invited to answer the questionnaire, regardless of their feld of study, age, institution, or education level. (Thus, all students who were enrolled in a bachelor's, masters, or PhD programme could participate.) Likewise, teachers and instructors, regardless of their discipline, status, experience level, or location, were invited to complete the survey. This study was

Marburg, Germany

S. Hamlaoui (\*)

e-mail: hamlaous@staff.uni-marburg.de

conducted by using data collected from major stakeholders' teachers and students at 13 universities in Tunisia in the period from 2016 to 2018.

# **Results and Discussion**

Problems of re-confguration and reform are not a new phenomenon. In 1513, Machiavelli wrote in *The Prince* "There is nothing more diffcult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things" (cited in Nisbet 1974, p. 32). Correspondingly, Seffrin et al. (2009) defne a "barrier" as "an event or condition that hinders the adoption decision" (p. 62). Based on the fndings of questionnaires and interviews, some major barriers were identifed regarding ICT implementation in Tunisia's higher education. In fact, the Tunisian ICT policy faces impediments ranging from personal/ individual attitudes to more general barriers related to the entire system of education and the ICT policies of universities, the Ministry of Higher Education, and the country as a whole. Studying the factors that may hinder the use of ICT in education may help teachers to overcome these impediments and become successful technology adopters in the future (Bingimlas 2009). In order to identify the impediments encountered by teachers and students when integrating ICT into the country's higher education institutions, I asked a group of faculty members (teachers, and staff) and students about the factors that may encourage a teacher to use ICT more frequently: "What would help you to use ICT more?" The collated responses are illustrated in Fig. 1.

According to the fndings, most teachers have entry-level knowledge on how to use ICT (open computer, connect to internet, surf, read materials online or download them, use social media, etc.). In the following, I will consider what some studies refer to as "extrinsic barriers" (barriers that are related to organizations as opposed to individuals) and "intrinsic barriers" (those which are related to teachers, administrators, and individuals).

# **Extrinsic Barriers**

One factor impeding the implementation of ICT in higher education begins at the university and government policy level and is related to infrastructure and funding (cost of hardware and software). This frst problem, which almost all developing countries face, is the paucity of fnancial resources and the scarcity or

**Fig. 1** What would help teachers to better use ICT?

out-datedness of equipment and resources. These factors are generally beyond the control of teachers and faculty members.

#### *The Insuffcient Number of Operational Computers and Peripherals*

Many studies have pointed out that the scarcity or inadequacy of ICT infrastructure represents the main barrier to ICT adaptation. According to an ICT expert in Tunisia, infrastructural facilities such as computers, laptops, smartphones, electricity supply, and broadband connection, etc., are highly inadequate and not affordable to the middle class or people below the poverty line. Only private universities are focusing on ICT in higher education; state universities are unable to adopt it due to resource constraints (W. M. ICT expert personal online communication, 15 February 2017). Many teachers and students in the survey deemed the lack of computer rooms and the insuffcient number of computers to be barriers to using ICT in teaching and learning: "It would be more convenient to have computers in class, not only in the computer room" (BA student, Sousse personal online communication, 12 February 2017). A teacher in the same institution complained:

It is impossible to always move the whole class to the computer room. First, because the students always outnumber the number of desktop computers available, and second, we do not have enough time during the session (50 to 60 min). (Teacher of English, Sousse personal online communication, 12 February 2017).

Most institutions have ICT peripherals such as keyboards or printers, which are based mainly in the computer rooms. However, teachers, students, and faculty members complained about the insuffcient amount of peripheral technology relative to the large number of students and teachers. At some institutions, there is no clear policy for ICT integration. This has led to unclear goals and processes and a lack of management when it comes to plans and the usage of existing ICT resources. A dean of a university in the capital said:

I can admit that most universities have the equipment needed to start implementing technology in teaching activities, but there is clear mismanagement of resources and facilities; in each university, there should be someone responsible for the management of the whole process. (K. H. personal online communication, 12 February 2017).

There is inadequate ICT infrastructure, including computer hardware, software, and internet access, at higher education institutions. Furthermore, there is an almost total absence of ICT materials in class, apart from overhead projectors, speakers, and teachers' private computers.

#### *Lack of Trained Technical Staff*

The lack of trained teachers is another challenge hindering developing countries from adopting ICT in their education systems (Gulati 2008; Kozma 1999). Most staff and faculty members interviewed agree that there is a lack of qualifed ICT personnel and skilled human resources. Most institutions lack computer-literate instructors and ICT experts to support and manage the integration of ICT in the learning and teaching process. That being said, most teachers answered "yes" to the survey question "Do you fnd ICT assistance in your institution when you need it?" However, when I asked this question again in a number of interviews, most teachers and faculty members admitted that "ICT assistance" is simply understood to be basic technical assistance related to fxing everyday connection problems related to the computer rooms or devices (e.g., video projectors). Even at the institutions that have settled equipment, some teachers stated that they can barely fnd skilled assistants to help them work with available materials.

The process of ICT integration in any teaching activity is based on the staff and faculty members' knowledge and skills. It is not easy to fnd skilled staff in my institution who can help. (L. L. a teacher from Nabeul, personal online communication 12 February 2017).

In order to apply ICT in the classroom, faculty members need specialists and ICT assistants who are competent and who can fulfll the minimum requirements of teaching staff at Tunisian institutions.

#### *Lack of Adequate Training Facilities for Teachers and Instructors*

In Tunisia, the training facilities and programs for teachers and staff are still inadequate, according to the interviewees. In 2002, the Virtual University of Tunisia (VUT), a public university, was established. In collaboration with IBM,1 it offers online training programs for teachers only. One of its objectives was to offer 20% of all national courses online. This goal was never reached because there is no clearly defned strategy to encourage faculty members to adopt or use distance learning. Indeed, faculty members are very reluctant to give online courses, and the number of online courses is still limited. A VUT teacher and ICT expert said, Some institutions showed interest in our programs and courses, but still there are no clear strategies or engagement efforts. Most teachers are hesitant and reluctant. Faculty member VUT personal online communication, 12 February 2017).

#### *Large Class Sizes*

Large classes are also one of the most commonly cited barriers that hinder teachers from using educational ICT. Teachers mentioned that implementing ICT in their classes requires a small number of students to test the process and the results. There is the idea that the larger the class is, the harder the teaching process will be, especially when the teaching is based only on lectures and face-to-face communication in a class session. A larger class may result in a less interactive and collaborative session in which the teacher talks and students listen and take notes. According to the teachers I interviewed, 50% spent the majority of the lesson time lecturing, with little time spent on practical issues, presentations by students, discussions, or group work. This does not seem to be an ideal situation for the implementation of ICT. Another teacher commented in the survey:

To start to implement ICT in my classes, I would prefer to deal with a small number of students to see how well they are able to use it and what kind of results can be achieved. I have 43 students in most of my sessions. Do you think it is easy to implement something new and evaluate the process? (L. L. a teacher from Nabeul, personal online communication, 14 February 2017).

#### *Didactic Issues*

Most teachers do not have the competencies and skills to manage and plan an ICT-based session or ICT-based materials. This is largely because they are used to a face-to-face teaching methodology that is used in lectures and is always teacherand text-based. From a didactic perspective, some teachers think that ICT use distracts students and causes them to lose concentration. This leads them to say that they would never use technology because they fear they may lose control of their class. Other teachers complain that the heavy workload and limited time do not allow them to implement ICT and that they prefer to use a textbook. One faculty member said:

The system barely encourages creativity or any kind of change. Lectures are based on knowledge transmission of a large amount of information—Chap. 1 to Chap. 9—from a teacher who has been doing the same things for years. (A. L., a faculty member Gabes, personal online communication, 12 February 2017).

Another major problem is the variability in curricula at Tunisian institutions, meaning that students do not receive the same quality of education. Hence, education policy and traditional curricula have to be revised for today's needs.

### *Inconsistent ICT Policies and the Infuence of Lobbies on Digital Strategy Planning*

Tunisia has a plan for ICT integration, which includes large projects and a good strategy, "Digital Tunisia 2018." However, economic and political pressure and crises during recent years have obstructed progress due to the prioritization of issues such as fghting terrorism. The changing political landscape and changes in the Tunisian Ministry of Higher Education have affected the implementation of the policy. Another concern is that the ICT sector in Tunisia is overrun by business and politics. In 2015, the frst meeting of the Strategic Council for Digital Economy (CSEN) was held, headed by the Prime Minister Habib Essid. The role of the council was to adopt and deploy new projects related to the National Strategic Plan (PNS) and "Digital Tunisia 2018." However, the council did not include representatives from civil society or ICT actors, who are meant to play a crucial role in the implementation of the National Strategic Plan for a Digital Tunisia. According to Ben Youssef, the Ministry of Communication Technologies and Digital Economy and the CSEN, which is also monitoring the National Strategic Plan and selecting experts and representatives from the private sector (2015), represent ICT actors in the public sector.2

#### *Political Factors*

Tunisia has always attempted to put education at the forefront and has allocated suffcient funds for the educational sector, with the aim of using ICT as a tool for improving education. This can be seen from the major budgetary allocations. However, since 2011, Tunisia has witnessed many political, economic, and social changes, which have had signifcant implications for the education sector. The share of the national budget spent on higher education and research decreased from 6.9% in 2010 to 4.8% in 2015. Decision-makers and offcials attributed that to the fact that the Ministry of Higher Education and Research has been integrated into the former Ministry of New Technologies and Communication, leaving both ministries with less money. Meanwhile, the combined budgets of the Tunisian Ministries of Defence and Interior increased by 15% in 2015 (Jamel 2015, para. 3). The additional funding went to army infrastructure and the security forces. In an interview with El Fanar Media, the former Minister of Finance, Ben Hammouda, said, "We raised the defence and security sectors' budgets by 15 percent since we all agree that terrorism constitutes a major challenge to the state" (Jamel 2015, para. 8). Apart from addressing terrorism, Tunisia is also attempting to combat the violence coming from the border with its instable neighbour, Libya. According to Salem Labyedh, a former Tunisian education minister, "Limitations on the budget will hurt efforts to improve educational infrastructure. The budget for higher education will barely cover wages, much less support innovation or scientifc research" (Jamel 2015, para. 12). The education sector's reprioritization stems from a lack of political will, as has been observed elsewhere: "The most notable of the barriers to the use of ICT in education in developing countries seems to be the political will of the people in the corridors of power" (Sharma 2003, p. 1).

# **Intrinsic Barriers**

One of the frst and most important—as well as common—barriers to integrating ICT into higher education is teachers' perceptions and attitude towards these technologies. Factors infuencing teachers' negative attitudes towards using ICT in teaching are a lack of time, their own lack of ICT skills, and a lack of confdence in using new technology in front of a class.

#### *Teachers' Resistance to Change*

Teachers' attitudes and inherent resistance to change are a signifcant barrier to their ICT use in education (Cox et al. 2000; Becta 2004; Schoepp 2005). Teachers, especially those who have more experience, display a certain resistance to switching from a traditional text-based didactic method to a technology-based teaching method. I found out that some teachers are either skeptical of the effectiveness of the new methodology or do not have enough confdence in using digital resources. This is related to teachers' age and/or years of experience. I found that teachers with more teaching experience are more resistant to change; those who are used to the "chalk and talk" methodology are not motivated to try to integrate ICT in their teaching. An ICT expert in the MENA region said:

Adopting ICT in higher education is challenging from both pedagogical and technical points of view. Not only in developing countries, but also in other countries. Many teachers resist the adoption of ICT in their classes and many students do not know how to adapt to it. (W. M. online communication on *ResearchGate*).

An emotional resistance to change may not in itself be the (main) underlying reason for teachers' reluctance to use ICT in teaching, but instead can be seen as an indicator of other explanatory factors—that is, teachers may have legitimate reasons pertaining to other barriers described in this section.

#### *Length of Teaching Experience*

The longer a teacher has been teaching, the more confdent and satisfed he or she tends to be with the methodology he or she has been using. Teachers with more years of experience seem more resistant to any kind of change. Whenever their university updates its policies or makes an effort towards ICT integration, that initiative is always met with slow uptake from teachers. Teachers appear to see no need to change or question their current professional methodology, resulting in their lack of acceptance of the use of ICT in their teaching. Veteran teachers are considered a real hindrance to the process of innovation in education.

#### *Lack of Competence and Digital Confdence*

Becta (2004) considers teachers' own lack of digital confdence to be a major barrier to ICT integration in classrooms. Some researchers classify it as a psychological factor, which could stem from a fear of failure, a fear of losing time, or a fear of not getting the expected results. I found that most teachers in the study are familiar only with basic ICT use, either for communication or social media or for searches on the web. Digital confdence regarding the degree to which one is able to integrate ICT into teaching is also related to more sophisticated activities that require up-to-date technical skills and competence.

#### *Lack of Motivation*

Motivation is an important positive factor, which encourages teachers to use ICT in their teaching and to move from the phase of entry and adaption to adaptation and integration. I found, however, that a group of teachers were not motivated to participate in the process. Their answers to the survey included statements such as the following:


A lack of motivation might be a refection of the MENA region's educational paradigm, in which students and learners in general are not autonomous learners. Motivation is not a factor in itself, but a refection of underlying issues. It stems from other factors such as digital confdence, infrastructure, time shortages, and a number of other direct and indirect barriers.

#### *Gender and ICT: A Social and Cultural Issue*

According to the latest Global Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum 2017), Tunisia is currently ranked 117th out of 144 countries. The gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa is at its best in Tunisia. Women work in the same felds as men with no differences in terms of position, rank, or time. However, in daily life, women in Tunisia still have more responsibilities at home and in caring for children. These domestic responsibilities are on top of their professional workloads. In this study, many working and studying women declare that men rarely help in tasks related to domestic work and childcare. There is no alternative to doing two—or three—things at the same time. Women do not have much time left to use ICT facilities, except to do easy and entertaining tasks such as using social media, chatting, and shopping. Thus, female students and teachers often do not have much time left to use ICT for developing new teaching or learning activities. This applies especially to teachers; female teachers are even more constrained than their male colleagues with respect to a lack of time and a busy work schedule, in noncoastal and particularly rural locations, where most people have no internet connection at home and go to internet cafés, which are not often or easily frequented by women for social and cultural reasons.

# **Implementation Strategy**

#### *Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) Theory*

Faculty members in Tunisian institutions are the main drivers in the process of ICT integration; hence, they constitute the change agents. Teachers and faculty members can be classifed based on Rogers's fve categories of innovation adoption.3 According to Medlin (2001), the most appropriate theory for studying the adoption of technology in higher education and other educational environments is Rogers's diffusion of innovation theory (Fig. 2).

**Fig. 2** Rogers's diffusion of innovation (DOI) theoryIn ICT application, the innovators are the pioneers or creators. This group of teachers does not need to be controlled or guided as they will even put their own resources towards ICT use. They have new ideas, and mostly serve as examples. These teachers are generally skilled and eager to learn; they only need better infrastructure and more resources. The second group are what Rogers calls the "early majority." They are real agents because they are a majority and they do not have many innovative ideas. However, they like to learn from new experiences and adopt to changes. These teachers need resources and much more support than the frst group, as they want to be visible. A big part of the investment will go to this group through better training, better infrastructure and programs spreading awareness of innovations. Like the early majority, the late majority includes a large portion of the population; these teachers will wait until most of their peers and colleagues have adopted the innovation. These faculty members are sceptical about the process of change and its outcome. They will not join until they are persuaded that doing so is safe. This group need a lot of support, training, motivation, guidance, collaboration, and peer work. They generally have some basic knowledge of ICT, but they are ready to learn more. This readiness varies from one individual to another based on many factors, including demographic, social-psychological, and cultural factors. The last group are those whom Rogers called "laggards" (1995): the saboteurs, mostly veteran teachers, who are the most resistant to any change. They are the custodians of the traditional view of education, and they are more skeptical about reform and change agents than the late majority. The adaptation periods of all resistant teachers are relatively long, and some totally refuse to embrace the change. A major mistake is to focus on the saboteurs or the rejecters in the reform process. They should either be ignored or used as a correction factor; they may serve as bad examples of negative feedback. The process of innovation has to start with pioneers and stop before the saboteurs, as one cannot change the whole group. Good examples and success stories are needed. The focus should be on models to capture the best of what is going on and make it available. In the next section, I consider in which direction the implementation should proceed: top-down or bottom-up

The top-down approach is an integration technique that involves political decisions to initiate an innovation. In this approach, decision-makers are considered as the real actors in the implementation process while the administrative staff and faculty members are given little attention. In contrast to the top-down approach, the bottom-up approach recognizes the work of the actual actors and implementers. The implementers are connected with the real situation and can evaluate and review more accurately than policy-makers, who usually miss a lot of information. In the bottom-up approach, local communities are actively engaged in the development process in a participatory manner by proposing recommendations based on their individual perception of the situation (Prabhu et al. 1999). In the Tunisian case, the top-down approach produces more results and more successful ICT implementation initiatives since the system is complex. Within the bottom-up approach, only faculty members and staff would be concerned if commitment and motivation were not high, whereas adopting a top-down approach automatically guarantees the involvement of the Ministry of Technology and the Ministry of Higher Education. The top management of the Ministry of Higher Education developed the e-learning strategy and issued directives that all lecturers and course teams had to adhere to. One reason for choosing the top-down strategy is that levels of ICT adoption vary signifcantly from one higher education institution to another. While some institutions only have online availability of course content, others can afford to develop content management systems. Teachers are more likely to be infuenced through simple communication strategies, policies, or top-down orders communicated through formal channels, instructions, email, or an intranet. The senior management should engage the staff, most of whom will reliably implement their initiatives and ideas as active agents.

# **Conclusion**

Tunisian teachers are more likely to be infuenced through simple communication strategies, policies, or orders from the top through formal channels and instructions or via emails or intranet. Senior management should engage the staff, who are mostly relied on to implement their initiatives, by acknowledging that the drivers for the e-learning process are signifcantly different from the institutional pressures on them (Clegg et al. 2003; Salmon 2005). This research contributes to knowledge in this feld with information collected through questionnaires, interviews, and analysis of the literature, which in turn might support education policymakers and ICT experts in their work regarding the future development of ICT in education. Although this research has answered the proposed research questions, it may have certain limitations. Some respondents might have interpreted the questions differently from what the researcher meant and accordingly provided invalid or inaccurate responses. The number of participants could still be considered small compared to the real population of both teachers and students in higher education. Hence, uncertainty always exists concerning generalizations based on data collected through questionnaires.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Sihem Hamlaoui** is an Arabic, English and French-speaking scholar who completed her PhD on the topic "ICT in higher education in the MENA region, a case study of Tunisian universities" at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany), where she also worked as a research assistant in the research network "Re-Confgurations". She is the co-editor of the Handbook of e-learning in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region, the only comprehensive resource on e-learning in the Middle East and North Africa which was published by Springer 2018. She additionally holds a B.A. in English Linguistics from the Institut Supérieur des Langues Vivantes Tunis (Tunisia).

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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**The Role of Social Movements in the Re-Confguration of Youth Transition Regimes: The Biography of an Unemployed Graduates Activist in Morocco**

Christoph Schwarz

# **Introduction**

For twenty-fve years, North Africa and West Asia (NAWA) has been the region with the highest youth unemployment rates worldwide, and developments since the so-called Arab Spring have hardly changed those numbers (Kabbani 2019). Before 2011, the situation of these unemployed has been mainly discussed from a rather technical perspective that has focused on policies and institutions, and has problematized young people's situation using the notions of "stalled youth transitions" (Salehi-Isfahani 2008; see also Dhillon et al. 2009), and, more precisely *waithood* (Singerman 2007, 2011).1 However, few scholars have written about the collective strategies of the unemployed themselves (Emperador Badimon 2009a, 2011b; Schwarz 2017, 2018).

In this chapter, I analyze the Unemployed Graduates Movement in Morocco from a youth transitions perspective that considers young people's agency. This movement, which has been mobilizing since the early 1990s, is a particularly instructive example of how young people negotiate their own transitions to adulthood within an authoritarian regime. For these purposes, people are defned as "young" if they have not yet attained the economically necessary assets required for adult status according to the hegemonic social norms: the resources to provide for a family of their own.

Frankfurt a. M., Germany

C. Schwarz (\*)

e-mail: christoph.schwarz@staff.uni-marburg.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_12

In the frst section, I will briefy discuss theoretical perspectives to analyze the phenomenon, and suggest applying the concept of "youth transitions regimes" (Walther 2006). The "regime" notion problematizes youth as a political issue, i.e. as the result of power relations, since it focuses on the structures and institutions that mold transitions to adulthood. However, by methodologically adopting a contextualized life-course approach (Nilsen et al. 2018), I intend to identify the dynamics within the Moroccan youth transitions regime from a bottom-up perspective, i.e. from the perspective of activists who contest it. In line with the Re-Confgurations approach, I aim to reconstruct patterns of confict and cooperation between protesters, authorities, and institutions, and thus take into account the interrelation of agency and structure in order to bring to the fore the specifc "order of change" (Elias 1970, p. 149).

In the second section, I will introduce and contextualize the Moroccan Unemployed Graduates Movement against the backdrop of the re-confguration of the country's social contract. From 2014 to 2017, I conducted seventeen interviews with activists of the movement, some of them life-story interviews, others more thematically focused. In the third section, based on this material, I will introduce as an example the life story of one of the movement's coordinators in order to illustrate the key dynamics of activists' life-courses and to discuss the movement's development since 2011. This example will be complemented by fndings from other interviews with activists and the general literature. On this basis, the chapter also discusses generational and spatial dynamics, i.e. the center-periphery relations that underly the movement and their moral economy (Thompson 1971), i.e. the way they draw on an older social contract—that of the development state under Hasan II—to justify their present claims. Last but not least, these interviews also illustrate that the 2011 "Arab Spring" protests resulted in a re-confguration of the Moroccan youth transitions regime, in the sense of a disruption of the dynamic ritual of negotiations between the unemployed graduates and the Moroccan authorities. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the results and point to remaining open questions.

# **Life-Courses in Youth Transition Regimes**

A rift between two approaches has long structured the feld of youth studies: the "youth transitions" and the "youth cultures" approaches (Mendoza-Denton and Boum 2015). Whereas the former emphasizes the institutional and socio-economic milestones on the path to adulthood, the latter focuses on the subjective meanings young people attribute to their status and status changes as well as their cultural strategies for dealing with "being young" in a particular social place. Roughly speaking, the "transitions" perspective has focused more on policies and structures, whereas the "culture" perspective has aimed to reconstruct young people's agency and the subjective meaning they attribute to their status as "youths." In one of the most pointed criticisms, Wyn and Woodman (2007) argued that the transitions perspective is inherently fawed, since its characterisations all rest on the assumptions that (a) there exists a normative transitional process, from which some young people deviate; (b) youth is a linear process or position on a life-course; and (c) culture, economy and politics simply add 'favour' or context to the development process. In the main, the literature on transitions draws implicitly on popular conceptualisations of generations, in which the Baby Boomer generation has become the implicit norm. The transitions of this generation (from school to work, leaving home, establishing nuclear families) have become the standard timeline against which subsequent generations are judged. This timeline calls young people's life patterns and choices into question through established assumptions about what 'ought to be' (Wyn and Woodman 2007, p. 498).

Accordingly, youth policies that apply a youth transitions perspective are often inconsistent, since they draw on a stereotypical idea of 'youth'. Instead, Wyn and Woodman argue for a generational approach that departs from the differences between social generations. In a response to this criticism, Roberts (2007) argues that generational and transition approaches have, in fact, been inseparable since the onset of research. The current consensus, among transition researchers—that transitions have been prolonged, de-standardized/individualized, and are often reversible 'yoyo' transitions—is itself the result of an implicit application of generational differences. By now, many studies are instead using transitions and cultural perspectives as complementary, and many transitions researchers concede the need to take young people's subjectivities into account to a greater degree (Furlong et al. 2011).

In this chapter, I will apply a "grounded" transitions perspective that refrains from developmentalist and psychologist tenets, but is situated in the framework of a life course, or biographical perspective. In other words, I will adopt a "contextualized" life course approach in the sense of Nilsen, Brannen, and Chelsom Vogt (2018, p. 85):

What characterizes a contextualist life course approach is its sensitivity to historical and spatial contexts. Studies from this perspective do not seek to formulate "laws" about how transitions happen that transcend time and place. Life course transitions, included the transition from youth to adulthood, are studied with reference to the historical period and contextual features of particular societies and groups that relate to social class, intergenerational relations, gender and ethnicity in which individuals are situated.

In this vein, I argue that a transitions perspective remains important in order to reconstruct the structural processes that reproduce social inequality along dimensions besides the generational divide, such as class position, gender, or geographical situatedness; the latter is particularly important in a country like Morocco, which exhibits the highest rural-urban divide in the region (World Bank 2011). Such a grounded and contextualized transitions perspective allows us to identify how these divisions translate into typical turning points in individual life courses, and most probably result in the intergenerational reproduction of certain social positions. Likewise, a transitions perspective seems imperative in order to reconstruct how socio-economic constraints, but also hegemonic symbolic representations and the acquisition of status symbols of "youth" and "adulthood," impinge on young people's trajectories, decisions, and political strategies.

The concept of *regime of youth transitions*, coined by Andreas Walther (2006), seems particularly useful for examining the political nature of these transitions: How are youth and adulthood socially and politically defned, and by whom? What notion of citizenship is central to the social contract within which transitions to adulthood are institutionally organized and negotiated? Discussing such questions with a regime terminology results in an analysis that looks at power structures and political actors and does not restrict itself to a merely technical policy discourse.

Drawing on Esping-Andersen's (1990) and Gallie and Paugnam's (2000) typologies of welfare regimes in Europe, Walther defnes 'regimes' as existing institutional settings that have a history structured not only by conficts and the interests of specifc social actors but also by the set of values and interpretations they constantly reproduce. Institutions and concepts merge into what is conceived of as 'normal' in a given context, which also includes a 'normal' relation between individual entitlements and collective demands. Herein, cultural and social patterns are also concerned with infuencing individuals' biographical orientations. (Walther 2006, p. 124).

Translating the welfare regime concept to that of a "youth transition regime" also requires the analytical inclusion of schooling and training, as they relate to (gendered) concepts of work (and profession), and the respective structures of employment and unemployment beneft programs. Using such ideal types and clustering different national systems necessarily leads to certain generalizations. The interpretative value of this model represents "a heuristic compromise of medium range validity. The strength of such a model lies in referring to the 'Gestalt' of the different models through which young people's lives are regulated" (Walther 2006, p. 125).

Although the regime notion suggests a clear focus on institutions and policies, Walther stresses that his concept also aims to analyze the interplay of structure and agency. Hence, he also refers to young people's biographical orientations in relation to their youth transition regimes. However, the youth transitions regime literature is still lacking an examination of politics from below, i.e. organized, collective, political strategies of young people in particular regime settings, for example in the framework of social movements. In the following, I aim to offer one such example.

# **Morocco: The Unemployed Graduates Movement and Its Historical Context**

So far, there has been no systematic analysis or classifcation of the Moroccan youth transitions regime, and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide one. Instead, I am going to focus on one particular transition segment, the transition from university to work, and on the social struggles over how this transition is organized. If the education sector is key to any youth transitions regime, it is particularly so in Morocco, where in recent decades a very insightful negotiation of transitions at this particular juncture evolved between two actors: the monarchy and the government, on one side, and the unemployed university graduates movement, on the other.

#### *The Youth Transitions Regime of the Development State*

The *diplômés chômeurs*—or unemployed graduates—movement developed against the backdrop of a successive shift of the Moroccan social contract and its respective youth transitions. Whereas the decades after the country's independence in 1956, under the reign of Mohamed V (r. 1957–1961) and the frst two decades after Hassan II (r. 1961–1999) took the throne, the monarchy's policies followed the logic of a development state. As in many other nation states in the region, the government, in order to consolidate its power, expanded the public sector, invested heavily in education and public administration, and granted citizens certain social privileges and rights in exchange for their loyalty. In a process termed 'Moroccanization', the *makhzen*2—the monarchy's own network of patronage, repression, and control—brought many economic activities under its control and allotted resources to its supporters (White 2001). For university graduates, this meant a guaranteed position as a civil servant after obtaining their diploma.

The fipside of the offer of economic benefts for loyalty was political repression and brutal human rights violations. The reign of Hassan II is often referred to as the 'Years of Lead', since those who refused loyalty to the regime—such as left-wing, democratic, or Amazigh3 activists or the student activists of the National Moroccan Student Union (UNEM, Union National des Étudiants Marocains)—were often arbitrarily detained, tortured, imprisoned, killed outright, or 'disappeared' to secret prisons such as the notorious Tazmamart (Vermeren 2006; Miller 2012; Hachad 2017; Menin 2019).

#### *Redefning the Social Contract*

The regime fnanced much of its expansion of the public sector, and the employment guarantees that came with it, within the framework of a rent economy. In this case, the natural resource from which to generate rents on the world market is phosphate, of whose global reserves Morocco holds around 40%, making it the world's most important exporter (Vaccari 2009). The heavy investment in the public sector came to a halt by the end of the 1970s. In 1975, the monarchy took control of Western Sahara, which resulted in heavy investments, both civilian as well as military since it now engaged in an armed confict with the Polisario movement, which claimed the territory's independence. In addition, phosphate prices began to drop. This meant a reduction in government revenues, which could no longer cover the exorbitant public expenditures. Faced with massive fscal instabilities, the monarchy sharply reduced public spending, which resulted in an increase in unemployment rates. At that time, major "bread riots" broke out in Casablanca in 1981. In 1983, Morocco had to agree to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP). This SAP included a devaluation of the Moroccan currency, the *dirham*, liberalization of trade, and further public budget cuts (White 2001, p. 32).

Bogaert summarizes the monarchy's strategy as a successive replacement of the old social contract of the development state with a new one, in which people were "responsibilized" and encouraged to seize the opportunities of the (free) market. State power had to be redeployed and reorganized, not only to exploit strategic locations and redesign urban skylines but also to create neoliberal citizens (self-reliant, entrepreneurial, individualized) and facilitate their integration into the formal market ("inclusive growth"). (Bogaert 2018, p. 166).

For university graduates, this meant that they could no longer count on a post as a public servant. Whereas between 1970 and 1977, university enrolment had tripled and the number of public servants had grown at an annual average rate of 5,5%, the unemployment rate among university graduates rose from 6,5% in 1982 to 26% in 1991 and 40% in 2002 (Bogaert and Emperador Badimon 2011). This rate tended to be higher among those with advanced degrees (Cohen and Jaidi 2006, p. 139), which is why Bennani-Chraïbi (2000, p. 143) even considered the integration of the educated urban young to be "the most pressing problem in Morocco today". Since this assessment from two decades ago, things even have deteriorated, particularly since 2010, with unemployment rates of over 20% for people aged between 15 to 24 as the national average, and even over 45% in urban regions (Medias24 2017; World Bank 2011).

Since Mohamed VI's ascension to the throne, in 1999, educational reform has been one of the regime's key priorities. Morocco was the frst country in the NAWA region to introduce the Bachelor, Master, PhD system in its public universities (Kohstall 2012).

#### *The Moroccan Unemployed Graduates Movement*

First protests of unemployed university graduates date back to the early 1990s. In 1991, activists founded the world's frst trade union-like organization for unemployed graduates, the National Association of Moroccan Unemployed Graduates (ANDCM, Asociation Nationale de Diplômés Chômeurs du Maroc) (Sater 2007, p. 97). The roots of the movement clearly developed out of university students' unions, like the UNEM, and the frst activists shared a leftist ideology. However, they were frustrated with "traditional ideological politics" that had not brought any socio-economic improvements; meanwhile, their own and the previous generations' experiences of the 'Years of Lead' had made them careful to avoid repression by the state forces. Against this backdrop, they opted for a form of "apolitical mobilization" (Emperador Badimon 2011b) focusing on one single subject: the right to employment in the public sector, and, concomitantly, opposition to recruitment through nepotism and patronage networks.

Among their central reference points were Articles 12 and 13 of the 1996 constitution, which state that all citizens have "equal rights in seeking education and employment." (13)4 and that "Opportunities for employment in public offces and positions shall be uniformly open to all citizens" (12); and two ministerial decrees, which guarantee direct employment into public service after completing a Master's degree (Cohen and Jaidi 2006; Bogaert and Emperador Badimon 2011).

The focus on the single subject of employment and the abstention from demands for any further political changes resulted in an approach that was very open-ended ideologically and that, from the very beginning, allowed Leftists, Islamists, Amazigh activists, and non-partisan graduates to come together for a common cause. This subverted the regime's strategy of playing different actors against each other.

At frst, activists confned themselves to sit-ins and hunger strikes in the relatively protected environments of the offces of supportive labor unions. However, after some years of consolidation and organizational expansion into more remote regions, the ANDCM adopted more public tactics, culminating, in 1995, in a nine-and-a-half-month sit-in—the longest in Moroccan history—outside the Ministry of Education. Ever since, their actions have been mainly street-based: demonstrations and sit-ins in front of the parliament in the country's capital, Rabat, demanding negotiations with the Minister of Labor, or, in case of repression, with the Minister of the Interior (Sater 2007, p. 94; Rachik 2010, p. 26; Emperador Badimon 2011b).

Within several years, a certain political ritual evolved: when protests intensifed, the government, employing methods of both repression and cooption, would regularly negotiate with the protesters and directly employ some of them in the public sector. The protest coordinators would in turn monitor their members, using lists of participation, to make sure that only those who regularly and actively participated in the protests were employed. Activists were given tokens they had to return to their local coordinator after the demonstrations (Emperador Badimon 2007, 2009b, 2011b; Bogaert and Emperador Badimon 2011). In some committees, those activists who exposed themselves to a higher degree to police violence, for example by forming the front row during sit-ins, would be given a higher ranking on the coordinators' list.5 After successful negotiations and ensuing employment, the respective protest groups would dissolve, only to be replaced soon enough by new cohorts of fresh graduates who could not fnd public-sector jobs. In the course of this process, the structure of the ANDCM was successively side-lined and replaced by decentralized local chapters that in recent years organized not only based on region, but also on degree level, and thus became somewhat more exclusive.

At the time of my research, from 2014 to 2017, the activists would gather in groups (according to their local chapters) up to three days every week in a park situated 250 m from the Moroccan Parliament in Rabat. Usually, they would gather in circles and discuss organizational and strategic questions. When they decided they were enough activists for a signifcant protest, they would form a disciplined demonstration, many of them dressed in vests bearing their committees' logos, and take to the streets. Organizers wearing special vests would walk alongside the demonstration and maintain order. In front of the parliament, the anti-riot brigades of the police would usually dissolve the demonstration. The activists applied a tactic called "provoke and run": they ran from the police, then hid by mingling with passers-by on the avenue, only to return as soon as possible in smaller groups to the area outside the Parliament, where they would again take out their banners and vests and recommence shouting and singing slogans until the police returned and chase them again.

In the following, I will take a closer look at the processes of engagement in the movement by introducing the life story of one of the activists, which I complement with fndings from other interviews and the general literature.

#### *An Activist Biography*

Omar,6 who was in his early thirties at the time of the frst interview in 2014, grew up in a small village in the Rif Mountains. He holds a BA and a MA in English Literature and was pursuing his PhD. Omar has fve brothers and two sisters. His father, a tailor, had died when Omar was still a child. He emphasized that this was very diffcult not only psychologically, but also socioeconomically. Most of his fellow students and colleagues remained fnancially dependent on their fathers. In his case, his oldest brother had to step in and support the family. He described his frst experiences on the labor market after fnishing his BA as follows:

I tried to fnd a job in the private sector. That was at the time that I had to go back to [my village] because staying in Fez requires a lot of money, because I had to rent an apartment—it was not easy. So I had to go back home, so at least I wouldn't pay for the rent and the food. I tried my best; I applied many times to get a job but always in vein.

In comparison to other activists, Omar was lucky to actually fnd a job in the formal private sector, in a private high school. The salary, however, was not enough to allow him to start a family:

Then I worked as a teacher for primary school students from 2007 to 2010 …. I would work for ffteen hours per week and I would be paid 1,500 dirhams (around \$150) each month. So later on, I just made up my mind and I realized that continuing in that position wouldn't help me establish a family, because with 1,500 dirhams it is simply impossible.

Many other unemployed activists emphasize that in fact, they are working, as they struggle to get by with any job that comes up, usually in the informal sector, for example as private tutors for high school students. However, as Omar's experience in the formal sector shows, the wage there does often not allow for realizing personal goals, such as marriage. Accordingly, almost all the activists were unmarried. Some had boyfriends or girlfriends, but many of their relationships ended—or were "ended" by their own or their partners' parents—because the had not accumulated enough capital and lacked employment prospects to provide to start a household and provide for a family. Omar recounted that he quit his job in the private school to continue his studies in order to increase his chances to one day be employed on a higher rank in the public sector.

# **A Precarious Cycle of Lifelong Learning**

Most of the other interviewees shared similar experiences and decision-making processes. They re-enrolled, precisely because they could not fnd a job according to their qualifcations. They affrmed that not putting their qualifcations to work would solidify their precarious position and thus render their degree useless after they and their families had invested so much time and money in their education. In the meantime, their peers who had not studied at university had at least gained several years of work experience and reputation, and they often already earned more than their graduate peers would in their frst job. The primary reasons for their preference for the public sector were secure pay, health insurance, social security, retirement benefts, and social prestige (Emperador Badimon 2011a). Catusse (2013, p. XV) understands the unemployed graduates' mobilization not only as the expression of a right to work that is justifed by individual and collective investment in university education but also as a demand for protection in a society in which public employment offers by far the most abundant access to social rights.

Those interviewees who were holding jobs in the formal private job market would report that often they were simply not paid, or only with several months' delay, and that they had to work many hours of unpaid overtime.

# **Protest as Part of the Transition**

At the same time, many students saw re-enrolling at the university as tantamount to preparing for several years of protests in Rabat with the Unemployed Graduates Movement. Omar explained:

Most, if not all, of the students go through this step. When they decide to apply for the master's program, they already have in mind that they will come to Rabat [to protest with the Unemployed Graduates Movement] after they get their MA because they know they will not fnd a job afterwards. Our university produces thousands of students, and they fnd themselves on the streets. They think it will be much better to get the MA and come to Rabat to demonstrate for one or two or three years … If you are lucky you demonstrate for only one year and get a job. In the previous generations [of graduates], there are some who demonstrated only for one year and they got a job at the end.

Here, protesting after graduation seems like an almost logical step in a transition from higher education to employment, which for them was the step to fnancial independence, the economic key marker of adulthood. This is relevant to both the temporal and spatial dimensions. Like Omar, all the activists I talked to came from the rural periphery, and they lacked networks in the metropoles, where public sector recruitment was conducted. The decision to travel regularly between their home universities and protests in the capital also meant signifcant fnancial expense. Some activists regularly commuted to Rabat from as far as Oujda, on the northeastern border with Algeria, a twenty-hour train ride away. Omar, like many other activists, was co-renting rooms in two cities, one room that he shared with eleven other students in Rabat, where he would come to protest every week from Tuesday to Thursday, and another room that he shared with seven fellow students in Fez, where he was enrolled at the university.

# **The "Arab Spring" as a Rupture: Ushering in the End of the Movement?**

At the center of the movement's discourse and framing strategy is a critique of the nepotistic and corrupt recruitment procedures in the *concours* examinations for public sector employment, arguing that the examiners would naturally favor their own families or admit applicants in exchange for exorbitant bribes. It might seem contradictory that, in their protests, the activists at the same time demand their own hiring without any *concours* or qualifcation exams. The protesters to a certain degree take as a given the logic of cooption in the sense that they aim for a, so to say, "meritocratic and transparent cooption," deliberately using political protest as a resource to get a job.

To link this to the discussions on temporality in youth transitions, Wyn and Woodman's (2007) critique that in many youth transition perspectives, the Baby Boomer generation often served as an implicit and generalized blueprint, against which the trajectories of young people today are measured, points to a legitimate scholarly problem. However, the Moroccan unemployed illustrate the strategic and normative leverage that comes with such a comparison from an activist's perspective. By strategically referencing the living conditions and social guarantees of the previous generation, who in this context grew up under the youth transitions regime of the development state (and its career prospects), they are defending a particular moral economy (Thompson 1971). The category of generation in this sense is also valid in that these graduates are, in the large majority of cases, the frst generation of their families to have attained a university degree. What further unites them as a generational unit (Mannheim [1928] 1952) is the above mentioned spatial mobility pattern. All the activists I talked to came from small villages or small towns at the rural margins. Their protests thus also express the power relations between the periphery and the metropoles in the Moroccan kingdom.

With their 'apolitical mobilization', they obviously resist the shift to a youth transitions regime that would individualize and de-politicize the risks of unemployment, and instead refer to the old social pact under Hassan II, i.e. the promises of the development state of the Moroccanization period. Often, they directly address the king as guarantor of national unity and social justice, and activists like Omar clearly attributed the decision-making powers in this regard to the *makhzen*: "Those who are fnding jobs for the students are not the government, but rather the deep, real rulers—I am talking about the king and his entourage. It is they who decide to employ these people."

In our frst interview in 2014, Omar emphasized that the amount of time spent protesting in Rabat required to fnally get a post as a civil servant was very variable: "It depends on the political situation. For us, I would say we are ((laughing)) not lucky enough because of the Arab Spring, for me it was like a curse to the unemployed movement."

In 2011, a new protest movement had formed in Morocco, motivated by the protests and revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and initiated mostly by young people: the 20th of February Movement (M20F), which, on that date in 2011, mobilized the largest demonstrations since independence, in ffty-three cities in Morocco. Its demands were mainly political: a democratization of the constitution, an independent judiciary, effective measures against the endemic corruption. In my interviews with M20F activists in the cities, some drew a thick line between social movements—which, in their view, pursued particularistic interests—and M20F as a political movement. Nevertheless, although sometimes marginalized, social issues were also addressed, particularly at the periphery of the M20F protests (Catusse 2013; Emperador Badimon 2019).

Omar recounts that the government, at the time headed by the Istiqlal Party,7 worried that the well-organized Unemployed Graduates Movement would join forces with the M20F, and that this would result in a dynamic that could threaten the established order. In response, they offered the currently protesting cohorts of unemployed graduates over four thousand jobs in the public sector in exchange for not joining the M20F. However, many of the interviewees contended that the Istiqlal cadres abused the agreement and directly employed many graduates who were not even on the lists provided by the movement; they suspected that these posts were given to graduates from families better connected in the patronage networks.

What is more, when Istiqlal was ousted in the ensuing parliamentary elections in 2011, the incoming Islamist Justice and Development party fnally ended the negotiations with the unemployed graduates. Since then, there has been no more direct employment of members of the movement. Omar recounted:

The government had never before offered that many jobs, and now it was simply too much; they could not employ more people. That's why the Arab Spring was a curse for us, for the following generations of unemployed graduates. When things began to calm down after the 20th of February, we knew the *makhzen* would not employ us anymore.

The movement continues protesting, but since 2011, it has not had any further success in negotiating public employment. Last time I visited Omar in 2017 in Fez, he had disengaged from the movement. Instead, he was focused on submitting his PhD thesis, and was struggling to get by with precarious jobs at the university and in the informal sector. Many of his fellow activists, however, were continuing to protest, together with the new cohorts of graduates that Moroccan universities had produced since 2011.

It remains to be seen if their protests will prove successful in the future, or if the 'Arab Spring' retrospectively marked the end of the Unemployed Graduates Movement, and thus the end of a key confict in the re-confguration of the Moroccan youth transitions regime.

# **Conclusion**

The Moroccan Unemployed Graduates Movement illustrates very vividly that transitions to adulthood are a matter of social and political struggle, and that the respective re-confgurations in youth transitions regimes are subject to resistance and negotiation. Faced with the dire and precarious prospects of the largely unprotected private job market, the activists reject the individualization of the risks of their transition from higher education to the labor market. Instead, they put forward the moral economy of the old social contract of the developmental state, which would have guaranteed them transitions to adulthood characterized by a secure post in the public sector and extensive social rights.

The movement does seem very particularistic and 'apolitical' at frst sight. Accordingly, it does not offer a Western audience a case for easy identifcation and idealization, as many of the 'Arab Spring' protesters did. Instead, the movement illustrates the constraints of long-term social mobilization under a repressive post-colonial regime. One important aspect is that the movement negotiates not only a temporal passage, but also a spatial relationship. Because the vast majority of the activists come from rural areas, either small villages or small towns at the rural margins, their protest also expresses the power relations between the periphery and the metropoles in the Moroccan kingdom. In terms of space, the Moroccan case and a look at its history of structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank also illustrates that youth transitions regimes are not limited to the framework of the nation-state, but are embedded in international power structures.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Christoph Schwarz** holds a doctorate in sociology, an M.A. (sociology/education), and a High School Teacher's Degree (Spanish/Civics) from Goethe-University Frankfurt (Germany). After his doctorate on adolescence in a Palestinian refugee camp, he joined the research network "Re-Confgurations" at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany) in 2014. Here, his research focused on intergenerational relationships in social movements in Morocco and Spain, and their moral economy. Currently affliated with the Institute for Social Research Frankfurt, he is researching the transnational movement that the Moroccan diaspora in Europe has been mobilizing in support for the Hirak protests that started in the Rif in late 2016. His general research interests include youth, intergenerational relationships, political socialization, collective memory, social movements, and migration.

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# **Family Memories and the Transmission of the Independence Struggle in South Yemen**

# Anne-Linda Amira Augustin

# **Introduction**

The year 2007 witnessed the birth of the Southern Movement. After the unifcation between the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) and the Yemen Arab Republic in 1990, power in the state was equally shared across ministries between South and North Yemeni politicians and bureaucrats. The results of the 1993 elections shattered the power-sharing agreement, marginalized the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) of the former PDRY, and strengthened the General People's Congress and the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Iṣlāḥ) and, with them, the tribal and Islamist elites of North Yemen. As tensions soared, civil war broke out on April 27, 1994. South Yemeni politicians proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Yemen on May 21, 1994 and, thereby, the disengagement of the territory of the former PDRY from the Republic of Yemen; however, this faction lost this war on July 7, 1994.

Initially, the Southern Movement was a loose coalition. Most of its members consisted of former army personnel and state employees of the PDRY who had been forced from their jobs after the war of 1994.1 In 2007, these people began to address their discontent publicly and appealed for socioeconomic rights, such as pensions, or the reinstatement of their former jobs. However, the Yemeni government was unable or unwilling to accede to their appeals. Government security forces used brutal measures against protesters. This government-sponsored brutality and indifference strengthened this loose social movement (see Human

A.-L. A. Augustin (\*)

Büro der Außenbeziehung des Übergangsrates Südarabiens in Europa e. V., Berlin, Germany e-mail: alaugustin@mei.edu

Rights Watch 2009). More and more people joined the demonstrations, and their appeals began to harden into concrete political demands, such as state independence of the territory that once formed the PDRY.

Since the Southern Movement began in 2007, I have regularly visited Aden and the surrounding governorates to conduct research. From March until May 2014, I conducted a three-month feld research for my PhD dissertation, which was followed by a stay in the feld from January to February 2015. Since the outbreak of the war, I have participated in events of the South Yemeni diaspora in Europe. In 2014 and 2015, I conducted participant observations during demonstrations and gatherings of the Southern Movement, as well as interviews with more than 80 people, ranging in age from 19 to around 70, and originating from almost all South Yemeni governorates. I analyzed the interviews via a grounded theory methodological approach as per Strauss and Corbin (1990).

Based on this longstanding feld research in South Yemen, this chapter will investigate the role family memories play in the transmission of the independence struggle in South Yemen. Family memories evolve in the interaction between different generations. They imply negotiations and struggles over concepts pertaining to the future of South Yemeni society during times of huge socio-political transformations and political turmoil in Yemen. As I will illustrate in this chapter, family remembrance in South Yemen is a practice of resistance. According to Routledge, "practices of resistance cannot be separated from practices of domination, they are always entangled in some confguration" (1997, p. 70). Thus, family memories are re-confgurations that refer to changes in discursive and symbolic power networks. Strikingly, young people have become very active in the Southern Movement, beginning before 2011 but especially once the protests of the "Arab Spring" began in Yemen. During my visits to South Yemen, I often heard young people born after Yemen's 1990 unifcation saying how great life had been in the PDRY. They often said that "*we* had" such-and-such accomplishments in the PDRY, that "*our* state" provided "*us*" with this or that achievement. Thus, they strongly identifed with a state that had disappeared from the world map two decades earlier, before they were even born. Where did their longing for the PDRY come from? And how could claims of an independent state in South Yemen reemerge in 2007 after the previous attempts at independence were dismantled in 1994?

Using interview extracts and participant observations from my feld research, I will give insight into the enormous impact of family memories on young people's longing for the PDRY, and, therefore, on their political engagement for an independent state in South Yemen.

# **The Role of Family Memories in Contexts of Defeats**

The family, a network of individuals comprised of two or more biological generations related by kinship, is "the main channel for the transmission of language, names, land and housing, local social standing, and religion; and beyond that also of social values and aspirations, fears, world views, domestic skills, taken-for-granted ways of behaving, attitudes to the body, models of parenting and marriage" (Bertaux and Thompson 1993, p. 1 f.). Besides school and media, the family "is the foremost mnemonic community, as it teaches children how to recall their past in a structured and socially acceptable manner" (Ryan 2011, p. 156). Memories never exist as closed systems, however. They touch, strengthen, intersect with, modify, and polarize other memories in the social reality (Assmann 2006, p. 17). Thus, an individual's memory is always comprised of both individual and collective memories (Assmann 2006, p. 23) and socially supported, constructed, and stabilized by communication with other people (Assmann 2006, p. 25). Family memories are "social memories" (Welzer 2001) that involve intentional forms of communication and transmission but also unnoticed, unintentional, and incidental transmissions of history (Welzer 2001, p. 16 f.).

I remember my own relatives, neighbors, and friends in South Yemen transmitting to me the nostalgia that everything had been better in the past; that people had been united in the independence struggle against the British in the 1960s; that people had celebrated New Year's Eve before unifcation; that people were well educated and knew the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Hugo; that education was much better by far than nowadays; that Aden had been a clean city with electricity and running water; that not everything was forbidden (*ḥarām*) or a source of shame (*ʿayb*) as it had become; that unveiled women could go out in the streets without being harassed; that there had been an atmosphere of mutual respect, particularly towards women; that all children attended school, etc. Such pronouncements are often interwoven in everyday communication without any specifc intentions. These counter-memories link to the narration of a better past, a current diffcult present, and a desirable better future. The belief in a better future, that would be at least as good as the past, is an important trigger for the claims of reestablishing an independent state on the territory of the former PDRY. This belief is frmly linked to the South's defeat in the 1994 war and to the subsequent marginalization of the South Yemeni population in its aftermath.

According to the unity narrative of the Republic of Yemen, which is omnipresent in Yemeni textbooks, unifcation was the sole source of progress, advancement, and development for the entire country. Most people in South Yemen perceived the opposite to be true. The obstacles to unity in 1990, the brutality of the war in 1994, and the massive marginalization of South Yemenis after this war was silenced from national offcial history, such as from nationalized textbooks, museums, political speeches and documents, etc. Therefore, the national narrative of the Republic of Yemen contradicts the many-voiced social memories in South Yemen. According to Argenti and Schramm (2010), a hegemonic narrative is often created when a violent past becomes the foundation for building a common future. In this process, the hegemonic narrative "frst cuts out everything that does not ft into the dominant story-line (of victimization, heroism etc.) and secondly puts the past at a somewhat comfortable distance from the present" (Argenti and Schramm 2010, p. 18). Nevertheless, "[i]ndividual memories are not easily overwritten and family stories are often preserved across generations through oral transmission" (Assmann and Shortt 2012, p. 4). As Yemeni unifcation in 1990 and the war of 1994 are the primary events in South Yemeni remembrance, based on which historical experiences are (re)interpreted and construed, family memories are incompatible with the offcial narrative that has been constructed in the aftermath of the war in 1994.

The unity narrative, which became dominant in education, political speeches, and public life after the war of 1994, clashed with South Yemeni memories because South Yemenis have underlined marginalized elements of their collective memory and created new interpretations of the past countering the unity narrative. These South Yemeni counter-memories challenge offcial versions of the past and emphasize South Yemenis' suppressed experiences. This "mnemonic resistance" (Ryan 2011, p. 155), "the resistance to a collective memory narrative" (Ryan 2011, p. 159), refers to South Yemenis' interpretative agency to resist "the encroachments of a powerful dominant memory" (Ryan 2011, p. 155). As political and/or state institutions that allowed a remembrance of South Yemeni representations of the past were non-existent after the war in 1994, due to the defeat of the South Yemeni faction and the fight of South Yemeni elites, the South Yemeni population took over the task of remembering in accordance with their representations of the past in daily communication and get-togethers.

However, the rupture that generated counter-memories on a collective level in South Yemen emanates from more than experiences of the war in 1994. It also, particularly, stems from the subsequent large-scale marginalization of South Yemenis. Most of the activists of the Southern Movement whom I met during my feld research were either forcibly retired or had a relative (often a parent) who had been forced into retirement after the war. Thus, there is a connection between the forced retirees and political mobilization in South Yemen. Under certain conditions, defeats can become central historical reference points; defeats are remembered, not only victories (Assmann 2006, p. 64). The memory of the losing side of the violent confict can have a stronger impact than the same confict has of the victors. Defeats do not necessarily destroy people's collective self-perception; they can also strengthen a group's cohesion. In cases in which a community's identity is based on a consciousness of victimhood, for example, the memory of suffering is borne in remembrance: this encourages community cohesion and mobilizes opposition. In this respect, defeats may strengthen the will for national autonomy and/or independence from a hegemonic power (Assmann 2006, p. 65 f.). In the following, I will illustrate how family memories transmitted the desire for an independent state to young South Yemenis who grew up after Yemeni unifcation.

# **The Transmission of Independence in Families**

In answer to my question about why young South Yemenis want to reestablish a state that they have never experienced, a man at a qāt-chewing gathering explained that the Arab family structure has a strong cohesive infuence on its members:

Arab society is different. Family ties in Yemen differ from those in Europe. In Yemen, in the south [South Yemen] or Arab countries, relations between father, son, and grandfather exist inside the family. The son absorbs the ideas that his father and grandfather have. They live together for a long time because they do not separate so much. He does not distance himself from them. That is why they transmit everything they carry to him.[…] The youth are infuenced by the past, and they know that it was better than the present. This stems from the family relationships—because I explain to my son, and my father explains to my son how he lived in the past, and how I lived.2

The older generations pass on to the young the nostalgic representations of their earlier lives, and the young absorb the ideas of their fathers and grandfathers. However, this is a very static notion of intergenerational transmission from the older to the younger generation and from men to other men. Daily communication in South Yemeni families involves counter-memories disseminated and dialogically transmitted in "conversational remembering" (Welzer 2010), in which representations of the South Yemeni past are invoked and collaboratively reconstructed.

In many instances where youth have mobilized, their knowledge about the former PDRY and the independence struggle began with family memories:3

A person—no matter how young—can become impressed by relatives, by uncles, by writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals, and party leaders. Concerning my surroundings, my family and relatives have relations to the revolution, to politics. My paternal uncle was secretary general of the party during a certain period. My paternal uncles were YSP leaders in the 1980s and in the 1970s. Thus, ideas of rejection, of revolution, and of many ideas developed in me. The emergence of the Southern Movement infuenced the minds of all people and contributed to the development of a certain direction and mindset. … We feel that our economic problems take place on a family level. There is no health care, no quality education, no services provided by the state. The right to state employment is impossible in Yemen; you pay money for a mediator. All these things, this suffering, concern the people.4

Ṭāriq comes from a family of YSP politicians. He explained that these relatives and others, such as "writers, journalists, academics, intellectuals, and party leaders," impressed him, which led to his interest in the grievances and claims of South Yemenis and fnally made him politically active. His sources of knowledge vary; however, his politically active family played the largest role in infuencing him via transmission. Ṭāriq's example demonstrates a strong connection between a family's political orientation and that of its descendants. Nevertheless, active Southern Movement parents do not automatically have active Southern Movement children, and vice versa. The situation in which people were living also made him aware of the grievances in South Yemen and the claims of the Southern Movement. Hence, "[t]he emergence of the Southern Movement infuenced the minds of all people and contributed to the development of a certain direction and mindset," as Ṭāriq expressed in the interview quoted above. Although not all South Yemeni families have been engaged in political parties in recent years, their children can still be politically active, as the following example demonstrates:

My father, my mother, the people, books; all those who speak [gave information about the past]. It would be wrong to tell you that only the house, my mother, I and so on speak; rather, all people speak. You read books, news. Everywhere you feel it. You speak to someone, and he tells you "We were, we were, we were. I worked in this and now I am sitting [jālis] at home. In the past, I traveled; today I do not have anything."5

Using a direct quotation, this female activist pointed out that South Yemeni forced retirees—known as *jālisīn*, 6 meaning "those who sit at home"—have an impact on young people because they disseminate in conversation their feelings of marginalization and exclusion. The forced retirees thus symbolize South Yemenis' exclusion from development and embody the lack of improvement and opportunity in the region. Forced retirees were among the frst protesters in 2007 and used collective action to show their discontent. However, long before the emergence of the Southern Movement, they were already numerous, and their forced retirement reminded their families, friends, and neighbors that the war in 1994 had been lost by the South Yemeni faction. People have felt punished, unjustly treated, and betrayed by the elites of North Yemen.

The following examples illustrate the connection between the forced retirees and their impact on family memories, as well as on political mobilization in South Yemen. A young man in his late twenties recounted that his father had been a soldier. After the war in 1994, he was forced to retire from his post. In 2014, he sometimes received a monthly pension of 30,000 Yemeni riyāl (around 100 € or 140 US\$). The young man complained that a North Yemeni would receive three times as much as his father. Because of the inadequate income, his father lost the family's house. After telling me the story of his father, the young man then asked me rhetorically how he could support unifcation in light of the injustice done to his father.

A woman in her early thirties reported that her mother lost her job and was forced to stay at home soon after the war in 1994. During the war, a North Yemeni pilot had seized the family's fat in Aden. With legal documents proving their ownership, they were able to regain the fat by taking their case to court. The young woman is also an activist today. Thus, the basis of the Southern Movement comprised not only the forced retirees, but also their children, whose parents and relatives symbolized for them the injustice promoted by the central government in Sanaa. In these cases, it is not necessary for intergenerational transmission to occur as a speech act: parental unemployment, a family's lack of money, and social insecurities transmitted the families' marginalization to the next generation without the need for words.

Once, I was sitting in the Aden Mall and speaking to young activists when a forcibly retired army general heard us talking and approached us. He began narrating his experiences of marginalization after the war in 1994 and his long struggle to be re-employed. He also told me that about the frustration and stress of not being able to support the family. While listening to us, he felt resentment about what had happened to him in the past, and he began narrating, thereby giving us—the younger generation—ideas about his life and the negative consequences of Yemeni unifcation and the subsequent war. He transmitted representations of the past, encouraged to speak by the communication between the young activists and me about today's independence struggle. Such narrations take place not only in interview situations, but also during everyday communication among families, on the streets, and in neighborhoods in South Yemen; people talk about perceived injustices, and, by doing so, they transmit their longing for the PDRY and their

desire to reestablish an independent state. This example shows that the intergenerational transmission of the independence struggle is not unidirectional from older to younger generations only, but is in fact a dialogical process in which both generations interact to construct a social memory, a process in which the past and current situation is reinterpreted and construed. The following statement also exemplifes this dialogical relationship:

The leaders of the generation of our fathers and grandfathers wrote history for us and wrote novels for us about what happened, what happened before the war in 1994 and before the signing of the unity [treaty], and during the war [in 1994] and how the transformation happened. … We are born during the phase of Yemeni unifcation. To this day, our school curriculum has not mentioned the PDRY but its relics still exist with us. … We learn from our fathers and grandfathers, and now we are transferring to the world [the knowledge] that marginalization happened here.7

Nadīm points out that leading fgures of his father's and grandfather's generation wrote down the events of the past, those that occurred during the war in 1994 and during the unity agreements. He also points out that young South Yemenis are now transmitting knowledge that was once transferred by the fathers' and grandfathers' generations. This dialogical transmission led to the young now becoming the ones narrating to "the world that marginalization happened" in South Yemen. Hence, the dissemination of memories among family members infuences young people's political engagement for an independent state.

Another extract from a group discussion with university students in Aden in April 2014 indicates similarly that family memories in South Yemen are important for understanding young people's mobilization for independence:


This discussion indicates that the transmission of the independence struggle is a two-sided coin. On the one hand, families do "not accept this situation," i.e. "tyranny", suffering, marginalization, unemployment, and the ramifcations of Yemeni unifcation in general. Therefore, dissatisfed with the situation, families have transmitted to younger generations their discontent with their life circumstances and their wish to regain an independent state on the territory of the PDRY. On the other hand, families, especially those who are not politically active, are uneasy with or even reject their children's participation in protests because they fear they could lose their children. However, according to my interview partner, it is "compulsory," "a duty" to "make sacrifces" for the future and the country. They feel "forced" to act, and their anxious families have to accept this. The independence struggle becomes a duty, an obligation, for a better future.

# **Conclusion**

By nostalgically lamenting the PDRY past in daily conversations, older generations who lived in the PDRY have transmitted their wish to recreate a South Yemeni state to younger generations. The Southern Movement has begun to contest the unity narrative of the Republic of Yemen publicly since 2007. However, as the extracts and examples in this chapter indicate, the struggle for an independent state had already begun long before the Southern Movement emerged in 2007. In particular, South Yemeni involuntary retirees, who were affected by largescale marginalization after the war in 1994, had an enormous impact on transmitting counter-memories to younger generations, and, thus, on South Yemeni society and its claims to reestablish the state on the territory of the former PDRY. These people became the basis of the Southern Movement in 2007, which soon transformed from a social movement appealing economic and social rights into an independence movement demanding the reestablishment of an independent state. Thus, family memories play a crucial role in the transmission of the independence struggle in South Yemen, and particularly in the dissemination of the longing for the PDRY to young people and the hope that only independence can bring back a stable and safe life. Young people, who never experienced life in the PDRY because they were born only after Yemeni unifcation, have received knowledge about the past from their elders. However, the elders' transmission is not a static process from the older to the younger generation, but a dialogical process in which the young engage with the older generations' remembrance. Thus, young people's political engagement for an independent state in South Yemen is linked to family memories, which involve the transmission of counter-memories that challenge the unity narrative of the Republic of Yemen.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**

Argenti, N., and K. Schramm. 2010. Introduction: Remembering violence: Anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission. In *Remembering violence: Anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission*, ed. N. Argenti and K. Schramm, 1–39. Oxford: Berghahn.


**Anne-Linda Amira Augustin** did her doctorate in sociology on the Southern Movement, resistance, and generational relations in South Yemen in the research network "Re-Confgurations" at the Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). She is a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. She is currently working as an advisor at the European representative offce of the Southern Transitional Council in Berlin.

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# **Aesthetic Re-Confgurings and the Politics of Change**

# **On the Re-Confgurations of Cinematic Media-Spaces: From Diaspora Film to Postdiaspora Film**

Alena Strohmaier

# **Introduction1: "Diaspora is Highly Contemporary"**

"Whether 'diaspora' is a common word, a scientifcally constructed concept, or a rallying cry that gives meaning to a collective reality, it is highly contemporary. Denying this would be pointless" (2008, p. 106), Stéphane Dufoix claims. The case of the Iranian diaspora and its flmmaking are particularly interesting objects of investigation because they illustrate the re-confgurations of both diaspora into postdiaspora and diaspora flm into postdiaspora flm, revealing the contemporariness of the "diaspora" lens through its potential for accommodating transformation and change.

Iran, like most of today's nation-states, has a long history of migration. As early as the eighth century, Zoroastrians fed from Iran to neighboring India for religious freedom after the Arab-Muslim colonization. In the nineteenth century, many Iranians migrated to the neighboring czarist Russian Empire to work in the oil industry. After the Second World War, many Jewish Iranians emigrated to the newly founded state of Israel. In the second half of the twentieth century, many Iranians from the middle and upper social classes went to countries such as Germany, France, Britain, Austria, and the United States for higher education with the initial aim of bringing their newly acquired knowledge back to Iran (Raji 2010, p. 193). The year 1979, however, marked a turning point: the Islamic revolution, which resulted in the deposition of Shah Reza Pahlavi and the establishment of an Islamic republic under Ayatollah Khomeini, led to probably the largest

A. Strohmaier (\*)

Institut für Medienwissenschaft/Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: alena.strohmaier@staff.uni-marburg.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_14

wave of emigration the country has ever seen. The consequences of the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq War prevented members of the frst wave from returning to Iran. Further waves of migration followed in the 1990s and increased after the uprisings of the Green Movement in 2009. There are currently no comprehensive statistics on the total number of Iranians living outside Iran, but it is estimated to be between four and six million (Vahabi 2012). Most Iranians relocated to North America, closely followed by Europe and Australia, with major cities as primary destinations. Iranians also moved to business-friendly cities in the MENA region such as Istanbul, Doha, and Dubai.

This chapter is primarily concerned with the re-confguration of diaspora into postdiaspora fueled by the formation of the (self-applied) term "Iranian diaspora" and its cinematic representations in what are termed postdiaspora flms. It makes three underlying theoretical assumptions: frst, the development of a fexible and open concept of diaspora; second, an anti-essentialist defnition of culture; and third, questioning of the dazzling category of the "hybrid." In a close analysis of Ana Lily Amirpour's 2014 flm *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night*, I will demonstrate that these re-confgurations manifest on three spatial levels: the real space of the diaspora, which is subject to socio-political changes; the internal-diegetic spaces in the flms themselves, which constantly bring new themes to the fore; and flm as its own space-creating entity that constantly updates its own mediality. In postdiaspora flms, these different spatial dimensions come together and convey new cinematic media-spaces.

# **From Exile to Diaspora**

"How then has this group of religiously, ethnically, and linguistically diverse people with different pasts constructed an Iranian identity in diaspora? Why is Iranian immigration even termed a diaspora?" (2003, p. 685), Nilou Mostof asks. In order to answer this question, it is crucial to draw distinctions with other terms in the context of migration. The (self-applied) label of Iranians living abroad as "diasporic" or simply as "diaspora" is a recent development. In popular discourse as well as in research, the terms "refugee," "émigré," and "exile" were initially predominant, but this changed and Iranians "reinvented themselves as a distinct national and ethnic group outside of Iran. […] A move away from the urgency of an exilic and immigrant narrative to one that situates Iran and Iranian culture in the continuum of more global diasporic consciousness" (Elahi and Karim 2011, p. 382 ff.). The Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans claims: "Iranians are now at a point in their immigrant journey where they selectively choose elements of their Iranian and American identities, developing a unique 'diasporic' identity that is quite different from native Iranians" (2014, p. 11). Babak Elahi and Persis M. Karim also emphasize:

Iran's current diaspora is by necessity part of a longer continuous historical narrative in which Iranian peoples have adapted and reinvented themselves. It is not only the home culture that determines the direction of diaspora. Rather, the complex network of places and spaces of home and away are mutually transformative (2011, p. 387).

Hamid Dabashi's cultural studies research and Hamid Nafcy's work on the TV and radio landscape of Los Angeles in 1993 made the most signifcant contributions to the designation of "Iranian diaspora." Hamid Dabashi's monograph *Parviz Sayyad's Theater of Diaspora* uses the term prominently in the very title. In his introduction, he speaks of intergenerational links between artists of Iranian origin, implying the inherent characteristic of community in the concept of diaspora (Sayyad and Dabashi 1993, p. xi). Hamid Nafcy, for his part, elaborates on the state of liminality and in-betweenness, and thus, despite the word "exile" in the title of his monograph *The Making of Exile Cultures*, speaks of "an ethnic minority, not just an exilic community" and "hyphenated Iranian-Americans and not just Iranians" (1993, p. 196), and fnally invokes "people in diaspora" (1993, p. 16 f.). In his monograph *An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking*, published in 2001, he further differentiated sharply between exile and diaspora: "There is nothing common about exile and diaspora" (p. 3). Hamid Dabashi also stresses this point by deconstructing the concept of exile, which occupies a central place in the experience and life reality of people living outside Iran, especially those in Los Angeles. According to him, the repeated term "exile" fuels a narrative that reinforces binary opposites instead of dissolving them. He unmasks the narrative of exile as a construct when he fnally argues that the majority of people living outside Iran are, strictly speaking, in a diaspora rather than in exile:

The fact is that with few exceptions the overwhelming majority of Iranians living outside Iran can get on an airplane and return to their homeland and there lead a half-decent life not particularly worse or better than what they lead in Los Angeles, Washington DC, London, or Paris (2009, p. 251).

In 2012, Hamid Nafcy dedicated an entire volume of his four-volume monograph *A Social History of Iranian Cinema* to the Iranian diaspora and its flmmaking. Here, the concept of diaspora is omnipresent: he writes of "Iranian culture in the diaspora" (2012, p. 384) and of a "worldwide diaspora" (2012, p. 372), and uses the term in a clearly positive way:

Millions of Iranians are living outside their homeland in one of the greatest modern diasporas, from where they are creating dynamically intertwined multilateral, transnational, and multicultural communities tied to each other and to their homelands by a globaI mediawork (2012, p. 511).

In his opinion, the difference between "exile" and "diaspora" lies in the reference point or frame of reference: "exile" would tie it closely to the country of origin, Iran, whereas "diaspora" means the opening towards the current center of life and the coexistence of different infuences:

While the exiles' identity involved a near exclusive, vertical relationship with the Iranian homeland, diasporic consciousness was multisited and multilateral: a vertical relationship with Iran and horizontal relations both with Iranian compatriot communities elsewhere and with their coethnics and coreligionists across the globe (2012, p. 395).

Similar to Dabashi, he also argues that the change from "exile" to "diaspora" has to do with the practical possibilities of return: "Finally, as exile became diaspora and immigration, and as more Iranians returned home for visits, the sights and sounds of home of decades earlier lost their hold" (2012, p. 388).

The shift from the terms "refugee," "émigré," and "exile" to "diaspora" should be seen in the context of the expansion of the concept of diaspora and the concomitant Diaspora Studies. It follows the change from a negative concept of a specifc form of dispersion to a fexible and positive concept of global migration (Brah 1996; Bauböck 2010; Tölölyan 2012). The Iranian diaspora, like any diaspora, is by no means a coherent community, it includes people of different political colors, social origins and generations. A problematic aspect of the term "Iranian diaspora" is the adjective, which makes the ethnic attribution visible and thus follows a logic of inclusion or exclusion. The Dictionary of Ethnology describes ethnicity as a concept of a group of people with a uniform culture and identity (Streck 2000, p. 53). In his text "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities," Stuart Hall counters this all too simple, long-prevailing defnition with the following:

They [ethnicities] are not already-produced stabilities and totalities in the world. They do not operate like totalities. If they have a relationship to our identities, cultural and individual, they do not any longer have that suturing, structuring, or stabilizing force, so that we can know what we are simply by adding up the sum of our positions in relation to them (2007, p. 45).

Closely tied to the concept of identity as a never-completed process, Hall conceptualizes ethnicity as an entity that is not self-contained either. The process from identity to ethnic identity, according to him, passes through identifcation and inclusion or exclusion mechanisms. These mechanisms play an important role, especially in the search for identity-forming narratives:

In the course of the search for roots, one discovered not only where one came from, one began to speak the language of that which is home in the genuine sense, that other crucial moment which is the recovery of lost histories. The histories that have never been told about ourselves that we could not learn in schools, that were not in any books, and that we had to recover (2007, p. 52).

These narratives form the awareness of belonging and (self-)attributions. Stuart Hall cites the example of Jamaican people who, when asked whether they would describe themselves as "black," initially reacted with disbelief. The different shades of brown and black were anchored in Jamaican parlance by many different terms, but there was no single category. This only emerged during post-colonialism, as empowerment and demarcation from the white colonial powers. Stuart Hall therefore describes the category of "black" as follows: "Black was created as a political category in a certain historical moment. It was created as a consequence of certain symbolic and ideological struggles" (Hall 2007, p. 54). "Black" is thus a category that creates an ethnic attribution at a certain historical moment in a certain geographical place. What is made visible in an act of inclusion or exclusion is primarily a power relationship, a valorization or empowerment vis-à-vis the Other:

This notion breaks down the boundaries, between outside and inside, between those who belong and those who do not, between those whose histories have been written and those whose histories they have depended on but whose histories cannot be spoken (Hall 2007, p. 48).

Drawing on Stuart Hall, I would like to argue that the term "Iranian diaspora"—like the category of "black"—is a constructed category that stems from a specifc socio-political and historical context. Taking the Islamic Revolution and the waves of migration associated with it as a starting point, the term is charged with the desire to describe the migratory condition in a positive way. Associated with this is the image of the well-integrated, left-wing, anti-religious, educated, and Western-oriented people of the middle to upper-middle classes, who are globally connected with Iran as well as with all other people within the Iranian diaspora and their respective countries. This carries the illusion of a homogeneous identity, which has been viewed critically:

The enemy had to be what we called "multi-culturalism." […] Nobody would talk about racism but they were perfectly prepared to have "International Evenings," when we would all come and cook our native dishes, sing our own native songs and appear in our own native costume (Hall 2007, p. 55 f.).

In this sense, the term "Iranian diaspora" is not only symptomatic of a positive description of a certain experience and lived reality of people residing outside Iran in a certain historical and geographical context. Ethnicity is used here as a defnite means of cultural localization; "of positioning, of placing [that] the term ethnicity connotes" (Hall 2007, p. 61). Cultural localization is always tied up with identity, because, according to Stuart Hall, it takes place within representation itself, not outside it: "Identity is always in part a narrative, always in part a kind of representation. It is always within representation. Identity is not something which is formed outside and then we tell stories about it" (2007, p. 49).

The term "Iranian diasporic cinema," like "Iranian diaspora," also carries the ethnic attribution as a marker of positioning within a cultural feld, in this case flm. This approach assumes that such positions are always reached through processes of negotiation and delimitation: "The fact remains that every new position, in asserting itself as such, determines a displacement of the whole structure and that, by the logic of action and reaction, it leads to all sorts of changes in the *prises de position* of the occupants of the other positions" (Bourdieu 1983, p. 338; emphasis in original).

In the following analysis of Ana Lily Amirpour's *A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night*, I will show that "Iranian diasporic cinema" is centrally concerned with the dissolution of cultural and generic ascriptions, leading to a new form of cinematic media-space in which postdiasporic conditions are negotiated.

# **Beyond Hybridity**

In most flms of the Iranian diaspora from the 1980s and 1990s, the narrative themes of migration and travel are embedded in transitional spaces such as hotels and airports. Some early diasporic flms that are popular for such scenes are *Sarhad* (*Checkpoint*), directed by Parviz Sayyad (USA, 1982); *The Suitors*, directed by Ghassem Ebrahimian (USA, 1988); *Guests of Hotel Astoria*, directed by Reza Allamehzadeh (USA, 1989); *I Love Vienna*, directed by Houshang Allahyari (Austria, 1991); and *I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore* (USA, 1994), directed by Caveh Zahedi.

The imaginary city of "Shahr-i Bad," depicted in the 2014 flm *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,* poses an interesting example of transitional spaces other than airports and hotels. Ana Lily Amirpour started a crowdfunding initiative to fund her directorial debut, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. The story goes as follows: Arash (Arash Marandi) lives with his heroin-addicted father, Hossein (Marshall Manesh). They are harassed by a cruel, drug-dealing pimp named Saeed (Dominic Rans), who seizes the young man's prized Ford Mustang as payment for the father's debts to him. In a crime of opportunity, Arash in turn steals a pair of diamond earrings from the wealthy young woman he works for, Shaydah (Rome Shadanloo). At night, Saeed comes across a strange young woman in a chador. "The Girl" (Sheila Vand) seduces Saeed and convinces him to take her back to his apartment, where she grows fangs and kills him; it turns out she is a vampire. As she leaves, she passes Arash, who has come to offer the earrings in exchange for his car. He fnds Saeed dead, and takes back his car keys along with a suitcase of drugs and cash. Arash decides to sell the drugs, allowing him to quit his job working for Shaydah. Later, he attends a costume party at a nightclub dressed as Dracula. "The Girl" with the chador spends her time listening to music alone in her apartment, skateboarding, or bedeviling pedestrians by night until she comes across the lost Arash. He shows vulnerability and compassion, and she takes him to her home, where they listen to music and she resists the temptation of his neck. Meanwhile, suffering from heroin withdrawal, Hossein has an episode where he believes Arash's cat to be his dead wife. The following morning, Arash discovers Hossein's dead body. Distressed, he runs to the apartment of "The Girl" and begs her to run away with him. They drive off together into an undecided future.

The flm is shot in black-and-white and opens with a medium close-up of Arash. He is wearing sunglasses and smoking while he leans up against a garden fence in a casual manner reminiscent of James Dean (Fig. 1). The tall wooden fence takes up the right three-quarters of the shot, leaving the protagonist the left quarter of the shot; in other words, the view of the surroundings is initially restricted. The camera holds the shot steady to show Arash waiting as the Western-style opening credits roll. The frst shot recalls the beginning of Sergio

**Fig. 1** *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,* "Opening," USA 2014

Leone's 1968 Spaghetti Western *Once Upon a Time in the West*. Suddenly something seems to be moving behind the slits of the fence and Arash jumps through a gap to catch a cat. He then makes his way along the path as the camera follows his purposeful steps.

Slowly the camera pans out to reveal dusty streets, an empty parking lot, a large industrial building, and fnally, in the background, the city. Arash continues to walk down the street with confdence as the camera shoots him from a birds-eye view. He walks past a street sign that reads "Shahr-i Bad" in Farsi, translating to "bad city" (Fig. 2). The camera pans out even further to a wide shot that reveals an American suburb, squeezed between the city and the rural landscape. The shot lacks any central area with a church, mosque, town hall, market, or square, and the view only shows a few houses of Shahr-i Bad (Fig. 3). It is impossible to identify the area from the shot geographically, but director Ana Lily Amirpour explains:

I think things that happen, happen inside me, and they happen in all the places in the world […], which is loneliness, being misunderstood, wanting to fnd a connection, feeling isolated. I feel there is a heaviness that a lot of societies wear. And I don't really think it's a geographically specifc thing (Amirpour 2015)2.

The street signs and the few spoken sentences in Farsi suggest that the story is set in Iran even though the flm was shot in California. To the question if the director would have preferred shooting "on the actual locations," Amirpour responds:

I do think it's a fairytale and for me it's just an Iran of my mind. Film is an opportunity to make your own universe, make your own world. I think that's what is exciting and wonderful about it. […] The great thing about art is that the limitations are actually the thing that encourages the creativity and push you to new places. I wanted to do this thing, ok so I cannot do it there, but then it became this limitless to really make my own place, make my own rules: we made the money,

**Fig. 2 and 3** *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,* "Arash enters the city," USA 2014

we reinvented the posters, the street signs, it was like really glorious, like making a world, that's one of the best parts (Amirpour 2015)3.

Ana Lily Amirpour does not see resorting to made-up spaces as an involuntary or secondary solution due to the lack of real alternatives, but as a chance to open up and create new spaces through flm. She has produced her own world, a no-man's-land, between the United States and Iran. Mixing elements from Iranian, American, and other (flm) cultures links to Laura Marks' concept of *intercultural cinema*:

"Intercultural" indicates a context that cannot be confned to a single culture. It also suggests movement between one culture and another, thus implying the possibility of transformation. Intercultural means that a work is not the property of any single culture, but mediates in at least two directions. It accounts for the encounter between different cultural organizations of knowledge, which is one of the sources of intercultural cinema's synthesis of new forms of expression and new kinds of knowledge. (Marks 2000, p. 6 f.)

The transitional space of *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night* is not a third space combining two or more elements (as conceptualized by Homi K. Bhabha); rather, it is the point of departure, the premise of the flm. Shahr-i Bad is not only a transitional space because the tattooed and pierced drug dealer Saeed drinks black tea out of small Persian teacups, or because the chador-wearing protagonist listens to songs by the White Lies. It is a transitional space because there is a thin line between life and death, day and night, black and white, danger and comfort, and horror and humor. Shahr-i Bad is a fuid space constantly in motion and process, and most importantly, a space with cultural exchange and negotiation. The city goes beyond genre descriptions and reveals that diaspora is characterized by hybridity and not cultural essentialism. This hybridity appears in the transitional spaces of this flm in a way that renders cultural designations impossible. Cultural and genre elements mix with imagined elements to the point that the construction is indicative of the relative arbitrariness of it all. In this sense Shahr-i Bad is a transcendent space, and so the dissolution of ethnic attributions coincides with the dissolution of genre attributions.

The vampire in *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night* wears a chador that not only functions as camoufage, but as a nondescript look. In response to a question about reinterpreting the chador from a symbol of female repression to a rebellious vampire cloak, the director Ana Lily Amirpour says:

The chador has this weight, this velvety, satiny [texture], it catches the air in a certain way, it felt like really nice. The thing about the chador or any of the things we do, it could be the bumper stickers on your car, how you organize your house, all the things that make the system of how we appear in the world, the truth is that

**Fig. 4 and 5** *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,* "The vampire shows her teeth," USA 2014

whatever reason, once you start pealing back the layers there is very very strange things inside us people and often it contradicts the outside system (2015)4.

She does not see an ostensible political message in the use of the chador, but rather emphasizes the tactile and haptic dimension of the chador as a flm prop.

"The Girl" is shown frst in participating in everyday rituals like going for walks, putting on makeup, and listening to music. Only once she encounters the drug dealer Saeed, the camera zooms in on her face and reveals her pointy vampire fangs. She pounces on him and sucks his blood, after which the camera shows another close up of her face, her mouth smeared with blood and her eyes possessed with bloodlust (Fig. 4 and 5).

This closely parallels Jim Jarmusch's staging of his protagonist in the 2013 flm *Only Lovers Left Alive*. After Eve (Tilda Swinton) drinks blood from a bottle for the frst time, the camera zooms in on her face, showing her mouth covered in blood, her pointed teeth, and her eyes closed in a moment of pleasure (Fig. 6).

In both cases, the background becomes blurry and is no longer in the feld of perception. The drug dealer's apartment in Shahr-i Bad and Eve's apartment in Tangier transcend into a new cinematic space of transformation. The woman believed to be human becomes a vampire and the flm transitions into the alleged vampire flm genre. The close-up in both scenes is purposely implemented as a cinematic tool of (de)visualization. In distanced shots, the viewer cannot recognize them as vampires. Only through the close-up do the traits of the vampire genre become visible in an over-exposition of blood and pointed teeth. The face becomes the cinematic space that reveals the genre.

In this "frst Iranian vampire Western," the protagonists do not ride into the sunset on horses, extending the frontier and claiming newfound territory. However, Arash drives a Ford Mustang that exemplifes the frontier motif and is reminiscent of 1950s Americana; "The Girl" rides a skateboard that calls to mind the 1980s.

One scene shows an empty street lined with streetlights. In perfect symmetry with the shot, the vampire can be seen on the skateboard appearing in the distance (Fig. 7). She rides down the street towards the fxed camera before disappearing behind it, whipping her chador in the wind (Fig. 8).

The end of the flm shows the Ford Mustang's headlights close up before zooming out to show the vampire and Arash sitting in the car with the cat between them, listening to music. After a long pause, the shot cuts to the back of the car as the lights go on and the engine starts. The lights illuminate the license plate that reads "Shahr-i Bad" in Farsi, thereby casting the city in focus one last time (Fig. 9). The Ford Mustang drives over the dusty desert road leaving behind the city and a small horizon of light at the top of the screen before fnally disappearing in the darkness of the night (Fig. 10).

In both scenes, the shift from *on* to *off* screen, visible to invisible, by using alternating close ups and distance shots, becomes a crucial cinematic tool for conceptualizing the genre element of the frontier. In this sense, *A Girl Walks Home* 

**Fig. 7 and 8** *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,* "The vampire rides her skateboard," USA 2014

**Fig. 9 and 10** *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,* "License plate and driving off," USA 2014

*Alone at Night* merges Iran and the Unites States and reimagines diaspora as a phenomenon where the frontier is not just extended but disappears entirely.

Based on the theoretical foundation that genre structures in the production and circulation of cultural artifacts are just as effective as the various approaches to using and analyzing media, Ivo Ritzer and Peter W. Schulze describe genre as a non-hermetic category: "genres cannot be understood as closed systems, but only as processes of systematization. They are always in fux and undergo changes" (2013, p. 15). Accordingly, as an open-ended concept, genre is especially useful for expressing the uncertainty and distance from (cultural) essentialism that are inherent to postdiaspora flms: "genres do not resemble each other because they have a common feature, but because they share multiple properties. Therefore, they cannot be designated essentialistically" (Ritzer and Schulze 2013, p. 10). Edward Said famously wrote: "All cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic" (1993, p. xxv). The fexible motion and discarding of clear designations are symptomatic of the similarities between genre and postdiaspora. The frontier no longer exists, space has long been conquered, and cultural and ethnical designations are no longer recognizable as simple hybrid forms.

# **Conclusion: "Postdiaspora is an Emancipatory Move"**

The example of *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night* analyzed above must be seen as an advancement of pre-existing diasporic spaces, which make cultural and cinematic attributions increasingly impossible. I would like to use the term "postdiaspora flm," as a variety of what Jeffrey Sconce called "smart cinema":

While previous forms of art cinema concentrated on formal experimentation with flm style and narrative structure as a means of critiquing the codes of "bourgeois realism" and/or "bourgeois society," the new smart cinema has for the most part re-embraced classical narrative strategies, instead experimenting with tone (2002, p. 352; emphasis in original).

His concept functions as an umbrella term for a multitude of aesthetic and narrative forms, each of which is an expression of an individual handwriting. The postdiaspora flm is thus an intelligent cinema that not only represents and depicts cultural differences, but may be taken as the premise for overcoming them:

Postdiaspora is an emancipatory move, refuting not the connection with one's place of origin, but rather one's unequal status vis-à-vis homelanders and hostlanders. Furthermore, postdiaspora is the struggle to overcome an imposed status position based on place of origin. Postdiaspora does not mean marginalization in the way diaspora does (Laguerre 2017, p. 22).

Using hybridized cultural and generic elements, Shahr-i Bad consists of multilayered intercultural spaces and thus opens up a feld of plural potentialities. As a cinematic-hybrid space, Shahr-i Bad appears in such a way that the genre elements are used as cinematic means to create a genre-space that allows complex cultural exchange processes to be observed and analyzed on the basis of cross-spatial cinematic elements. Shahr-i Bad is a cinematic space in which several spatial dimensions, which are actually contradictory and mutually incompatible, are juxtaposed in one flmic-hybrid space. The unifying force prevails over the separating force in dissimilar constellations. Diaspora is not a culturally hermetic space, and neither is flm. Thus the cinematic space becomes a media-space through the interrelation of different cultural elements. The fexible movement of relating and withdrawing clear attributions is symptomatic of the postdiaspora. This re-confguration of Shahr-i Bad's postdiaspora flmic space is based on revising genre elements from vampire and western flm genres. The frontier no longer exists, the space has already been conquered, and cultural and ethnic attributions are no longer recognizable as hybrid forms. Instead, they are now cinematic media-spaces conceived less as transitions or passages than as places of residence. *A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night* thus joins the ranks of flmmaking that "survives (and at times thrives) at the symbolic and material intersection of 'Hollywood,' the 'indie' scene, and the vestiges of what cinephiles used to call 'art' flms" (Sconce 2002, p. 351). As a flmic-hybrid space, it engages in cinematic transformation processes that go beyond its own re-confgurations, thus allowing conclusions about general cultural transformations of postdiaspora and postdiaspora flmic spaces as they express mobile and fexible intersections and collaborations, which in turn stimulate further connections.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Alena Strohmaier** is postdoctoral researcher and project leader of the research project "'But I'm not flming! I'm just doing a bit of video…' Cinematic appropriation processes of protest videos 2009–11 in the Middle East and North Africa" (2019–2023; funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Prior, she was the academic coordinator of the research network "Re-Confgurations" and managing editor of *META Journal. Middle East – Topics & Arguments* (both Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies). Her main areas of research are diaspora flm, media and migration, digital archives, and video activism.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **The Metamorphosis of the Signifcance of Death in Revolutionary Times: Mohammad Rabie's** *Otared* **(2014)**

Walaa Said

*All hope abandon, ye who enter here. Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri*

# **Introduction**

Although violent death (and its related themes of fear, anger, mourning, loss, pain, torture, and despair) has been ever-present throughout the Middle East since 2010, both as a trigger and an outcome of the mass-mobilization in the region, it has not been adequately addressed by various domains of intellectual discourse. In her 2015 article "Death and Martyrdom in the Arab Uprisings: An Introduction," Amira Mittermaier criticizes the lack of anthropological research on death during this period (2015, p. 588). Furthermore, she urges her readers to reconsider "death as an analytical lens to think about street politics" (Mittermaier 2015, p. 587). Moving away from the designation "Arab Spring," which tends to romanticize the extensive popular political mobilization in public spaces across the Arab world, Mittermaier's reminder provides a chance to scrutinize the effects of the intense incidents of violence and death and their affective consequences on reproducing and disempowering both the individual and the masses. The article analyzes selected scenes from Mohammad Rabie's novel *Otared* (2014) in an effort to trace the effects of violent death on bodies and to examine how those bodies

W. Said (\*)

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: walaa.said@staff.uni-marburg.de

© The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_15

translate and internalize such deaths' effects through the emotions of anger, hope, fear, and performative horror.

# **Violent Death: Between the Derealization of the Living and the Martyrization of the Dead**

Violent death is medically defned as a death caused by intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, a group, or a community (Norris 1992). As Rynearson explains, violent death thus has three dimensions, the "three Vs": violence, violation, and volition. Correspondingly, dying is either "injurious," "transgressive," or resulting from "irresponsible negligence" (2013, p. 21). In turn, these three dimensions mandate "retaliation," "retribution," and "punishment" and work as "an inherent counter-story to the [three] V's of violent dying" (Rynearson 2013, p. 21). Those three Vs interfere with the mourners' acceptance of death, causing what is called a "complicated grief," "a form of bereavement marked by elevated and persistent separation distress, seriously impaired functioning, and diffculties 'moving on' with life following the loss of a loved one" (Currier et al. 2006, p. 404).

Since January 25, 2011, Egypt has witnessed bloody clashes, chaotic killing, sniping, and injuries at the center of its capital aired on television screens or circulated via social media. Given such a state of emergency, where death is visible and fear becomes both permeable and ubiquitous, it is useful to briefy explore how death is facilitated, permitted, and received, and Judith Butler's concept of "derealization of the living" provides an apt lens for this exploration.

In *Precarious Life*, Judith Butler describes at length how violence and death are facilitated and justifed. While she mainly criticizes the ideas that allow US society to justify suspecting and killing "Others" in the context of the War on Terror, it is quite helpful to extend her argument to include other tense political situations in which systematic violence is a means to control widespread fear or cover national vulnerability. Life, accordingly, becomes a privilege that is not granted to everyone equally. On a discursive level, this privilege is bestowed upon those who demonstrate ethnic, political, and/or social commonalities within the dominant group, whereas people who lack such commonalities are denied that privilege. That said, there are those whose lives are considered valuable and, hence, "grievable." And there are those who, because of cultural or political difference, unfamiliarity, or disputation, are distanced and othered; their lives are not valuable and their death is ungrievable (Butler 2006, p. 34 ff.). In Butler's words, this discourse derealizes those lives, rendering them "unreal." So when violence is exercised against the invisible, "it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated" (Butler 2006, p. 33). Accordingly, those derealized lives are "neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral" (Butler 2006, p. 33 f.). Those situations of political fragmentation beget what Butler calls "violence of the derealization" (Butler 2006, p. 33), a vicious cycle of violence that is nearly impossible to break, as it targets spectral bodies. Within this discourse, exerting violence against or even killing such spectral bodies is not considered a crime; it never happens. The process of derealizing bodies mirrors the state's fear; therefore, the process constitutes a case of othering, in which the spectral bodies are scapegoated for the loss of security.

Since grief is essential for the living, not only to process death, but to assure them of the value of their lives and thus their deaths, the total absence of united national grief results in a "national complicated grief." The spread of the arbitrary killings that took place on public spaces, intentionally at times, confrmed the unworthiness of individual lives and gave root to intense fear. In a fragmented political context that lacks national grieving, renaming the dead "martyrs" (*shuhadāʾ*) serves as an antidote to their derealization. This retrospective process of martyrizing the dead offers a healing solution. While the dead themselves cannot beneft from being upgraded to martyrs, martyrization of dead has allowed bereaved survivors to fnd meaning for the death of their loved ones, and perhaps, for the dead's lost lives.

Amira Mittermaier characterizes martyrdom positively as "about giving one's life for a cause, a better state of affairs, and simultaneously … about one's fate in the afterlife" (2015, p. 588). By contrast, in her introduction to *Martyrdom in Literature*, Friederike Pannewick problematizes the concept as "a voluntary act staged as a response to the collective experience of suffering, fear and utter confusion" (2004, p. 1). Although the previous defnitions stress the intentions of the dead, which are impossible for a witness to know for certain unless the dead left behind a note, martyrization cannot be accomplished without the living sharing the same suffering and/or cause. While both Mittermaier and Pannewick suggest the purposefulness of the dead, the latter not only stresses collective weariness with the socio-political contexts, but partially explains protestors' insistence on continuing to occupy the public squares despite the random killings. However, for a person to count as a martyr, his or her death should be witnessed or attended by an "audience" (Mittermaier 2015, p. 588) and accepted by the local community of survivors. Thus, martyrdom "is a label assigned retroactively" (Mittermaier 2015, p. 588): in order for this process to be completed, the life of the dead requires to be examined and idealized, and transformed into a legacy circulated to keep the memory alive. Although the factors of witnessing and/or intentions were not satisfed in many cases during the clashes, martyrization continues to be widely practiced. It has been convenient for protesters and political activists to extend the label of martyr to anyone shot or killed during clashes and, equally important, to one's political allies*.* At the outset, this grand narrative works as a coping mechanism for this new level of terror and heightened death rate, serving "as tools for holding the state accountable, as mobilizers of continuous protests, and as a source of inspiration" (Mittermaier 2015, p. 586).

On another note, Mittermaier points to the fact that "death does not erase hierarchies" (2015, p. 594), and not all martyrs are memorialized equally: some become famous and are branded through different media, while others are consigned to oblivion, or denied the rank altogether.1 Despite the intention of fnding consolation by martyrizing the dead, the discourse of martyrdom contributes more to the state of the derealization of the living, who are derealized twice. The hierarchy of death and martyrdom denies that all lives are valuable and therefore grievable. Evidently, the interrelationship between violence and the revolutionary act problematizes death as well as life and keeps lives "interminably spectral." As much as martyrization becomes a way to grant death meaning, the intensity of fear remains: silently lurking and paving the way for the police and/or the military state to take over and, most importantly, eradicate revolutionary bodies from public spaces. In short, empty public spaces subjected to military discipline have been haunted by the spectral bodies of the dead and the permanent stain of fear.

# **Death and Fear in Post-2011 Dystopias: The Example of Mohammad Rabie's Otared**

Mohammad Rabie's novel *Otared* is graphically violent: it includes intense descriptive scenes of rape, necrophilia, and homicide. Dead, tormented bodies and bodies in terror are not only the pivotal theme in the novel; this is the text's tool for demonstrating a deconstructive reading experience of the idealized uprising. In this novel, published shortly after the dispersion of the Rabaa' sit-in of 2013, the uprising of 2011 is a point of departure, or better, a momentum, for the text's fragmentation that implodes any possible discourse of hope. In the narrative, January 25, 2011 instigates cycles of dystopic futures. The novel tackles the theme of sniping as the main reason for the deaths during the frst eighteen days. *Otared* is a complex work, in which the violent death scenes are gravely elaborated. Through a circular labyrinth, *Otared* comprises three main temporal threads: 2025 AD, 2011 AD, and 455 AH (1063 AD)2 in fve parts (with alternating 2011 and 2025 parts grouped around the central 455 section), named after these points in time, besides a prologue, which takes place some time before 2011. The novel is narrated in a line that cuts across the three temporal lines: a 2025 grotesque under occupation Cairo, taking most of the narrative space; a briefer section during 2011 "revolutionary" Cairo; and a 455 AH early medieval apocalyptic Cairo, at the center of the narration. Once the narration passes the medieval portrayal of Cairo, the entire tone and vocabulary intensifes and recapitulates the metaphysical idea of hell as an interpretative paradigm of the following course of actions. The characters portrayed in the 2025, 2011, and 455 sections remain separated throughout the narration except for the fnal part, titled "2025," in which Otared, the protagonist of the prologue and the 2025 time line, meets Zahra, the protagonist of the 2011 segments. The narrative voice is polyphonic, with both frst-person and omnipresent narrators. In the following, my analysis will focus on scrutinizing how, in a revolutionary context, the narrative techniques strip any glorifed signifcance from the moment of death and render it a mere public performance of terror.

# **2011: Hope as the Grim Reaper**

In the 2011 narrative thread, Rabie uses two themes to explore how lives are derealized. First, he dramatizes the random killings committed by snipers on rooftops overlooking Tahrir Square during the eighteen days of the uprising. The narrative demonstrates the effects of the extensive, arbitrary killings on the streets of Cairo on which people are entrapped, as death is inescapable. From another angle, Rabie presents the derealization of lives through the anonymity of the dead. All the sub-stories in this narrative thread center on dead bodies without ID cards, the state offcial document of people's identifcation, visibility, and surveillance. For the "[m]any in this country [who] had no ID; many were too low down the scale to own one; [and] many had lost theirs on purpose" (Rabie 2016, p. 177). These scenes highlight the symbolic existence of the ID as a reference to the system and its concept of "humanity." In the eye of the state, humanity is synonym to citizenship based on a notion of complete docility and obedience. Without an offcial ID, both citizenship and human individuality are erased. Thus, those who decided to dispose of their IDs might escape the frm grip of state's surveillance, but they lose any chance of personal visibility; their lives and their deaths are, therefore, not accountable or even valuable. Dramatizing those two themes touches upon how the system derealizes lives and, as a corollary, how people deeply internalized this systematic derealization.

Moreover, those two themes dismiss any glorifed interpretations of death. In this context, death is not meant to be natural; rather, it is executed through killing and visibly deformed bodies in public spaces. Rabie captures the moments of extreme fragility and vulnerability that occur when citizens are exposed to those scenes of death. In other words, through emotions of terror and helplessness, the "2011" sections reproduce an alternative history of the frst eighteen days. Accordingly, the novel renders revolutionary demonstrations distant and invisible while foregrounding death and deformed corpses. The text brushes aside the role of the political activists, instead spotlighting marginal characters and their individual confrontation with the commonality of death. The image of the public space as a festive *mulid*3 is depicted as a space of fear.4

On another level, the novel's 2011 narrative thread is concerned with portraying the frsthand experiences of marginal unpoliticized characters from different social classes. The narrative thread of the middle-class characters Insal and Zahra examines the death of the unidentifed from another perspective, in which dead bodies affect living ones. As Cairo goes through chaos and paralysis during the frst eighteen days of the uprising, Insal, a teacher, fnds himself responsible for his four-year-old student, Zahra, after she is left behind with no relatives or family to contact. Insal takes Zahra to live with him and his wife Layla, who is four months pregnant. Because he has never met Zahra's father, Insal decides sorrowfully to take the little girl on a journey through Cairo's morgues, which are packed with dead bodies, hoping to fnd her disappeared, "unknown" father. Insal's experience in the streets of Cairo exhibits how civilians inherited the system's way of derealizing the living. On his way home after a long day of searching, Insal watches civilians chase a man who is thought to be a thief because he is not carrying an ID. The man has been hit and tortured. When he is about to escape, Insal, taking him for a thief too, helps the crowd to grab him again. It takes only a few minutes until the man is hanged on a streetlight (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 159). Insal later approaches the body and observes that "[t]he nails were clean and the fngers well-formed. Unable to resist" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 159). This man was most probably not a thief; his mistake was to walk on the streets of Cairo without an ID while people are in a state of fear and doubt. Ironically, in Tahrir Square, where people are expressing their anger and shattering the old barriers of fear of the regime, fear becomes the predominate emotion that dictates people's action outside the revolutionary spaces. Arriving home, Insal is unable to verbalize his own fear caused by what he has seen. In a moment of breakdown, he beat at his temples. He tugged at his hair. He covered his mouth with his hand and started to scream. He jumped up and down. He bit his fngers. He gripped his shirt and tugged at it violently, trying to rip it. Then he started slapping his face with a relentless rhythm, a slap every two seconds, one slap after another, striking harder with each one … by the end each blow seemed to food the scene before him with a bright light … after a quarter of an hour of violence, he settled (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 159 f.)

Traumatized and likely suffering survivor's guilt, Insal inficts violence on his own body. An example of the middle class, he is another marginal character who has never before encountered violent death in public. Before encountering the hanged man and the bodies of gunshot victims in the morgues, Insal has only witnessed "peaceful" deaths: "the bodies of people he knew who had slipped quietly away after sickness or in their sleep" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 162).

All are exposed to rape, violence, death and deformed bodies of other marginal individuals. The exposure of this sudden severe violence disrupts their former contentment. The thin veil of security that their marginal existence provides them is abruptly and violently torn.

A closer look at the narrative perspective will help us to understand how the mood of obstruction and the sense of entrapment are expressed. The two parts titled "2011" share an omnipresent narrator that comments nonchalantly on the frst eighteen days of the uprisings where "[t]he people out in the streets were angry. Murder was abroad" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 164). This third-person voice is not passively narrating selective death scenes, but it exercises the authority of explaining what lies behind these scenes and commenting on the characters and events. In one early instance, the narrator unveils the master plan behind the sense of torment and death that unfolds later, saying:

[n]o one realized that what had happened and what would happen thereafter was preordained, that the hell they lived in was perfectly normal, was in fact a hell that recurred elsewhere and often, and that all these things were a punishment (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 154).

This early articulation briefy introduces the central notion of Rabie's political dystopia. Rabie borrows the Islamic concept of hell and dramatizes it. While, in Islamic theology, hell is a place that awaits the disobedient and nonbelievers in the afterlife, Rabie decides to design his own version of hell as an earthly place and eliminates any possibility of salvation. In consequence, Egyptians are the inhabitants of an eternal hell, where they are punished and doomed for eternity. The plot's twist is that the hell's inhabitants are unaware of living there; they mistakenly believe that they fnally are able to demonstrate agency and topple a regime. This dystopian construction completely dismantles the uprising's status as a glorifed act of resistance, rendering it absurd, as no revolutionary acts are expected in a traditional, theological hell: "There would be no victory today. There'd be no victory here, ever" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 165). In Rabie's nihilistic vision, life is stripped of meaning, and death, in this sense, is a torment to the living, void of any glory and heroism.

# **"2025": "Marters of the Reverlooshun!"**

Death becomes conventional in public spaces, exactly as the narrator anticipates in the "2011" section. Fear is normalized. Brutal killings become an integral part of daily life against a backdrop of a cumbersome political situation. In the "2025" parts, fourteen years after a failed uprising, the spirit of political activism and the ambition of a possible political reformation are demolished. Moreover, Cairo has been occupied by the mysterious "Knights of the Republic of Malta,"5 who have divided it into Western and Eastern sectors.

Otared's and his colleagues' usage of "resistance" highlights the term's ambiguity and its problematic aspects. By their defnition, resistance means "safeguarding the state" in which "the life of the average citizen [is] worthless when measured against the value of safeguarding the state" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 72). Moreover, at one of their secret meetings, Otared describes the fnal plan set in motion by Sulayman Madi, a top Resistance leader, to oust the Knights of Malta. In short, this plan consists of enjoining civilians to revolt against the occupiers and kick them out by disseminating "pure panic" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 67) among civilians, which the Resistance would blame on the occupiers. Madi goes on to explain how panic would be spread:

[T]he streets are going to be full of murder. It will be a crime without punishment … killing without rhyme or reason. The fragile barrier of security … will collapse without warning, and it is at that moment that the people will have no option but to rise up … there are no restrictions to what you can do—select your victims with total freedom. Men and women, children and the elderly, it's all the same. It will be easy because you will be concealed (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 68).

This vicious plan aggrandizes the derealization of the "average citizens" and the systematic enshrouding of their existence. The overriding purpose of the Resistance movement is to expel the occupiers in order to restore authority to Otared and his cohort. The confict, in this portrayal, is restricted between two poles of power over governing Egypt. This "national" resistance, in this sense, is a way to monopolize authority and surveillance and, moreover, to narrow the signifcance of "nation."

Ironically, in this plan, the envisaged dead "average citizens" are not considered "martyrs"; this status will be reserved for members of the Resistance. In the same meeting, they remember the shootings that happened on the "Day of Rage" in 2011. For Otared, Madi and their companions, the January 25, 2011 and the following days until the resignation of Mubarak are called the days of "troubles" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 70),6 or mockingly "the reverlooshun" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 72), in which sniping was an "attempt to frighten people and get them to go home" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 70). However, those "days of trouble" still conjure up a painful memory of their injured pride, when the people dared to burn down police stations and demanded the end of injustice. From 2011 to 2023 (a mix of factual and imagined events), this random shooting never stops; on the contrary, "killing was permitted [later on] to dispose of terrorists, troublemakers, ffth columnists, and demonstrators, with the unconditional support of the people, the prosecutor general, and the judiciary. Indeed. Truly wonderful days…" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 70 f.). "The unconditional support of the people" draws a direct connection between the masses' complicity in the state violence (inficted on political opponents in an illusion of maintaining a fragile, conditional security) and their entitlement to punishment for their complicity.

As one of the best snipers, Otared plays a major role in "Operation Pure Panic," where he is stationed on one of the high buildings in downtown Cairo, where he hunts "average" citizens. Quite surprisingly, after twenty-four hours of murder, sniping, and massive piles of corpses left on the streets, the Egyptians do not rise up; it is the Knights of Malta who decide all of a sudden to leave Egypt. As he enacts his fateful mission and roams the streets of Cairo in a Buddha mask, we see how the effects of killing civilians have changed dramatically. At this stage, citizens accept gunshots with indifference and anticipation, as if sloughing off the burden of living.

Rabie paints a rather grotesque portrait of Egyptian society in 2025 Cairo, where verbal violence, violent sex, homicide among civilians, public suicides and death penalties, and the availability of weapons are pandemic. Violent death becomes a performance of horror to which the spectators contribute to escalate it. The major scene of the SpongeBob-masked naked man committing suicide is wholly telling. Making use of the "arena of spectacles" (Edwards 2007),7 the man decides to perform his own death naked on one of the busy bridges of Cairo. Arranging his props to perform the self-killing, he knots a thick rope, one end tied to the rail and the other around his neck, smiles to the crowd through the hole in the mask, then starts to "spit," "shake his hips," and "grin" at them. He succeeds in establishing the desired attention from the crowd, who are "finging abuse at him and snorting derisively, and answering his shaking hips in kind. When he laugh[s] at them and wave[s], they laugh … and wave" too (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 96). To maintain the spectators' interactive engagement, he signals to the crowds with his frst and middle fngers his urge to smoke, and a lighter and pack of cigarettes are thrown to him. Introducing his climax, he smokes calmly while balancing himself on the railing and playfully starting to urinate on the people below the bridge. Finally he jumps off, and his neck is broken by the rope. The scene of his corpse is quite absurd: his swaying body maintains a lighted cigarette and mix of urine and blood. The scene of death does not truly cease after the man's personal demise; on the contrary, it makes space for its continuation by inviting the crowds to actively take part in it. The spectators transform into performers when they start to thrash his corpse with "stones from the ground, pieces of wood, bags of trash, shoes, [and] tomatoes" (Rabīʿ 2014, p. 97). Later, some of them start to shoot at the rope, while the pellets spread on the corpse and the "unmoving" spectators. Finally, the rope breaks and people circle the deformed corpse. Unlike the scenes of death in 2011, the crowd shows no anger, fear, or empathy; the spectators are either pass by indifferently or participate grotesquely in such scenes. Death itself is no longer a source of terror, having become a public performance. In parts of "2025," violent death has been internalized by the people and is reciprocated among them. In this futuristic context, civilians instigate even more horrifc deaths than the state does. This accentuates an extrapolated effect of violence and torture by allowing the normativity of violent death to prevail, which in turn provokes terror in the reader.

# **Conclusion**

While Keraitim and Mehrez describe Tahrir Square as a "symbolic site of the birth of the [Egyptian's] freedom" (2012), in *Otared* it only brings death and annihilation. Four years after January 2011, *Otared* was published as an introspective view of the event and its reception and as an expression of anger and entrapment. This sense of entrapment stems from the fact that the matrix of the authoritarian regime is as unshakable as the theological notion of hell. As long as the likes of Otared are not held accountable, lives will continue to be ungrievable. This desperate realization, in turn, nullifes the potency of resistance. After January 25, 2011, dystopian novels have perceived the event as a dystopic moment at which false hope cost people their lives. It is too soon to predict how long the wave of post-2011 dystopias will last or how it will develop, but it is quite clear that the main aim of Rabie and his fellow authors is to deconstruct utopianizing discourses of the uprising as a way of commemorating the dead and acknowledging the suffering of the living.

#### **Endnotes**


"found meanings in the bloody deaths of gladiators" (2007, p. 46), which are linked to their "attitudes of dying and representations of death in Roman antiquity" (Edwards 2007, p. 47).

# **References**


**Walaa Said** is a research fellow at the Institute of English and American Studies (IAA) at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). The working title of her PhD dissertation is: "Crossing Borders and Breaking Rules in Dystopian Political Systems: A Cross-Cultural Study". Since 2018, she is also a research fellow at the Department of Arabic Studies at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the same university. She is interested in borders, urban, and masculinity studies in relation to Egyptian, South African, and Canadian literatures.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Processing the Revolution: Exploring the Ways Tunisian Novels Refect Political Upheavals**

Charlotte Pardey

# **Introduction**

Socio-political transformations can be complicated and messy. Understanding them requires context and an active engagement with the events that goes beyond a descriptive narrative. Literary fction lends itself to this kind of rationalization or "processing," as I will explain below. Still, an event such as the 2010–11 uprising in Tunisia challenges literary expression; it is almost too overwhelming to be captured in its entirety between the covers of a novel. Yet political events of this scale contain a certain urgency and pervasiveness that pushes writers to narrate them and to put memory into words. This chapter explores how recent Tunisian novels that address the uprising deal with this challenge. Specifcally, it analyzes novels that have found acclaim in the Tunisian literary scene. All four works analyzed here were laureates of the Tunisian prize for fction, the Prix Comar d'Or. The selection of prizewinning novels suggests that the books represent ideas that are present within Tunisian society or at least supported by the jury of the literary award, as the frst section of the chapter will explore. Although all four works deal with the uprising, their portrayals of it represent different trends. Some employ autobiographic refections, with or without comparisons to past revolutions. Others contain family stories, particularly examining the notion of the absent father, and relegate the uprising to the sidelines. These different ways to rework the revolution will be discussed and analyzed below.

C. Pardey (\*)

Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: pardeyc@staff.uni-marburg.de

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_16

My main argument focuses on the novels' discussion of intimacy and personal experience in politically tumultuous times. Each work seeks a solution to the literary "problem" of how to write about revolutions: How can an author juggle both personal experience of the event and its national relevance? What should such a novel emphasize? A comparison of the works reveals that the revolution is already fading as a central theme of the novels.

# **Why Analyze Literature?**

Before delving deeper into this investigation, one might ask how analyzing post-revolutionary literature could help contextualize socio-political transformation processes. More specifcally, how does a comparative reading of novels help us make sense of the Tunisian uprising of 2010–11 and its aftermath? This chapter hypothesizes that literature is the outcome of a thought process, a rationalization or interpretation that actively engages with the materials or events it portrays by highlighting certain aspects more than others. Literature proposes metaphors, draws parallels, and offers allusions for reworking its subject matter. Moreover, literature is always created in a certain historical and social setting and refects the worldviews that dominate this setting. Lennard Davis describes this intertwinement as ideological. In his words, "novels do not depict life, they depict life as it is represented by ideology." He goes on to describe fction as "one of the ways in which the culture teaches itself about itself" (Davis 1987, p. 24 f.). This is another aspect of the "processing" that I am trying to highlight with this article. Since literature is in constant exchange with the societies in which and for which it was written, it not only offers its own processing of events, it also refects changes in perspective within society itself. Joseph A. Massad suggests in his study *Desiring Arabs* that the novel functions "as a reading (and writing) of society that is most unintrusive in comparison with other genres of writing and investigation" (Massad 2007, p. 269). As such, an exploration of literary production, particularly novels, from the aftermath of the Tunisian uprising paints a picture of how it has been perceived at different times. By examining novels that were awarded with literary prizes, we can draw conclusions about the ways in which the Tunisian literary establishment wishes the revolutionary events to be read by readers near and far.

# **Literary Prizes and Their Infuence: The Prix Littéraires Comar d'Or**

Abir Kréfa describes the laureates of the Comar d'Or literary prizes as some of the most visible and respected Tunisian authors (Kréfa 2013, p. 398). Marc Verboord adds more generally that the "winning of literary prizes is an indication of an author's contemporary prestige" (Verboord 2003, p. 266). Accordingly, one can assume that the literary establishment and the offcials behind the awards appreciate the four novels discussed in this chapter, which in turn allows certain interpretations regarding the ways in which the Tunisian literary establishment prefers for the revolutionary events to be processed in literature. The Prix Littéraires Comar d'Or are an initiative by Comar Insurance to promote culture in Tunisia and are organized in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, signifying a connection to the Tunisian state. The prizes have been awarded since 1997 to authors of Tunisian nationality and their works, which can be either published in Tunisia or abroad. The prizes are awarded in different categories and differentiate between Arabic and French, which refects the prominence in the Tunisian literary landscape of publications in both French and Arabic. While winners of the Comar d'Or in Arabic or French receive 10,000 Tunisian dinars each, the winners of the Prix Spéciaux des jurys win 5000 and winners of the Prix Découverte receive 2500 Tunisian dinars.1 In Europe, "the monetary value of literary prizes is quite often secondary," according to Richard Jacquemond, yet this is different in the Arab world, where literary markets are weak and in need of state sponsorship (Jacquemond 2008, p. 47). Publishers or authors can submit novels to be considered for the prizes. A winning author cannot win another prize in the same category for fve years.2

Authors, journalists, and academics sit on the jury that selects the winning novel. Since the awards' goal is the promotion of literature, being selected might be about literary quality, yet winning the prize is more about economics. This is important, since the Tunisian literary market is dependent on state funding. In addition to the monetary benefts, winning awards also increases a writer's professional status. The publicity for a book enlarges its readership, and meanwhile its author gains professional opportunities. For example, Yamen Manai, the Paris-based winner of the 2017 Comar d'Or, said that winning the prize paved the way to a variety of trips to and readings in Tunisia.3

Literary prizes form an archive (Ducas 2013, p. 8), not just of the novels published each year or of the writers and books that had prestige at the time, as was argued at the beginning of this section. The prizes also track which publishers have been publishing a successful canon of works. Since the award's inception in 1997, ninety books have been awarded in the different categories, as occasionally two works and their authors were selected per category. While many publishers only received an award in one year, others were more successful. Here are the top fve publishing houses, in ascending order of the prizes they received: Arabesques Éditions (four awards), Dār Zaynab li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzīʿ (fve awards), Éditions Elyzad (six awards), Dār Sahar li-l-nashr (seven awards), and Éditions du Sud (thirteen awards). These awards are almost all equally distributed before and after the uprising of 2010–11, indicating that the socio-political transformations did not make one or the other publisher more presentable than under the previous regime. The publishing house Zaynab li-l-nashr wa-l-tawzīʿ is exempted from this observation, as it was founded in 2013.

Literary prizes can include as well as exclude. As Sylvie Ducas writes: "Comme tout réseau, les prix littéraires sont oxymoriques et paradoxaux: à la fois ouverture et fermeture, lieu de contrôle, de pouvoir ou d'échanges, d'interactions, frontière entre la norme et la marge" (Ducas 2013, p. 216).4 In the case of the Comar d'Or, one exclusion is the restriction against applying after winning the previous year. Another exclusionary effect can be that participants need to supply the competition with seven copies of the work to apply; this poses a fnancial burden for the respective publisher or author.5 In terms of the awards' role in facilitating an exchange, this investigation will offer as an example since it brings together four novels that process the Tunisian uprising.

# **Individual Impressions of Socio-Political Change**

Autobiographical accounts contain an individual perspective and are therefore exempt from the need to give all-inclusive explanations. This perspective was frequently adopted in and after 2011, not only in Tunisia. In Egypt, publications about personal experiences of the Tahrir protests proliferated, and in Syria, personal accounts narrated the beginning of the protests.6 Two recent laureates of the Comar d'Or 2017 exemplify fctional versions of this trend from Tunisia: Béchir Garbouj's *Passe l'intrus* (2016) and Jamila Ben Mustapha's *Rupture(s)* (2017). The works were written in French and are analyzed below in regard to their representations of the socio-political changes associated with the Tunisian uprising.

In the frst novel, a professor refects on the uprising of 2010–11 against the backdrop of the 1968 Paris protests, which he experienced as a Tunisian exchange student. At the time, he was in love with the mysteriously absent Nadine. *Passe l'intrus* uses the 1968 Paris protests as a stand-in for the Tunisian uprising. This creates a distance from the Tunisian events, which is further increased by focusing on the private instead of the political. While the primary focus of the narrative is on the love affair, which ends during the 1968 protests, the novel itself speaks to and about the Tunisian uprising.

The professor explores what remains from tumultuous times and addresses the vagueness of memory. In the process, he illustrates the diffculties of contextualizing or rationalizing socio-political transformations. His memories are blurred and the different temporal layers of the narrative blend into one another, a strategy that highlights that the Tunisian situation is meant to be understood via the previous protests. Meanwhile, the professor attempts to understand his fascination for the Paris protests, which he became part of almost by coincidence and without expecting the turmoil (Garbouj 2016, p. 13, 155).

In returning to 1968, Garbouj suggests the possible consequences of 2011. He alludes to the importance of political changes and protest for the general course of history. The novel shows May 1968 as a political moment of exceptional importance for the twentieth century. The narrative's parallelism suggests that the Tunisian uprising holds comparable importance for the twenty-frst century. Both the love affair and the protests have left an impression on the professor's life: decades later, the former lover is still on his mind, although his memories have faded.

The second novel, Ben Mustapha's *Rupture(s)*, similarly addresses in parallel the consequences of socio-political transformation and personal turmoil. The novel, set in Tunisia between 2012 and 2014, follows the character of Inès as she comes to terms with the end of a love affair. In her diary, she processes both her secret relationship with Hassen and the immediate years after the uprising. Their relationship had lasted for over twenty years before it ended in a separation—one meaning of the French word *rupture*. Hassen, a member of the Tunisian opposition, was forced to emigrate to Lebanon, where Inès visited him regularly. She broke off contact three years before the uprising after being pressured by state security. After the uprising, Hassen returns to Tunisia yet does not approach Inès and instead devotes himself to a political career made possible by the regime change. According to Inès, he has changed and broken ties with former companions. Inès is disappointed, but she works through her heartbreak in her diary and starts to see him as both a political and personal opportunist. By the end of the narrative, she has made peace with Tunis and the situation, although she is aware of the infuence of the previous regime and its practices on her own life, as the initial cause of her heartache. Still, she accepts the discrepancies in her life and in her country as she realizes that Hassen is less important for her happiness than her family and friends.

The novel uses a personal account to study Tunisian post-revolutionary reality and thereby creates a sense of distancing. The political events seem to form the backdrop to Inès's emotional journey, but really the private story is used to comment on political developments. In Inès's words, "la transition d'une situation à l'autre que le pays traverse, n'est pas moins exempte de désordres que celle, aussi chaotique, que je suis en train de vivre jusqu'aujourd'hui" (Ben Mustapha 2017, p. 86 f.).7 Accordingly, Inès' initial response to the post-2011 situation is disappointment. She believes that the very same practices of the previous regime those that negatively infuenced her life—are continuing in a different guise. In addition, her fellow Tunisians have failed to keep their word and are striving for their own personal advancement, not that of the community. For Inès, both developments are the result of long economic struggles and repression by those in charge. The novel thus highlights people's vulnerability to the effects of offcial pressure and socio-political changes on their lives, the other "ruptures" referred to by the title. Ultimately, this is a comment on those socio-political transformations and their effects.

Both novels play with the autobiographical trend that spread immediately after the uprisings in the Arab world (both in blogs and in print).8 While they are not strictly autobiographical themselves, the narratives resemble this genre. More obviously in Ben Mustapha's novel, which takes the form of a diary, but also in Gerbouj's novel, a narrator relives and thereby contextualizes the uprising through memories. Both novels avoid giving an all-encompassing overview of the revolutionary moments and still capture their confusion, excitement, and socio-political turmoil. Both books employ distancing techniques that differentiate them from the immediate autobiographical responses that followed the uprisings in the Arab world, which tended to be less sophisticated. The personal sphere is harnessed in portraying uprisings. This is not to say that the uprisings constitute the narrative's primary background. Rather, the personal sphere is being utilized to shed light on the political sphere and its implications for individual lives. The main goal remains the contextualization of the revolutionary moment and its aftermath.

# **Family Drama Beats Revolutionary References**

One year later in 2018, the Comar d'Or was again awarded to two novels that relate to the contextualization of the Tunisian uprising. In addition, I am jointly considering novels written in Arabic and French, answering Karima Laachir's call for the necessity of such an analysis across language divides (a "reading together") to best refect the literary community of Tunisia's multilingual locale (Laachir 2016, p. 25 f.). In the previous year, the themes of the Arabic novels did not suit such a comparative reading.

In 2018, Ali Bécheur's *Les Lendemains d'hier* (2017) won the Comar d'Or for the best novel published in French while Inès Abassi's *Menzel Bourguiba* (2018) received the *Prix spécial du jury* for a novel in Arabic.

This is Ali Bécheur's second time winning the Comar d'Or; in 2006, he received it for his novel *Le Paradis des femmes*. *Les Lendemains d'hier*, his eighth novel, describes a son's effort to narrate his father's success story while rebelling against the father's expectations for him likewise to succeed: "Apprenant année après année que, quoi que je pense ou fasse, quoi que je rêve ou espère, quel que soit ton regard sur moi – fût-il posthume –, je ne serai jamais à ton image, papa" (Bécheur 2017, p. 251).9 The father's story is a typical rags-to-riches-narrative. The son of a barber from the Tunis medina, he not only reaches secondary education and becomes a lawyer but also increases his social standing with a successful marriage. In *Les Lendemains d'hier,* his son tries to come to terms with the legacy left by his late father. In exploring their relationship, he tries to fll the silences it contained by turning his father into the hero of a story that is, for lack of information, semi-fctional: "Tout être humain est impénétrable, on n'en perçoit que la surface, l'intérieur reste invisible" (Bécheur 2017, p. 263).10

The narrative is presented in vignettes told from different perspectives (indicated by the personal pronouns *je, tu, il*). Occasionally, this makes it very diffcult to differentiate the sections and determine who is speaking or being addressed. Parallel to the narration of the father's story, the novel references Tunisian history from the protectorate era to the 2010–11 uprising. However, the historical events merely serve as the backdrop to the personal storyline. Take, for example, the portrayal of the father's death:

Tu as jeté un regard par la fenêtre, mais ce matin de novembre avait perdu son ciel […] et tu t'es dit que cette vie-là ne valait plus la peine d'être vécue. […] Alors tu t'es allongé sur le lit, tu as fermé les yeux. […] C'était avant la *Révolution du jasmin*. Parfois je me demande ce que tu en aurais pensé. Rien, peut-être.11 (Bécheur 2017, p. 265 f.)

This treatment clearly diverges from the novels discussed above. Bécheur's novel does follow Ben Mustapha's observations regarding the impact of political events on the personal lives of individuals. Yet, here, the socio-political world is merely a point of reference, allowing the reader to date the story and characters and to see them as the children of their times. This indicates a certain distance from the political turmoil, as far as the necessity of commenting on them is concerned. They form a backdrop that has been normalized; they no longer are the emergency that needs to be the center of attention. They have been absorbed into the lives of the characters and no longer actively determine them. A contextualization has already taken place, and it is therefore no longer necessary to work on that contextualization within the narrative. Other aspects are more important such as the relationship to the father.

The father fgure is of metaphorical relevance, as we will see after analyzing the second novel, Inès Abassi's debut novel *Menzel Bourguiba*. 12 This book also discusses the relationship with a father, or rather with his absence, and the lack of such a relationship. After her father's death, Jihān comes to terms with the effect of his absence on her upbringing and her adult life. Her father left her mother before she was born and relocated to the United States. Jihān joins her family for the funeral and the reading of his will and is motivated to solve a family mystery: the disappearance of her father's brother thirty years ago. In the meantime, she also learns more about her father. The mystery of the disappearance is partly autobiographical, as the author has mentioned in an interview (Abū l-Naṣr 2018). The novel is narrated from two perspectives: Jihān's accounts are supplemented by chapters written from the point of view of her father's second wife, Sofa.

Parallel to the events of the narrative, the Tunisians rise up against their president. Jihān and Sofa are therefore both stuck in the city of Menzel Bourguiba (Bizerte Governorate) and are forced to stay there longer than planned. Menzel Bourguiba means "Bourguiba's house." This choice of setting could also be a reference to former president Habib Bourguiba, who styled himself as the father of his country and citizens. With his death in 2000, he left behind his "children," who were already under the rule of his successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Menzel Bourguiba is also the author's hometown, where she feels most inspired to write, as she states in an interview (Abū l-Naṣr 2018). Yet it is not only Bourguiba's house that plays a metaphorical role, but also the house of Jihān's father. It is the setting of much of the action of the novel and furthermore shapes its narrative, insofar as the latter is divided into parts that are entitled with reference to the structure of the building (e.g. "al-Ṭābiq al-Arḍī," "ground foor" or "Nāfdha fī-l-ṭābiq al-thānī," "a window on the second foor").

Moreover, the house exposes the rivalry between Jihān and Sofa: Jihān's father bequethes the Tunisian house to his daughter, while his second wife and their daughter receive his restaurant in Chicago. Sofa is horrifed when she hears this at the reading of the will, and exclaims that she will do everything she can to contest it (Abassi 2018, p. 10).

The Tunisian uprising is presented in the novel as an inconvenience that forces the characters to spend time together (Jihān, for example, would like to leave earlier, but her aunt does not let her go out of concern for her safety; Abassi 2018, p. 183). It thus facilitates the remaining action of the novel: the exploration of Jihān's complicated relationship with her father and the investigation into the family secret. Jihān is sad about her father's absence from her life, and she expresses a certain longing for his presence, yet the situation is not shown to leave her incapacitated or utterly helpless. On the contrary, the narrative is resolved by a hopeful dissociation from the complicated family history: Jihān is an adult and able to escape the situation by returning to the life she has built for herself in the capital, rejecting any interest in inheriting her father's house. She continues to live out her own independent future. This can be understood as a suggestion for Tunisia's future, independent from father fgures.

Read together, both novels are conspicuous for their discussion of fathers at a time when Tunisia's leadership is in fact facing a crisis of power, a view that can be read in (or at least into) the two books. In its description of the 2018 situation, the International Crisis Group frst singles out the ruling party Nidāʾ Tūnis's internal struggle over control. Second, and more relevant for the context of particularly *Menzel Bourguiba*, Prime Minister Youssef Chahed lost some of his support from Nidāʾ Tūnis and al-Nahḍa in summer 2017. He was asked to resign by various political counterparts and was eventually dismissed from his party position. He then decided to found his own party, Taḥyā Tūnis. Regardless, his position has been weakened, as has the consensus between Nidāʾ Tūnis and al-Nahḍa (International Crisis Group 2018; Delmas 2018).

Both works present the uprising of 2010–11 as a historical backdrop against which characters experience and deal with their personal lives. The implication is that the personal discourse is of greater importance. Abassi comments on the use of history in her literary work in an interview in which she defends historical references and argues that they do not distract from the main narrative. She suggests that she deals with history through her characters' experiences instead of presenting it as a separate discourse (al-Falāḥ 2016). The necessity of defending this approach, using the historical backdrop, suggests a completely different situation from that of the frst two novels discussed. The 2010–11 uprising only plays a role through characters' experience of it, and not as of itself.

That both works were recognized by the Comar d'Or suggests that the novels' normalized approach to political events is resonant, and not exceptional. This is a shift from the earlier works discussed in the previous section. It remains to be seen whether this trend continues in other literary publications.

# **Political Upheavals and the Personal Sphere**

A comparison of all four novels reveals a change in the uprising's importance. In the earlier works, the complications of the socio-political transformations were at the center of *Rupture(s)* and *Passe l'intrus*, although the authors might have resorted to distancing techniques. The works were about the uprising, insofar as they discussed the events' repercussions and their impact on individual lives. In particular, Jamila Ben Mustapha's *Rupture(s)* clearly showed a sense of disappointment with post-revolutionary Tunisia and the achievements of the uprising, which no longer seemed as glorious as it had in 2011. Since then, the country has experienced political changes and terrorist attacks, leading to a precarious economic situation, a disappearance of tourism, and stalled improvement in the lives of ordinary Tunisians. Corruption is rife in the country and it is questionable whether Tunisians believe in the power of political leaders to bring about actual change. Chahed's declining support is in fact a result of his initiative to fght corruption (International Crisis Group 2018). This situation can be read between the lines in the more recent novels, *Les Lendemains d'hier* and *Menzel Bourguiba*. The revolution as a theme has moved to the background of both books. With a difference of merely one year, one notes a thematic shift from politics' infuence on personal lives to a discussion of the personal lives in which political events provide context. We can see a clear return of the private sphere. This is not to say that the personal is not also political, insofar as it can be read as a commentary, but the newer books do not present the uprising itself as the main issue. The political meaning of personal experience is also more allusive: For example, an eager reader can interpret absent father fgures as an allusion to the country's leadership issues or its response to its history of autocratic rule by strong male fgures.

The personal sphere has entered the texts in regard to questions of memory and remembrance that were already present in the earlier works. These works attempted to make sense of the socio-political transformations through fctional autobiographies and individual memories. In the more recent works, this personal aspect has become the narratives' main concern.

# **Conclusion**

This chapter explored the ways in which Tunisian novelists have refected on the uprising of 2010–11 through the lens of four novels awarded prizes by the Prix Comar d'Or. All four novels address the revolutionary events of 2010–11, but in different ways. They also illustrate changing trends in responding to the political transformations. The preceding analysis explored the autobiographical trend and, in one case, included an added comparison to another revolutionary moment. I then highlighted a second trend: a return to the private sphere, which relegates political turmoil and its depiction to the sidelines, as context instead of content. However, by presenting family stories and specifcally father conficts, the novels did comment on the internal politics of Tunisia, or could at least be read to do so. This development can be considered a sign of maturity with regards to the reworking of the Tunisian uprising of 2010–11: a move away from the style of political pamphlets to the development of original characters instead of stock characters. Memory is questioned, another indication that the age of testimony is gone. However, the question of how to deal with the past is still at stake. Both *Les Lendemains d'hier* and *Menzel Bourguiba* challenge the writing of history; the feetingness of memory was already alluded to in *Rupture(s)* and *Passe l'intrus*.

Given that the two more recent novels were chosen as the winners of the Comar d'Or in 2018, one can assume that the Tunisian literary establishment currently favors this approach to the revolutionary events in literature. None of the recent protagonists were described as actively participating in the protests. Instead, they were portrayed as uninvolved observers. This suggests a much calmer perspective than a portrayal of a protest that simply develops, as one can read in Kamāl al-Riyākhī's *al-Gūrillā* (2011), for example. The sense of calm presented here could be interpreted as a sign of an offcial effort to de-escalate, to return to docile civic life. Yet the move away from partisan writing also allows for a greater depth of language and style, as the narratives become more complicated and technically more sophisticated literary works. It remains to be seen what the next stage of the literary processing of the revolution might be: an ultimate focus on the personal sphere without any references to the uprising?

#### **Endnotes**


actions; the border between the norm and the marginal." (All translations from French are by the author).


# **References**


Bécheur, Ali. 2017. *Les lendemains d'hier*. Tunis: Éditions Elyzad.

Ben Mustapha, Jamila. 2017. *Rupture(s)*. Tunis: Éditions Déméter.

Davis, Lennard J. 1987. *Resisting novels. Ideology and fction*. New York: Methuen.


**Charlotte Pardey** is a research fellow at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). Her research background is in Arabic and Comparative Literature. Her PhD thesis (2018, forthcoming) dealt with the fgurations of human bodies in Tunisian novels originating between the country's independence and the protests of 2010/2011. Her research interests lie in both arabophone and francophone literary works from North Africa.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **Transformations of the "Syrian" Literary Field Since 2011**

# Felix Lang

The intellectual and artistic space in which Syrian authors, flmmakers, and artists move has changed markedly over the last eight years. In the light of the events unfolding in Syria since spring 2011, we are quick to attribute these changes to the revolution and the ensuing armed conficts. Indeed, political crises as "turning points" have always held an important narratological function in literary history, as they have in any other felds which are in a dominated position in relation to the political sphere1. The discursive consolidation of such turning points and points of rupture tends to blur relations of causality by collectively attributing changes to "The War". Continuities, which are grounded in the specifc history and structure of the feld, tend to be obscured by the dominant narratives of rupture and change.

One way of counterchecking the powerful narratives of change current in academia and the media, as well as in the literary feld itself, lies in a quantitative approach little used in studies of Arab cultural production so far. Thus, in the present chapter, I will present some preliminary fndings based on the data collected for a database on Syrian literature that is currently being assembled at the Department of Arabic Literature and Culture at the University of Marburg2. The database stores bibliographic data on the published works of 210 Syrian writers who

F. Lang (\*)

Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: felix.lang@staff.uni-marburg.de

I would like to thank our student assistants Hannah El-Hitami, Jan Pfeiffer and Wael Alokla who helped to compile the data analysed in this chapter.

have published at least one novel between 1980 and 2016. This includes nearly every living Syrian novelist in 2016. In addition to approximately 2500 novels, the database contains over 5000 reviews, articles, publications about and by these authors and their literary works.

This chapter considers changes in the feld between 2005 and 2016 insomuch as they can be inferred from the data collected. It intends to critically evaluate the widespread assumption that the uprising constitutes a watershed moment in Syrian cultural production (e.g. Chiti 2016; Cooke 2016; Wedeen 2013; Ziter 2015). While much of this work has been dedicated to themes and forms of art and literature produced in the wake of the revolution, few scholars have considered structural changes3. In the following, the data available will be used to elucidate the question whether, and if so in which ways, the events that have been unfolding since 2011 have had a demonstrable effect on various important features of the feld.

# **The Field**

As Mohja Kahf has pointed out, in a familiar move of criticizing a notion of national literatures transposed on the Arab World by Western academia, there is no such thing as Syrian literature (Kahf 2001). The literary language shared across more than 20 nation-states is the foundation of what is in many ways a transnational space of literary production, which stretches to its limits an orthodox, nation-centered approach to the literary feld. Historically, we have seen close connections between Syria's intellectual elite and the state. For the Baath party, which frst came to power in 1963, intellectuals and writers had an important political role to play. Consequently, many institutions of the feld were controlled by the state: many artists and intellectuals depended—and still depend—on the state for employment.4 Two of the most important Syrian publishers of the last 40 years are the Ministry of Culture (*Manshūrāt Wizārat al-thaqāfa*) and the publishing house of the state-controlled Arab Union of Writers (*Ittiḥād al-kuttāb al-ʿarab*). However, almost the same number of novels written by Syrians were published in Beirut as in all Syria during the period in question. Likewise, institutions of consecration are not found in Syria alone indeed, the regional and international institutions' recognition is often connected with higher symbolic capital. Pan-Arab newspapers, notably *al-Ḥayāt* with its literary supplement, along with newspapers based in other states of the region, such as Lebanon's *al-Akhbār*, are important sources of symbolic capital for Syrian authors. Whereas the relative value of such reviews is diffcult to determine based on quantitative data, the sheer number of reviews in these media vouches for the relevance of such international actors: thus, *al-Ḥayāt* and the *Al-Jazeera* website rank highest when it comes to publications about writers from our corpus. Regional literary awards also carry ample weight: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction is the prime example.

The integration of Syrian writers within the wider Arab feld of cultural production also makes it diffcult to speak of an essentially Syrian literature on the level of symbolic products. Kahf, in her article quoted above, makes a case for the "silences" and circumvention of censorship laws and other forms of control required from writers in an authoritarian system as a unifying characteristic of Syrian literature, however she acknowledges that authors in Iraq and Libya faced similar conditions for much of the second half of the twentieth century. It is conceivable that the literary production turning around the 2011 uprising and the ongoing war in Syria may come to be seen as the beginning of a truly Syrian literary tradition—analogous to the civil war novels in 1980s and 1990s Lebanon or the trauma of occupation and exile that draws together Palestinian literature. However, to this point these texts remain essentially transnational through their reference to notions of trauma, testimony and documentation.

Traditionally, as in many parts of the Arab World, poetry has been the most prestigious genre of literary production. This dominance has been seen to be waning since at least the 1990s (see Jacquemond 2003, p. 229). In the aftermath of 2011, and in the international segment of the feld, poetry played a minor role as a form of artistic expression: the dominant voices in the feld now belong to a younger generation of novelists. Few, if any, of those who have recently left their mark on the feld are poets. The short story, which has also been a more important literary genre in the Arab world than in the West, retains much of its importance in a context where online platforms, magazines, and social media have acquired an important role in the publication of literary works.5

While there may be no Syrian literature, there are undoubtedly novelists, poets, and short story writers who were born in Syria. Currently, at least three loosely defned generations of Syrian writers can be discerned. Authors who had already begun their literary careers before the Baath Party came to power in Syria in 1963 form the most highly consecrated generation. These authors inlcude the poet Adonis, who left Syria in 1955 and later renounced Syrian citizenship, and the novelists Hanna Mina (Ḥannā Mīna), Ulfat Idlibi (Ulfat Al-Idlibī), and Walid Ikhlasi (Walīd Ikhlāṣī). The next generation comprises authors who made their debuts in the 1980s, when younger writers such as Salim Barakat (Salīm Barakāt) were challenging the social realism of Mina and Ikhlasi. Finally, the late 1990s and early 2000s saw the entry to the feld of a group of writers who have since become the dominant voices in the international segment of the feld during the confict in Syria. Samar Yazbek (Samar Yazbik) published her frst collection of short stories in 1999 (Yazbik 1999), Rosa Yassin Hassan (Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan) in 2000, and Khaled Khalifa's (Khalid Khalīfa) frst novel (Khalīfa 2000) was also released in 2000.

In structural terms, the most notable effect of the violent confict in Syria on the literary feld no doubt arises from the displacement of a considerable part of its players. Most of Syria's well-known authors, as well as a host of younger writers in the early stages of their careers, have left Syria since 2011. Typically, writers, as well as other artists, frst moved to neighboring countries, especially Lebanon and Turkey, and later settled in Europe, with Germany as one of the most important destinations. Berlin soon became a center of the Syrian arts scene.

This displacement entailed the inclusion of a completely new range of international actors that have not been previously part of the feld: public diplomacy organizations and their various funding programs, foreign publishers and translators, but also new platforms for publication such as online magazines like Dahnon, Al-Jumhuriya and Raseef 22.

Arguably, these two intertwined processes drive the transformation of the Syrian literary feld. In the following, the data gathered will be used to two ends. First, bibliographical data will be used to describe more precisely the process of internationalization. Second, I seek to gauge how the inclusion of new intermediaries, along with the changing involvement of established intermediaries, is bound to change the structure and the hierarchies of the feld.

# **Trends of Internationalization**

#### *Publishers*

First, we will consider the development of the overall number of publications and the countries where Syrian authors have been published. These developments are charted based on the full set of novels published between 2005 and 2015 (Fig. 1).

The frst thing to be noted in this chart is that the overall number of titles produced by Syrian authors has not been affected by the confict beginning in 2011—in fact, the mean output of about 48 titles per year is the same for the period from 2005 to 2010 as for the time period from 2011 to 2015. Nonetheless, we fnd two discernible peaks in literary production: one in 2008, which is most likely connected to the surge of publications in the context of the Damascus Arab Capital for Culture celebrations that year. The second, in 2014, might be attributed to a surge in publications connected to the war. More signifcantly, we see

**Fig. 1** Publications by Country (database of the research group "Figures of Thought | Turning Points. Cultural Practices and Social Change in the Arab World" (DFG) at CNMS, Marburg)

a steady decline of literary production from 2011 to 2013, until it picks up again the following year. This slump would seem to be connected to the outbreak of the confict in Syria. The number of works published by Syrian publishers shrunk by a staggering 80% in these two years while overall production only decreased by 30%. In the years between 2005 and 2010, approximately 40% of titles were published in Syria; in the years following the uprising, the proportion dropped to 15%.

In other words, we see a clear trend towards internationalization of publishing, which appears to be a common feature of Arab literary felds in moments of crisis. Tristan Leperlier, in his work on the Algerian feld during the Black Decade in the 1990s, fnds similar dynamics at work: a growing number of publications in France (Leperlier 2019) compensates for the decrease of publishing in Algeria. In the Syrian case, the destinations of authors who publish abroad are more diverse, and clear trends are more diffcult to identify. Lebanon's share, for instance, remains relatively stable between 37 and 39% of overall production. Egypt's publishing industry clearly plays a more important role for Syrian authors following 2011, but it does so on a relatively small scale, with a proportion of about 10% of total production. The clearest trend, however, is the increasing importance of the publishing industry of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states after 2011. In 2013 and 2014, publishers in the Gulf were the second most important group in the Syrian literary feld after the regionally dominant Lebanese publishing houses. Reasons for this sudden growth might be found in the close connections that many Syrians had with the Gulf as a place of work6. At the same time, the publishing sector in the Gulf has been growing for a number of years, and fnally, the Gulf countries' position in the regional confict could also make the publication of Syrian authors critical of the regime a politically opportune endeavor.

# **Translations**

Translations are another important marker of internationalization and recognition of Syrian authors abroad. Syrian authors, as well as authors writing in Arabic quite generally, are rarely translated into foreign languages, a fact that has been deplored by scholars of Arabic literature for decades7. Figure 2 shows the number of translations of works by the authors of the corpus, which were released by European and US publishers between 2005 and 2014. Numbers include translated texts in edited collections.

As we can see, the number of translations increased markedly from an average of four per year between 2006 and 2010 to an average of nine titles from 2011 to 2014. Translations of Adonis's works, which account for roughly a third of total translations, have been left out. Given the very low number of translations, the margin of error in these calculations is relatively high. However, it can be stated that the confict in Syria has led to an increased interest in Syrian literature

**Fig. 2** Translations

abroad. Before 2011, the target languages were almost exclusively French, English and German, whereas translations published after the outbreak of the confict also included Spanish as well as smaller European languages such as Dutch and Swedish. The proportion of women writers remained unchanged at about 30% of the titles translated.

However, the increase in the number of translations should not be equated with the emergence of a readership for Syrian writers in general. The works of Samar Yazbek, particularly her diaries of the civil war, and Khaled Khalifa (primarily his novel *In Praise of Hatred*) account for over 40% of the translations between 2011 and 2014. Thus, while the number of published translations has almost doubled, the number of translated authors has increased only by two from 12 to 14. In addition, the vast majority of writers translated after 2011 had already been translated. The confict mostly worked to frmly establish some of the younger authors, among them Yazbek and Khalifa, but also Rosa Yassin Hassan and (possibly) Dima Wannous (Dīma Wannūs) at the international pole of the Syrian feld, while some older writers, such as Salim Barakat, Nihad Siris (Nihād Sīrīs) or the poet Faraj Bairaqdar (Faraj Bayraqdār) retain a certain international visibility.

As the well-established intermediaries in the literary feld, publishers and translators connect the writer, the text, and the readership. As we have seen, for many Syrian authors Syrian publishers have been replaced by enterprises in other countries in the region, and Euro-American publishers and translators have concentrated on a small number of authors. In both cases, these developments pose a potential challenge to the established hierarchies in the feld: the priorities of these new actors can present an advantage for writers who only enjoyed limited recognition before, provided their work fts the agenda of the new gatekeepers. Samar Yazbek, for instance, obviously managed to respond to a demand from European—and to some extent Syrian—readers with her diaries of a revolution, which more highly consecrated authors were unable to satisfy.

# **Challenges to the Hierarchies of the Field**

Different publishers and translators are not the only intermediaries we encounter in authors' post-2011 professional trajectories. In the following, I consider reception in Arab and US/European media, as well as social media. For the compilation of this data, we have concentrated on a sample of 60 authors divided in fve age groups, with 2016 being the year of reference. The proportion of male to female authors was made to refect the distribution between the sexes in the larger group of 210 authors referred to above. In order to refect the wide variety in terms of output, professional background, and career trajectories—diffcult variables to classify—we have otherwise opted for a random selection of authors.

In order to gauge the reception of Syrian authors in Europe and the US as well as in the Arab world, we have counted interviews, reviews, and other published texts about the authors in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. The corpus is limited to texts that were listed in Internet searches using the Google search engine between 2014 and 2016. Compared to a systematic search of a limited number of publications, this search yields a greater range of publications and gives a broader picture of the authors' reception. The data should not be taken to represent a full record of publications about an author's work. However, they will contain the vast majority of articles visible to internet users between 2014 and 2016. Consequently, few articles will date from before 2000 and more recent articles are bound to be overrepresented. Nonetheless, I believe that these numbers are suitable to give us a broad overview of the relative importance of these intermediaries for Syrian authors at different stages of their career.

#### *Social Media*

With the confict in Syria, social media have gained new importance for many Syrians abroad, including authors of fction and poetry. The social networking site Facebook, in particular, has served as a publication platform for many authors. In some instances, Facebook posts have been made into books published in translation: Aboud Saeed's (ʿAbūd Saʿīd) *Der klügste Mensch im Facebook* (2013) is a case in point. The use of social media in furthering a literary career certainly existed before 2011, but, as can be seen with the example of Saeed, Syrian authors fnd themselves in a situation where the potential impact of social media use is unprecedented. Saeed, who had not appeared as an author of fction or poetry previously, became a published author translated into several European languages (among them German, Portuguese, and Swedish)—a distinction hitherto reserved to a few highly consecrated fgures of the Syrian literary feld—in no more than a couple of years. Figure 3 shows that posting in social media is widespread among Syrian writers. Even among those over age 65, who might be suspected to be less versed in the use of these new media, 30% wrote at least one post a week between May 2014 and May 2016.

Apart from this fnding, it is maybe unsurprising that the percentage of writers making frequent use of social media for publication is highest between the two lower age groups. This, however, shows the transformative potential of social media platforms for the feld: the lower age groups typically contain the less consecrated writers. Due to their presence on social media, they are more likely

**Fig. 3** Social Media Posts

to proft from the symbolic capital that can be accumulated through these sites and are thus able to circumvent the established gatekeepers of the literary space, which becomes a challenge to the established hierarchies of the feld.

#### *US/European Media*

For a long time now, the institutions of consecration of the Euro-American literary felds have played an important role for Arab, and by consequence Syrian authors. Translation into foreign languages, hitherto the prerogative of literary fgures well recognized in the Arab literary space, has always been a mark of distinction. However, the translation and publication of an entire literary work is not necessarily a prerequisite for an author to be recognized by Euro-American media. In the case of Syrian authors after 2011, the publication of shorter translated texts in anthologies, literary magazines, or as part of the activities of public diplomacy organizations, such as British Council or Germany's Goethe Institut, made authors visible in the international media. Thus an extract of Samar Yazbek's *Diaries of a Revolution*, which appeared in Arabic in 2012, had already circulated in the European press in the second half of 2011 (Yazbek, August 3, 2011a; August 10, 2011b; December 3, 2011c), laying the groundwork for Yazbek's wider recognition as an important literary voice in the context of the confict in Syria.

When we consider the average number of contributions per single author that we found in European and US media, it is interesting to note that the age group that enjoys the greatest recognition is not the age group that typically comprises

**Fig. 4** Articles in US/European Media

the feld's highly recognized—and translated—fgures such as Faraj Bairaqdar, Nabil Sulaiman (Nabīl Sulaymān), Nihad Siris, and Zakariya Tamir (Zakarīyā Tāmir) (see Fig. 4).

This certainly has to do with the fact that a number of these—Bairaqdar and Tamir among them—have long lived in exile in Europe. The interest of European media mainly lay with the illustration of current events in Syria. Again, this prioritization of the symbolic capital of "being there," or at least "having been there recently," is bound to lead to a challenge, and possibly a transformation, of the hierarchies in the feld. The fact that Euro-American media have solicited authors increases their visibility for publishers, but also for cultural journalists. For the literary avant-gardes, serving as an expert on Syria can appear to be an inroad into European cultural spaces, or at least certain dominated segments thereof, and a shortcut to the position of the translated author and the associated symbolic capital which can be used in the competition with their peers.

# **Arab Media**

Arab media, especially the literary supplements of major newspapers, comprise some of the most important gatekeepers and institutions of consecration when it comes to Arabic literature8. Therefore, we would expect that highly recognized

**Fig. 5** Articles in Arab Media

authors, who are frequently those in the older age groups, would have the highest numbers of articles to their name (Fig. 5).

Indeed, the group of writers older than 80 scores relatively high. What needs further explanation, however, is the high scores for writers between the ages of 20 to 35.

To a certain extent, this could be explained with the small sample: publications about the authors are rather unevenly distributed, as the sample contains well-known as well as very little-known authors. Of the seven authors in this young age group, two, Muṣṭafā Tāj al-Dīn al-Mūsā and ʿAbdallāh Maksūr, who are fairly advanced in their careers and have already published several novels, account for almost 40% of the publications between them. In addition, both have published widely in Arab media and are likely to possess the professional networks to bring their work to the attention of potential reviewers. Both had recently published works related to the confict in Syria and one of them received an award for his short stories in 2015. While there are many reasons to suspect that the overall average for authors in this age group is lower, it would seem that the attention of journalists and reviewers in the Arab media is more evenly distributed, and therefore less disruptive to the established hierarchies than that of their Euro-American counterparts.

# **Conclusion**

Summing up, it appears that the practices of translation and the greater importance of social media and Euro-American media for Syrian authors' literary careers favor emerging authors by offering access to new resources for symbolic capital. How the rise of this generation of authors will play out in the competition with the consecrated writers of the older generations seems far from clear. For the time being, we can observe the formation of an international segment of the Syrian feld, which is in the process of establishing its own hierarchies. This will certainly change the space in which all Syrian writers, including those in the national segment of the feld move. However, considering the feld as a whole, it is too early to speak of a "turning point." Clearly, challenges to the existing structure and hierarchies are evident, as are the innovations in form and content pointed out by the scholars of Syrian art and literature referenced above. The revolution and the war play a role in perpetuating and intensifying processes of change that have been evident before this political crisis, and which, in due course, might lead to the "deep transformations of the symbolic relations of force" (Bourdieu 1996, p. 126) which could be said to defne a "turning point" in the Bourdieusian conceptual framework. If transformation happens, it will not only, and not even mainly, be because of the war, but because of the complex interrelations of the feld of politics with internal processes at work in the space of literary production which go back to before 2011.

The cautious wording of the analyses above refects the limits of the quantitative approach pursued in this paper. The fact that there are no offcial publication records in the countries of the Arab world complicates the compilation of data, as does the often incomplete bibliographic information in older published books and the fact that newspaper archives are only partially digitized and searchable. This list of problems could easily be extended. Still, it is worth further developing methods for the quantitative study of Arabic literature as a contribution to an otherwise largely anecdotal social history of literary production. Given the general lack of sources for the study of social networks of literary production in modern Arabic literature—such as edited collections of writers' correspondence, for instance—and the dearth of research on the subject in the past, publication data is one of the very few opportunities we have for investigating networks of literary production in the past, other than interviews and notoriously unreliable human memories.

At the very least, as I showed in this chapter, counting articles, books and Facebook posts can help us form hypotheses about structural changes that can be corroborated by further qualitative and archival research. In the end, it is certainly worthwhile to extend the use of quantitative methods to the analysis of content and form, following the example of digital humanities research in German or English literary studies—not in an attempt to replace the "traditional" analyses of artworks, but in order to seize the opportunity to ask new and different questions.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Felix Lang** holds a PhD in Arabic Literature and Culture from Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany). He is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of Arabic Literature and Culture and coordinator of the "Figures of Thought | Turning Points" research group (DFG-Leibniz), and author of The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma, and Capital.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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# **The Year 1979 as a Turning Point in Syrian Theatre: From Politicization to Critical Humanism**

# Friederike Pannewick

This chapter will refect on the year 1979 as a turning point in Arab theater, taking Syrian playwright Saʿdallāh Wannūs as a case study. This internationally acclaimed author, born in 1941, belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose political and artistic self-defnition and worldview was strongly shaped by the Palestine confict. Wannūs's early works reveal an intense social engagement, which he characterized as a "theater of politicization/*masraḥ al-tasyīs"* (Wannūs 1996, p. 131). But his self-positioning as a politically engaged artist was not static throughout the latter part of his life, which was cut short by illness and ended when he was only 56 years old in 1997. Nearly twenty years earlier, in 1979, his political and literary convictions were seriously called into question by an event that interrupted his life and writing and interfered with his artistic production. In an extensive interview at the end of his life, he characterized this event as decisive turning point in his dramatical writings.

According to narrative psychologist Jerome Bruner, turning points in individual life stories, "though they may be linked to things happening 'outside,' are fnally attributed to a happening 'inside'—a new belief, new courage, moral disgust, 'having had enough'" (Bruner, quoted in Nünning and Sicks 2012, p. 8). This means that change in society goes hand in hand with personal transformations. Reaching a turning point "tends to result in, and correlate with, a heightened degree of self-awareness or self-consciousness on the part of the subject in question, an increased awareness that a decision has to be made" (Nünning and Sicks 2012, p. 7). The study of turning points looks for concurrences and dis-

F. Pannewick (\*)

Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost Studien, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany e-mail: pannewick@uni-marburg.des

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2021

R. Ouaissa et al. (eds.), *Re-Confgurations*, Politik und Gesellschaft des Nahen Ostens, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31160-5\_18

continuities beyond conceptions of time in terms of linearity (Nünning and Sicks 2012, p. 17).

The term "turning point" is understood here according to Nünning and Sicks's defnition as "mininarration" and "metaphor" (Nünning and Sicks 2012, p. 7) inasmuch as turning points have a narrative character and "tend to interrupt regular patterns and trajectories in the life-fow" (Abott, quoted in Nünning and Sicks 2012, p. 7). The narrative character points at the fact that turning points are not objective givens "but are instead conceptualized as results of retrospective constructions of meaning" (Nünning and Sicks 2012, p. 2).

The decisive turning point in Wannūs's literary career was the day of November 19, 1977 when President Sadat became the frst Arab politician to visit Israel on offcial business, where he outlined his plans for peace in a speech to the Israeli Knesset (parliament). A world came crushing down for Wannūs. This unilateral peace offer, which led to the Camp David Accords of 1978 and resulted in the Egypt–Israel peace treaty signed in 1979, left the two key issues unanswered: the situation of the Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem and the occupied territories. A comprehensive and coherent solution to the Israel-Palestine confict seemed thus to recede into the distance. Wannūs tried to take his own life on the night of this epochal event. He stopped writing plays and would not complete any for more than ten years.

This chapter will show how the writings he published after this self-imposed silence turned away from a didactic theatre of politicization to psychological studies focusing on the individual, as well as minority and gender issues, which might be considered part of what Fadi Bardawil described as an "inward turn" (2013, p. 1). This new literary style was as politically engaged as his previous style, but this political commitment is conveyed differently, arguing in favor of a new and critical humanism in a Saidian understanding whereby humanism is based on "the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition rather than on received ideas and approved authorities" (Abraham 2007, p. 5).

In the Syrian documentary flm *Wa-hunaka ashyāʾ kathīra kāna yumkin an yataḥaddath ʿanhā al-marʾ [There Are So Many Things Still to Say*], directed by Omar Amiralay and broadcast by La Sept/Arte in 1997, Wannūs speaks about this crucial turning point in his dramatist's life and work:

When Sadat visited Israel, I can't describe my feelings. There was some astonishment although I can't say the visit surprised me. The sun was bright that day, even though I was shut up in this very room behind my desk. I closed all the inner and outer windows. I felt the sun was entering through the cracks in the windows and entering the sitting room. Like a foreign aggression against my inner peace. I sat and wrote *(The Coffn and the Mourners Together)*. It was the last thing I wrote before a long period of silence. After I fnished writing it, I said "I'm tired" and I should go rest for a few weeks, some place, in Lattakia or Aleppo. But I was very nervous and knew I couldn't control myself. It was around sunset, I took a sleeping pill, trying to escape through sleep. Two hours later, I woke up, even more nervous and troubled. The darkness was total. That night, I made a serious attempt to commit suicide. (Wannūs in Amiralay 1997, min. 25:14–28:50).

This impressive and touching testimony from one of the most important dramatists of modern Arabic theatre tells us about an individual and political turning point in the late 1970s. If we assume that something fundamental changed at this time, we might ask: what was this change about? And what about the notion of the political aspect of the arts—did it remain the same after this turning point in 1979 and then later, in the 1980s and 1990s as Wannūs and others of his generation changed their literary styles, abandoning an aesthetic of politicization in favor of a call for critical humanism?

# **Politicization and Commitment in the Wake of 1967**

International in his orientation, Wannūs was an intellectual who saw himself as part of a worldwide avant-garde movement. The early period of his writing, from the early 1960s to the late 1970s, was formatively infuenced by Erwin Piscator's political theatre, but above all by Bertolt Brecht's didactic drama. Wannūs' initial works reveal an intensive social engagement, which he characterized in his theatre manifesto *Bayanāt li-masraḥ ʿarabī jadīd*, published in 1970, as a "theatre of politicization or *masraḥ al-tasyīs*" (Wannūs 1996, vol. 3; cf. also vol. 1, p. 131). In a phase marked by signifcant social developments that were triggered by the country's defeat by Israel, Wannūs provocatively formulated the lineaments of a "politicizing" aesthetic which was to make Arab theatre into a vehicle of hope, instigating political reforms and undergirding processes of democratization: "We perform theatre to develop and change consciousness. We want to deepen the grasp of our collective consciousness for our shared historical consciousness" (Wannūs 1970, p. 24).

It is noteworthy that the June war of 1967 did not trigger resignation or despair in this dramatist's work. On the contrary, in the wake of the all-embracing *hazīma* (defeat), he conceptualized his theatre of politicization. His play *Ḥafat samar min ajl khamsat ḥuzayrān* (*An Entertainment Evening for June 5*), published shortly after the 1967 defeat, stages.

The profound malaise of a majority of Arabs in the aftermath of the 1967 war: people overwhelmed by humiliation, disappointment, anger, and fear. With his inimitable honesty and lucidity, he depicts a malaise caused primarily, in his opinion, by state repression and manifested in military defeat, but also in cultural mediocrity, intellectual futility, and personal despair. (Kassab 2010, p. 53).

The articulation of his concept of "politicizing theater" is thus to be seen in the context of Wannūs's devastating critique of the political and intellectual situation in 1967. Given that theater was an important domain for cultural critique, Wannūs developed the lineaments of a "politicizing" aesthetic within this realm.

# **Between Commitment and Despair**

However, this rather optimistic and somewhat idealistic perspective changed signifcantly due to the gloomy political circumstances in the Middle East. Throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s, Wannūs had been imbued with such a strong sense of living through a crisis that it encroached upon and damaged his entire personal life, an affect he emphasized repeatedly in various statements. One of these statements is the interview with Omar Amiralay in the documentary quoted above. Another revealing text in this regard is a short piece Wannūs wrote after Sadat's visit to Israel: "Anā l-janāza wa-l-mushayyiʿūna" ["I am the Deceased and the Mourners"] (1996, vol. 3, p. 439 ff.). Here, politicizing art seems to have lost its validity, the individual is cut in two parts while one observes the funeral of the other:

My life has neared its end and I still dream of saying "No." I wanted and I want to say "No" to the "Yes" citizen, to the prison-homeland, to the modernization of the methods of torture and domestication, to the offcial discourse. … I wanted and I want to say "No." And I search for my tongue but fnd only a foam of blood and fear. From my severed tongue the defeat started, and the funeral procession set out. From my suppressed "No" the enemy got through, as well as the separation, the poverty, the hunger, the prison, the torturer, and the contemporary Arab collapse … Briefy, if it weren't for my suppressed "No," half of me wouldn't be in the coffn and the other half dragging itself behind it. And my deprivation from my "No" made me not only into the victim and the spectator, the dead and the mourner, but also into a conspirator … [T]he "No" citizen is, for the Arab thrones, a bigger danger than the Israeli danger, and a conspiracy worse than the imperialist conspiracies … And until I recuperate my suppressed "No", the funeral procession will continue, with us dragging our tails behind it. (English translation quoted in Kassab 2010, p. 56 f.)

The high degree of self-criticism and disillusionment in this text is characteristic for this dramatist's writings in the late 1970s. The metaphoric mini-narration clearly marks a turning point in his life that, according to the characteristics of a turning point quoted above, "tends to result in and correlate with, a heightened degree of self-awareness or self-consciousness on the part of the subject in question, an increased awareness that a decision has to be made" (Nünning and Sicks 2012, p. 7).

After his suicide attempt in November 1977, Wannūs did not write a single play for eleven years. He frst broke his silence in fall 1989 with a play that was as celebrated as it was controversial—a play that attempted to relate to the Palestinian confict from an Israeli viewpoint: *al-Ightiṣāb* [*The Rape*] (Wannūs 1996, vol. 2, p. 61 ff.). *The Rape* (originally published with Dār al-Ādāb, 1990) marks a turning point in Wannūs's dramatic writings. For the frst time, the focus is placed on the individual, instead of the collective, and on the physical and psychological consequences and implications of political oppression. This drama deals with interpersonal problems, providing psychological studies, and achieving multidimensional characterization on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. The enemy that for decades had been represented in Syrian literature as a dehumanized monster and a united, homogenous block was now depicted as an individual suffering from Israeli state violence like its victims.

I would call Wannūs's new approach to theatre as a means of generating insights into individual and psychological phenomena "individualistic humanism." This form of humanism, which is closely tied to individual and psychological dimensions, is not without political implications. Indeed, the decision to point relentlessly at the devastating effects of violence and abuse on both victims and perpetrators is a deeply political act with a clear-cut humanistic meaning. Since Wannūs addresses the effects of violence on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian confict and, in so doing, breaks a taboo that had been maintained for many decades in Arab discourse, this humanistic meaning could be also called critical and Wannūs's approach could, therefore, be understood as a form of "critical humanism."

Viewing *The Rape* (Wannūs 1996, vol. 2) as an example of critical humanism allows us, furthermore, to perceive an intriguing link between Wannūs's thought and that of Frantz Fanon, who repeatedly stressed the importance of collective and individual responsibility on "a truly historical scale … If nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads into a dead end" (Fanon 2004, p. 144).

This humanism, which lies at the very root of both Fanon's and Wannūs's critical thinking, was also one of the main tenets of the Arab Spring uprisings, as exemplifed in popular revolutionary slogans such as "al-shaʿb yurīd isqāṭ al-niẓām" ["the people want to bring down the regime/the system"]. Moreover, this vision of humanism links the perspectives of both Wannūs and Fanon with perspectives put forward in the context of the Arab Spring, and suggests the relevance of Fanon's argumentation to the process of engaging in a critical refection about the dilemmas of the Arab societies in the late twentieth and early twenty-frst centuries. Thus, what is being argued here is that *The Rape* may be understood as Wannūs's critical answer to the complete failure of a social and national humanism within both Israeli and Arab consciousness since 1948.

Saʿdallāh Wannūs died in 1997, before he could witness the beginnings of the Syrian revolution. Nevertheless, Lebanese novelist and journalist Elias Khoury counts intellectuals and writers like him as forerunners of "a new culture, one which only fully emerged with today's generation of Syrian men and women who are bringing about a revolution from the heart of oppression and despair" (Khoury 2012, p. x). He considers his plays and essays as "the intellectual roots of the Syrian revolution" (Khoury 2012, p. xiv). Hence, Wannūs's idea of a critical humanism in the face of the devastating political circumstances in the Arab world seems to be an appropriate answer to the post-2011 situation as well.

In regard to dramatic changes in Wannūs's personal life, it is important to note that a second turning point after the frst one in the late 1970s occurred in this dramatist's life and work: Wannūs came down with thyroid cancer in 1991. His terminal illness, diagnosed shortly after the Gulf War, lent his bleak words even greater weight. For his own part, Wannūs stylized himself as a victim of the political history of his era, portraying his illness and imminent death as the result of unsolved political problems:

It seems like we were destined to see a series of continuing blows. The last blow was so painful that I suspected it as the direct cause of my being stricken by cancer. The blow was the 1991 Gulf War which did away with the remaining hopes of the Arabs. It's no coincidence that I began to feel the tumor during the war, during the monstrous bombing carried out by the US against Iraq. (Wannūs in Amiralay 1997, min. 40:21–41:17).

In the following years, from 1991 to his death on May 15, 1997, he wrote, as he put it, against death. The perspective evident in his writing shifted after the outbreak of his illness, and along with it his literary techniques and characterization of fgures.

# **From Didactic Theatre to Psychological Studies**

In contrast to the parable-like style of his politically accentuated didactic theatre, where the fgures were examples, in the fnal phase of his creative life Wannūs addressed specifc individual themes, exploring interpersonal problems, furnishing psychological studies, and achieving multidimensional characterization. Breaking more than one taboo, these plays are no less political and critical than his earlier texts of the 1960s and 1970s, however.

In an interview with Mari Elias in 1992 (p. 101), Wannūs explained a crucial turnaround in his work as stemming from the realization that, in the 1980s and early 1990s, political activism in the Arab world was hopeless. The opposition groups in society were marginalized, and established political forces were rotten to the core and hopelessly factional. Any belief in the possibility of changing the world through struggle, heroic acts, and martyrdom was suddenly revealed to be an illusion. In those years, which included the beginnings of the Lebanese Civil War and tragically culminating in the Israeli invasion of 1982, Wannūs bid farewell to the idea that had hitherto guided him: that the problems of the Arab world could be traced back to simple power relations in society.

The literary forms and themes of Wannūs's work changed accordingly. From consciously simplifying representations that aimed to ignite political change and restructure power relations, he now turned to an approach that sought to generate insights into problems of the individual in society as well as minority and gender issues. This new conception touches upon Said's concept of humanism: "Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority" (Said 2003).1

More diffcult than instigating a change of regime, Wannūs said in 1992, was "stir[ing] a society adhering to and petrifed in superstition" (p. 101). This new style of drama led Wannūs to a kind of aesthetic liberation and self-discovery:

For the frst time I have a sense of how writing can be a liberating act. Previously, I had certain ideas: I imposed a kind of self-censorship. An inner censorship which—as I imagined it—consisted in repressing everything that was of secondary importance, and left me to deal exclusively with the purportedly big questions. For the frst time, I feel that writing is enjoyable. I was of the view that personal worries or individual problems were bourgeois, were superfcial, unimportant affairs which one can put to one side. My whole interest was focused on grappling with and understanding history, and I thought—wrongly—that I had to avoid the traps of petit-bourgeois literature and go beyond all that was individual and personal. For this reason, I never felt as if entirely at one with myself in my work as playwright. (Wannūs 1992, p.101).

This quotation brings Wannūs quite close to Fadi Bardawil's description of the disenchantment of the 1960s' militant intellectuals in post-1967 discourse who "focused their analytical gaze inwards toward the social structures and culture of their societies" (2013, p. 92). Fadi Bardawil rereads the critical literature written after 1967 by the Syrian Marxist thinkers Yāsīn al-Ḥāfẓ and Ṣādiq Jalāl al-ʿAzm, demonstrating how books like these reveal a kind of "turning of the critical gaze inwards, focusing on the level of social structures, culture, and values while seeking to move beyond analyses restricted to the political surface, such as those which theorized the defeat as a result of imperialism or the 'shortcomings of the Soviet Union'" (2013, p. 95).

This inward turn implied an essential transformation of the leftist intellectual's self-image. Wannūs's turn away from the belief that the problems and power relations of the Arab world might be solved and changed by the theatre of politicization could be placed within these Arab leftist discourses of political disenchantment—which in Wannūs's case did not set in until after Sadat's visit to Israel in 1977, ten years later. The Arab leftist intellectuals who shifted their critical gaze inwards towards a harsh critique of the backwardness of Arab society in the aftermath of 1967 did not lose their solidarity with the masses in the process. This new approach is aptly described by al-ʿAzm in an interview from 1997:

What al-Hafez brought out for me was the importance of critically confronting the superstructures of thought, culture, heritage, and religion, which were impeding the economic, social, and political accomplishments of the Arab liberation movement. (quoted in Bardawil 2013, p. 95).

Al-ʿAzm criticized the contradiction between the Arab liberation movement's "revolutionary" core economic and political agendas and the movement's own "conservative" superstructure. According to al-ʿAzm, this contradiction was reproducing "values of ignorance, myth-making, backwardness, dependency, and fatalism" and thus "impeding the propagation of scientifc values, secularism, enlightenment, democracy, and humanism" (al-ʿAzm quoted in Bardawil 2013, p. 94). To my mind, this argument is exactly what motivated Saʿdallāh Wannūs to modify his dramatic style after his long literary silence in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Succeeding *The Rape* (Wannūs 1996, vol. 2) as his frst endeavor of a new psychological approach, the fve plays Wannūs wrote in the 1990s up to his death in 1997 refect the author's new self-defnition.2 These dramas no longer contain a simple and clearly political message or ideology which addresses "the people" or "the masses"; the addressee here is rather the individual, or a limited group of open-minded and attentive individuals who are astute enough to understand the veiled articulation of harsh political and social criticism.

In the last phase of his writing, and in the context of a litany of political setbacks in the Arab world, Wannūs renounced the idea that a change in power relations would automatically change society from within. This disenchantment of a committed leftist intellectual clearly refects the new socio-political reality in 1979 and the two decades that followed. Egypt's peace treaty with Israel did indeed destroy or at least severely damage the imaginative possibilities of this Syrian author's understanding of intellectual and literary engagement. He no longer believed that the problems of the Arab world could be traced back to simple power relations in society and devoted himself instead to "to stir[ring up] a society adhering to and petrifed in superstition" (Wannūs 1992, p. 101).

Thus, the political events of 1979 represent the parallel trends of societal change and personal transformations in a leading dramatist's biography and literary style. In Wannūs's autobiographical and intellectual self-narration, these political events are represented as a turning point that triggered a heightened degree of self-awareness and self-consciousness combined with an increased awareness that something has to be changed. The plays he published after his long literary silence until 1989 are Wannūs's critical answer to the complete failure of a social and national humanism within Arab consciousness in the postcolonial era. Here, the concept of critical humanism as a coping mechanism for ongoing injustice and backwardness in postcolonial Arab society and state, as coined by late Edward Said, nearly converges with Wannūs's position after his 1979 turning point: "humanism is the only—and I would go so far as saying the fnal—resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfgure human history" (Said 2003).

The Lebanese author and journalist Elias Khoury (Ilyās Khūrī) also believes that only a blunt and unsparing self-criticism could enable the Arab world to deal adequately with the complex postcolonial situation. In an article, published in 2002 in the leftwing Beirut journal *al-Ṭarīq*, Khoury advocates a "third *nahda/*cultural awakening" (p. 28). He sees Said as a forerunner of a specifc type of Arab intellectual, one who willingly assumes a highly visible public profle in intellectual opposition to the ruling powers. Comparable to the position taken by Wannūs, Khoury demands that the traditional roles of Arab intellectualism such as king, sheikh, poet, politician, offcer, entrepreneur, or journalist be replaced by a new set of roles. In the spirit of Said's critique, a new oppositional practice and intellectual movement needs to be initiated, one that counters both the repression and the injustices of Arab governments and the xenophobic cultural and religious ideologies circulating in the Arab world. This new understanding of the public role of the Arab intellectual precisely fts Saʿdallāh Wannūs's new orientation and outlook as an intellectual committed to a new critical humanism.

#### **Endnotes**


# **References**


**Friederike Pannewick** is professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture at Philipps-Universität Marburg (Germany) and co-director of the research feld "Travelling Traditions: Comparative Perspectives on Near Eastern Literatures" within EUME/Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She is co-editor of the book series Literatures in Context: Arabic-Persian-Turkish (Reichert) and has published extensively on modern Arabic literature and theatre.

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