Revolutionary Shocks, Divergent Results
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A Creative Spring: North African Cultural Productions and the Transition
A creative Spring: North African cultural productions and the transition Cleo Jay, PhD candidate at SOAS, Near and Middle East department Abstract: 2011 has indisputably been a year of great change for North Africans, and the Arab Spring has been an inspiration for a wide range of cultural productions, from paintings to theatre plays. Artist in various in countries used art to reflect and gain hindsight on the events surrounding them: an interesting example in “Stone from Tahrir Square” by Ashraf Foda, who collected stones discarded by protesters and asked various important figures to sign them, dealing with issues around political activism and memory. The Revolutions have also led to a greater freedom of expression, enabling artists to address issues previously considered taboos. I will look in particular at how theatre is used as an interactive forum for political debates, and I will work on a comparative basis. Theatre acts as a “mirror” for society, through which the youth can reflect on its issues and its hopes, and recent plays served as a “prelude” to the Arab Spring, by expressing the youth’s disillusion and disenfranchisement and focusing on relevant themes such as suicide, women’s rights or corruption of the authorities. I will focus in particular on Morocco, a country who has managed to start a peaceful transition and has introduced a large number of reforms in the last ten years, and compare it to Egypt and Tunisia, who got rid of their oppressive leaders through violent demonstrations. 1 Introduction Over the last 18 months since young Tunisian Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight in a revolt against government violence, corruption and poverty, much has changed in North Africa: leaders have fallen, the people have taken up to the streets and organized new elections, and at last they have been able to make democratic choices. -
Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather” Was first Published July 31, 2011, at Winterends.Net
Greece’s Communist Organization: LearningLearning toto SwimSwim inin StormyStormy WeatherWeather by Eric Ribellarsi Also includes “The in!uence of the Chinese Revolution on the Communist Movement of Greece” by the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE), 2006 KASAMA ESSAYS FOR DISCUSSION “Greece’s Communist Organization: Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather” was first published July 31, 2011, at winterends.net. Winter Has Its End is a team of reporters traveling during the summer of 2011 to places in the world where people are rising up. “!e influence of the Chinese Revolution on the Communist Move- ment of Greece” was published by the Communist Organization of Greece (KOE), May 2006 Published as a Kasama Essay for Discussion pamphlet August, 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States Licence. Feel free to reprint, distribute or quote this with attribution. Cover photo illustration by Enzo Rhyner/original photo by Eric Ribellarsi Kasama is a communist project that seeks to reconceive and regroup for a profound revolutionary transformation of society. website: kasamaproject.org email: [email protected] 80045_r2 08.11 Greece’s Communist Organization: Learning to Swim in Stormy Weather by Eric Ribellarsi We in Kasama, and many others, have been en- Great and energetic hopes often masked under- gaged for several years now in trying to imagine new lying naiveté and fracture lines that would inevitably ways to fuse revolutionary ideas with the popular dis- come to the fore: How should these popular move- content of the people. It is part of what drew our Win- ments view the existing army (in Egypt), or the intru- ter’s End reporti ng team to Greece and what draws sive Western powers (in Libya), or problems of defin- us now to discuss the Communist Organization of ing specific solutions, or the organizational problems Greece (known as the KOE, and pronounced ‘Koy’). -
The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Legacies
1 The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Legacies Vladimir Tismaneanu The revolutions of 1989 were, no matter how one judges their nature, a true world-historical event, in the Hegelian sense: they established a historical cleavage (only to some extent conventional) between the world before and after 89. During that year, what appeared to be an immutable, ostensibly indestructible system collapsed with breath-taking alacrity. And this happened not because of external blows (although external pressure did matter), as in the case of Nazi Germany, but as a consequence of the development of insuperable inner tensions. The Leninist systems were terminally sick, and the disease affected first and foremost their capacity for self-regeneration. After decades of toying with the ideas of intrasystemic reforms (“institutional amphibiousness”, as it were, to use X. L. Ding’s concept, as developed by Archie Brown in his writings on Gorbachev and Gorbachevism), it had become clear that communism did not have the resources for readjustment and that the solution lay not within but outside, and even against, the existing order.1 The importance of these revolutions cannot therefore be overestimated: they represent the triumph of civic dignity and political morality over ideological monism, bureaucratic cynicism and police dictatorship.2 Rooted in an individualistic concept of freedom, programmatically skeptical of all ideological blueprints for social engineering, these revolutions were, at least in their first stage, liberal and non-utopian.3 The fact that 1 See Archie Brown, Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 157-189. In this paper I elaborate upon and revisit the main ideas I put them forward in my introduction to Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) as well as in my book Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (New York: Free Press, 1992; revised and expanded paperback, with new afterword, Free Press, 1993). -
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6 The decline of the legitimate monopoly of violence and the return of non-state warriors Cihan Tuğal Introduction For the last few decades, political sociology has focused on state-making. We are therefore quite ill equipped to understand the recent rise of non-state violence throughout the world. Even if states still seem to perform more violence than non- state actors, the latter’s actions have come to significantly transform relationships between citizens and states. Existing frameworks predispose scholars to treat non-state violence too as an instrument of state-building. However, we need to consider whether non-state violence serves other purposes as well. This chapter will first point out how the post-9/11 world problematises one of sociology’s major assumptions (the state’s monopolisation of legitimate violence). It will then trace the social prehistory of non-state political violence to highlight continui- ties with today’s intensifying religious violence. It will finally emphasise that the seemingly inevitable rise of non-state violence is inextricably tangled with the emergence of the subcontracting state. Neo-liberalisation aggravates the practico- ethical difficulties secular revolutionaries and religious radicals face (which I call ‘the Fanonite dilemma’ and ‘the Qutbi dilemma’). The monopolisation of violence: social implications War-making, military apparatuses and international military rivalry figure prominently in today’s political sociology. This came about as a reaction to the sociology and political science of the postwar era: for quite different rea- sons, both tended to ignore the influence of militaries and violence on domestic social structure. Political science unduly focused on the former and sociology on the latter, whereas (according to the new political sociology) international violence and domestic social structure are tightly linked (Mann 1986; Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1992). -
Social Media and Power Relations During the Arab Spring Revolutions with Comparative Focus on Egypt and Tunisia
Social Media and Power Relations during the Arab Spring Revolutions with Comparative Focus on Egypt and Tunisia Taylor R. Genovese Please cite as: Genovese, Taylor R. 2015. Social Media and Power Relations during the Arab Spring Revolutions with Comparative Focus on Egypt and Tunisia. Unpublished MS, School of Anthropology, The University of Arizona. doi: 10.13140/RG. 2.1.1860.8806 INTRODUCTION & A BRIEF DISCUSSION ON ORGANIZATION This paper has grown out of an earlier work that I completed as an undergraduate anthropology student. In 2011, I wrote a more journalistic and speculative paper on the Arab Spring Revolutions as they were unfolding and hypothesized that unrest in the Middle East contributed to the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the United States. I argued that the reason this quick transfer of revolutionary theory was possible was due to the utilization of social media sites—the first time that social media was used to such a large scale for revolutionary activity. The first section of this paper utilizes my original paper from 2011. This section provides a brief historical account of what happened in Egypt and Tunisia as well as some basic principles for how social scientists look at—and analyze—the transfer of information through social media. The second section of this paper is mostly an analysis of what happened. It applies several theories of change and offers a comparison between the revolutions of Egypt and Tunisia; the former falling back into a regime similar to when Mubarak ruled and the latter having a relative success story. SECTION 1 — The Egyptian Uprising in 2011 Genovese 4 THE MATCH THAT STRUCK THE FLAME OF REVOLUTION On December 17, 2010, a man in Tunisia set himself on fire. -
A Century of 1917S: Ideas, Representations, and Interpretations of the October Revolution, 1917–2017 * Andrea Graziosi
Harvard Ukrainian Studiesa 36, century no. 1–2 (2019):of 1917s 9–44. 9 ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER THE REVOLUTION A Century of 1917s: Ideas, Representations, and Interpretations of the October Revolution, 1917–2017 * Andrea Graziosi Introduction he celebrations of the 1917 centenary were striking for both their diversity and the diminishment of the event they commemorated, Tfrom Moscow’s low-key celebrations,1 to the missing or halfhearted remembrances organized in the former Soviet and socialist countries, to the West’s many platitudes—all of them stridently contradicting the initial energy of 1917. Embarrassment and hollowness were the key words in Russia, where, in 2017, 1917 was presented either as a “world historical event” illustrating the country’s greatness and importance by the very fact that it had taken place there, or it was buried under occasional studies of local events, with very little room left over for ideas. In the remain- ing post-Soviet states, as well as in the former socialist countries, silence often fell on what was until recently a hot terrain of polemics * This essay is based on a lecture that I delivered at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute on 6 November 2017, “Rethinking the 1917 Revolution,” as well as on a presentation that I gave at the 100th Anniversary Roundtable “The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Legacy in the USSR, Post-Soviet Russia, and the West,” organized by the Davis Center on the following day. The idea for this essay came from the way I reconstructed the interpretations of the Soviet experience in the chapter “What is the Soviet Union?” in my Histoire de l’URSS (Paris: PUF, 2010; Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2016). -
The Impact of Social and Digital Media on Traditional Agenda Setting
Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Graduate Research University Graduate School 2018 The mpI act of Social and Digital Media on Traditional Agenda Setting Theory in Relation to The Arab Spring Revolutions Arianna Khan Florida International University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/graduate-research Part of the Journalism Studies Commons, and the Mass Communication Commons Recommended Citation Khan, Arianna, "The mpI act of Social and Digital Media on Traditional Agenda Setting Theory in Relation to The Arab Spring Revolutions" (2018). FIU Graduate Research. 1. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/graduate-research/1 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Graduate Research by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL AND DIGITAL MEDIA ON AGENDA SETTING 1 THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL AND DIGITAL MEDIA ON TRADITIONAL AGENDA SETTING THEORY IN RELATION TO THE ARAB SPRING REVOLUTIONS By Arianna Khan Chair: Professor Jessica Matias Committee Member: Dr. Maria Elena Villar Committee Member: Aileen Izquierdo A PROFESSIONAL PROJECT PRESENTED TO THE SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION OF FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY [Spring 2018] THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL AND DIGITAL MEDIA ON AGENDA SETTING 2 Table of Contents 1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Literature Review a. The Arab Spring b. Citizen Journalists c. Gatekeepers d. Framing e. -
Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation (2018)
Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation Pamphlet of the £3/$4/€4 Communist Workers’ Organisation Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation Pamphlet of the Communist Workers’ Organisation Affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency in Britain Introduction 1 1 Idealism and Bourgeois Materialism 2 2 How Working Class Consciousness Develops 7 3 Marx, Engels and Proletarian Organisation 11 4 The Era of Social Democracy and the Fight Against Revisionism 15 5 On the Eve of Revolution: the Debate Between Luxemburg and Lenin 21 6 Class Consciousness and Working Class Political Organisations 28 7 Party and Class in the Revolutionary Wave 1917-1921 33 8 The Decline of the Russian Revolution and the Cult of the Party 37 9 The Idealism of Bordigism 43 10 By Way of Conclusion: Towards Proletarian World Revolution 49 For correspondence write to: BM CWO London WC1N 3XX email: [email protected] or visit our website: http://www.leftcom.org Subscriptions to Revolutionary Perspectives (3 issues) and Aurora (at least 4 issues): UK: £15 (€18) Europe: £20 (€24) World: £25 (€30, $30) How to pay: By cheque made out to the “CWO” and sending it to the address above. By emailing us at [email protected] and asking for our banking details. By Paypal using the “Donate” button on our webpage. You can also take out a supporter’s sub by adding £10 (€12) to each sum. This will give you priority mailings of Aurora and other publications including free pamphlets as they are published. Introduction The issue of class consciousness is one of the most important for the working class, and for its revolutionary minorities. -
The "Tunisian" Spring: Women's Rights in Tunisia and Broader Implications for Feminism in North Africa and the Middle East John Hursh Mcgill University
University of Baltimore Law Review Volume 46 | Issue 2 Article 5 2017 The "Tunisian" Spring: Women's Rights in Tunisia and Broader Implications for Feminism in North Africa and the Middle East John Hursh McGill University Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/ublr Part of the International Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, and the Law and Politics Commons Recommended Citation Hursh, John (2017) "The "Tunisian" Spring: Women's Rights in Tunisia and Broader Implications for Feminism in North Africa and the Middle East," University of Baltimore Law Review: Vol. 46 : Iss. 2 , Article 5. Available at: http://scholarworks.law.ubalt.edu/ublr/vol46/iss2/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Baltimore Law Review by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@University of Baltimore School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE “TUNISIAN” SPRING: WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN TUNISIA AND BROADER IMPLICATIONS FOR FEMINISM IN NORTH AFRICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST John Hursh* I. INTRODUCTION More than six years have passed since the tumultuous weeks that comprised the key moments of the Arab Spring.1 Although initially greeted with great optimism, most results of these remarkable events ultimately have been discouraging.2 In Egypt, a “democratic coup * LL.M., McGill University Faculty of Law; J.D., Indiana University Maurer School of Law. I would like to thank the University of Baltimore School of Law and the Center on Applied Feminism for inviting me to its outstanding Feminist Legal Theory Conference in 2016. -
The Arab Spring: One Year After Transformation Dynamics, Prospects for Democratization and the Future of Arab-European Cooperation
Amine Ghali, Ibrahim Hegazy, Salam Kawakibi, Eberhard Kienle, Elham Manea, Samir Saadawi, Tobias Schumacher, Jan Völkel The Arab Spring: One Year After Transformation Dynamics, Prospects for Democratization and the Future of Arab-European Cooperation Europe in Dialogue 2012 | 02 Address | Contact: Bertelsmann Stiftung Carl-Bertelsmann-Straße 256 P.O. Box 103 33311 Gütersloh GERMANY Phone +49 5241 81-0 Fax +49 5241 81-81999 The Arab Spring: One Year After Armando Garcia Schmidt Phone +49 5241 81-81543 E-Mail [email protected] 2012 | 02 Joachim Fritz-Vannahme Phone +49 5241 81-81421 E-Mail [email protected] Europe in Dialogue www.bertelsmann-stiftung.org Europe in Dialogue Transformation Index BTI 2012 Europeans can be proud as they look back on fifty years of peaceful integration. Nowa- Advocating reforms targeting the goal of a con- Discover the world of transformation “To improve governance, it is indispensable to learn from experience. With its qualitative analysis of transforma- days many people worldwide see the European Union as a model of how states and their tion processes in 128 developing and transition countries, the BTI provides a valuable resource for understanding stitutional democracy and socially responsible The interactive Transformation Atlas is an innovative tool that helps users explore better the successes and failures of political management. Its actor-centered approach identifies a diverse set the entirety of the BTI‘s extensive data set. An engaging presentation of information of strategies in how to get the job done. The BTI is an outstanding instrument for policy learning and should and intuitive navigation structure provide users easy access to the BTI‘s key fi ndings be consulted by policymakers worldwide who are struggling with the challenge of building sustainable and and allow them to identify patterns and correlations without compromising the thriving democracies.” citizens can work together in peace and freedom. -
Bogdan SZAJKOWSKI*
Alternative Politics, Vol.3, No.3, 256-419, November 2011 256 TIMELINE OF THE ARAB REVOLT: DECEMBER 2010 – JUNE 2011 Bogdan SZAJKOWSKI* December 17, 2010 Tunisia - Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed, sets fire to himself in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, protesting at the confiscation by police of his fruit and vegetable cart. He suffers third-degree burns across his entire body and is subsequently treated in the Traumatology Centre for Severe Burns in the town of Ben Arous. His self-immolation sparks demonstrations in which protesters burned tyres and chanted slogans demanding jobs. Protests soon spread to other parts of the country including the towns of al-Ragab and Maknasi in central Tunisia, and later the capital, Tunis. Videos of the Sidi Bouzid demonstrations are online soon after the protest began and the Twitter website carries extensive commentary of the protests. December 19, 2010 Tunisia - Protests spread to Kairouan (holy city located in north-central Tunisia), Sfax (city 270 km southeast of Tunis), and Ben Guerdane (town in south-eastern Tunisia, close to the border with Libya). December 20, 2010 Tunisia - Mohamed Al Nouri Al Juwayni, the Tunisian development minister, travels to Sidi Bouzid to announce a new $10m employment programme. But protests continue unabated. December 21, 2010 Tunisia - President Ben Ali carries out limited cabinet reshuffle and warns that protesters would be punished if rioting continued in the country. December 22, 2010 Tunisia - Lahseen Naji, a 22-year-old commits suicide in the midst of another demonstration over unemployment in Sidi Bouzid by climbing an electricity pylon and electrocuting himself on the cables, after shouting out ―No to misery, no to unemployment!‖ 257 Bogdan Szajkowski Ramzi Al-Abboudi, under the burden of business debt, ironically made possible by the country‘s micro-credit solidarity programme, commits suicide. -
Wild Times: from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the Revolution of Our
Abstract: The present work is an attempt to locate the relevance of the C R Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It takes as a premise the thesis that the I previous century was announced by this event, which indeed brought the S Wild Times: From I idea of Communism from the marginal debates into the center of political S action. It then goes on to debate revolutions as a plebeian moment, all the way to the possibility and the nature of socialism today, by taking a detour & the 1917 Russian through the meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution. The paper concludes C with affirming the necessity of revolutions, as something which dignifies R I the human beings. T Keywords: Russian Revolution, Lenin, plebeian, Revolution, Gramsci, I Revolution to the Q Soviet Union U E We are living in wild times. It’s difficult for our generation to / Revolution of Our adapt to the new situation. But through this revolution, our Volume 4 / lives will be purified and things will get better for the youth. Issue 2 Times S. Semyonov, spring of 19171 I.- The Revelation The revolutionary outburst split the world in two; moreover, it split the social imaginary of the world in two. On the one hand, the existing world with its inequalities, exploitations and injustices; on the other hand, a possible world of equality, without exploitation, without injustice: socialism. However, the result was not the creation of a new alternative world to the capitalist one, but the emergence -in the collective Álvaro García expectation of the world’s subordinates- of the mobilizing belief that this could be achieved.