and Amidst the : Lived Experiences of Hope

Uriel Abulof & Shirley Le Penne, Tel Aviv University and Cornell University

Now that we have tasted hope, Now that we have lived on this hard-earned crust, We would sooner die than seek any other taste to life, Any other way of being human. -- Khaled Mattawa, Now that we have tasted hope

Introduction

Political life draws on a deceivingly obvious, forward-looking force: hope. After all, why would one vote, join a party or demonstrate, if not for imagining that things should, and can, get better, and one can help make it so? But if so, how can we explain that the Arab Spring’s moment of hope was ignited, literally, by ’s suicidal despair? This paper seeks to resolve this apparent paradox.

We argue that, at the heart of the Arab Spring, as perhaps of every revolution, lies the interplay between political hope and despair. We show how political hope ascends by defying fear and fatalism, underlining the emergence, evolution, and outcomes of the Arab Spring in the Maghreb, comparing Tunisia 2011 and Algeria 2019. We tap into the lived experience of Arab protests by analyzing its discourse, focusing on key individuals (in the case of Tunisia) and symbols (in Algeria). We propose that the revolutionary hopeful process develops, dynamically and dialectically, from (personal) rage, through (moral) outrage, to (social) courage.

Investigating the revolutionary matrix of hope and despair has much to benefit from, and contribute to, political theory. To-date, political scientists have hardly conducted dedicated research on this lifeline of politics. What transforms personal despair into socio-political hope, and vice versa? Answering the question through political phenomenology,1 we trace people’s evolving revolutionary experience. Rage rises from a growing, humiliating, gap between what one wants and has. Rage may then turn into a moral outrage by recognizing how unhappiness was wrought by a widening socio-political chasm between the ought and the is. Finally, when moral outrage finds social courage, the revolution finds hope.

Theory

The Arab Spring was a season out of nowhere. The popular uprisings ended four long decades of regime stability, which engendered a voluminous scholarship on structural causes that pushed and pulled people and their leaders into a status quo of “enduring authoritarianism.”2 No scholar of the region saw the revolutions coming. Gause wondered “Why Middle East Studies missed the Arab Spring,” and the same applies to the social sciences writ large.3

Tellingly, in the wake of the Arab Spring, scholars resumed the very mode of inquiry that has previously failed – searching for structural causes, effectively treating “people as puppets.” A plethora of explanations was brought to fore:

1 Thomas Groenewald, "A Phenomenological Research Design Illustrated," International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3, no. 1 (March 1, 2004 2004). 2 Eva Bellin, "The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective," Comparative Politics 36, no. 2 (2004). 3 F. Gregory Gause, "Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring: The Myth of Authoritarian Stability," Article, Foreign Affairs 90, no. 4 (2011). aging autocrats, rigged elections, new ICT, unemployment and inequality, youth bulge, crony capitalism, corruption, overt repression, rising food prices, sectarianism, and Western involvement.4

These structural causes are certainly important but can hardly answer some vexing questions. Since key causes were already in place, why 2011, and not sooner, or later? Why was Tunisia the first, and why did other Arab societies follow, or not? Looking for regularities, experts quickly noticed that the titular Arab republics were more fragile than the monarchies5 – what then made Algeria an exception to the rule (in 2011), until it wasn’t (in 2019)?

Overall, structural causes cannot capture the revolutionary drive. As nicely indicated by The Economist “shoe- thrower index”, no casual complex, let alone a single variable, can predict the Arab Spring’s outcomes.6 This index, like others, omits one key factor – the human factor. After all, a revolution, perhaps more than any other prominent social phenomena, both defies the “people as puppets” paradigm, proving repeatedly that people are unpredictable. Revolution is not merely caused, it is made – by people, who reason, and act upon their reasoning, often choosing to risk their lives to make a change.

Our research contributes to the study of (Arab) revolutions by turning the pivotal question “Why the Arab Spring?” onto the people themselves – asking them to answer why they took to the streets, hoping, . Effectively asking “What is the lived experience of the Arab Spring?” we seek to append causal accounts with an intersubjective analysis: delving into the experiences of activists. By tracing key revolutionary people and symbols, we analyze the decisive roles of hope and despair in revolutionary politics.

People’s perspectives and the role of hope have not been absent from scholarship. Several works rely on fieldwork, mostly involving interviews with activists, to provide “bottom-up” views on the uprising.7 Still, unlike studies of structural mechanisms, these works largely avoid substantial theorization. We seek to make a theoretical contribution by unpacking key concepts at the heart of the revolutionary experience: fear, despair, and hope. The latter, however, still merits a rigorous analysis in the context of revolution. For example, an edited volume about the Arab Spring by leading scholars feature “hope” in its title, but does not include a single piece dedicated to decoding the role of hope in the upheaval.8

How do rogue regimes – whether authoritarian or not – survive? Why don’t their citizens revolt? Fear is an obvious answer. Sans fear, we may readily presume, the people will rise against a regime that works against them. But fear has many faces. We propose to unpack fear into three modes: Fright is about facing immediate, concrete and visceral danger; angst is fear of freedom, fearing our own choices and actions; finally, anxiety is about fearing uncertain, mostly

4 Ricardo Rene ́ Laremont, ed., Revolution, revolt and reform in North : the Arab Spring and beyond (New York: Routledge, 2014); Kjetil Selvik and Bjørn Olav Utvik, eds., Oil states in the new Middle East: uprisings and stability, Routledge studies in Middle Eastern democratization and government (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016). 5 Nur Koprulu and Hind Abdulmajeed, "Are Monarchies Exceptional to the Arab Uprisings? The Resilience of Moroccan Monarchy Revisited," Digest of Middle East Studies 28, no. 1 (2019). 6 The Economist online, "Build your own revolutionary index: An interactive index of unrest in the ," The Economist, 14 March 2011, 2011, The Economist, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2011/03/14/build-your-own- revolutionary-index. 7 Asaad Al-Saleh, Voices of the Arab Spring - Personal stories from the Arab revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Layla Al-Zubaidi, Matthew Cassel, and Nemonie Craven Roderick, Diaries of an unfinished revolution: voices from to Damascus (New York: Penguin Books/Penguin Group, 2013). 8 Mark L. Haas and David W. Lesch, eds., The Arab Spring: the hope and reality of uprisings, Second edition. ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2017). outside, dangers. While fright is certain, both angst and anxiety linger in the imagination of the uncertain. When we are “afraid of the dark,” we might experience fright of the darkness itself; or anxiety about possible looming dangers; or angst – about certain thoughts running through our mind.

Fright is not the most effective tool of subjugation. It requires the regime to create and sustain an immense apparatus of coercion, capable of constantly terrorizing each and every citizen, read subject. This costly strategy is hardly viable. Constant complete coercion is unsustainable; you cannot hold a gun to the head of each and every citizen, or subject all to torture.

Angst and anxiety are far more cost efficient, thus sustainable, to help regimes survive. With angst, citizens dodge their freedom and succumb to determinism, essentialism, and, most useful for a rogue regime, fatalism – believing that they have “no choice,” and that no matter what they do, the regime is bound to survive. With anxiety, citizens are fearful of lurking dangers around every dark corner: the regime’s arbitrary might pulls hidden strings to manipulate and crush them at any given moment; the citizens need not behold that crushing power, just be constantly cognizant of its existence.

How can revolution break this wall of fear? We suggest it does so by breeding hope out of despair. We propose that the revolutionary hopeful process develops, dynamically and dialectically, from (personal) rage, through (moral) outrage, to (social) courage – combating fright, angst and anxiety, respectively. Rage rises from a growing, humiliating, gap between what one wants and has. Like fright, rage too is visceral, immediate, instinctive, but while fear is passive (one is an object of danger) and internal, rage is active, externalized against an object of frustration.

From reflex to reflection, rage may turn into a moral outrage by recognizing how unhappiness was wrought by a widening socio-political chasm between the ought and the is. For example, an activist confessed to us that her husband demanded her to choose between her family and the revolution. Feeling the urge to be on “the right side of history,” she chose the revolution. By engaging the moral dilemma, making a choice, and reasoning it, one embraces, rather than escapes (as in angst), freedom, however costly (the activist ended up divorcing).

Finally, when moral outrage finds social courage, the revolution finds hope. Courage, like anxiety, involves imagination and uncertainty. But while anxiety traps us in a state of paralysis, courage imaginatively translates a potential into a course of action. This is not easily done. Whistling in the dark might help us abate anxiety about lurking dangers, but it is more an attempt to dodge our imaginaries; with courage, one goes through the darkest alley to face its worst fear – and defeat it.

What might en-courage such a move? Companionship and care. With companionship, the face, especially the eyes, of others, turn from lens-reflection to mirror-reflection. Rather than seeing yourself through the eyes of others, you see yourself in their eyes, and they, perhaps, in yours. Your (out)rage is theirs, and theirs yours; the mirror becomes emotional, and moral. Such companionship may help break alienation, the cement in the wall of fear. With care, one is willing to work, indeed make sacrifice, for all – and all, perhaps, for one.

Revolutionary courage, then, relies on human connection. The latter is also the cradle of both despair and hope, according to two prominent thinkers. For Sartre, “Despair is the realization that we can rely only upon ourselves.”9 Hence, despair is more than the absence of hope: it is the outcome of a crisis in relationships, a rupture, experienced

9 James A. Haught, Honest doubt : essays on atheism in a believing society (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007), 113. especially when the connection between individuals or groups, and society at large, has been at stake.10 Yet, to Sartre, despair does not mean we should abandon ourselves to inaction. On the contrary, it should lead us to commit ourselves to a joint course of action – for a just cause: a revolution.

For Camus, however, revolution carries grave dangers, for it is prone to nihilism and totality (e.g. “The old world shall be destroyed”).11 Camus further contrasts revolution with : “Rebellion’s demand is unity; historical revolution’s demand is totality... One is creative, the other nihilist.” Camus distinguishes between revolutionary solitary and rebellious solidarity, seeing the former as basking in power politics, the latter as “the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.” Rebellious solidarity finds hope in realizing that “I rebel, therefore we exist.” Still, unlike the revolutionary aspiration to fuse all people into a unity of sameness, the rebellion recognizes that ultimately “We are alone,” resisting the temptation of absolute, and often lethal, revolution.

Can revolution and rebellion entwine to enrich each other? Only, we argue, if the revolution avoids totality, and the rebellion commits to politics. Responsibility is the nexus – revolution’s, by caring for all humans in the present; rebellion’s, by caring for future generations. By creating bonds of mutual, and communal, responsibility, solidarity can fuse revolution (fighting collectively against a rival) with rebellion (individual defiance embedded in human kindness). Sacrifice here is not for sacred goals or values, as total revolution would have it, but for other people. This “hope against hope” has its eyes fixed not on the great beyond, but on humanity as a whole.

Tunisia

Explaining the Arab Spring, much has been made of the demonstration effect: societies following the examples of their peers, perhaps irrationally.12 This cannot be said about , making it especially important. Inequality, unemployment, social media, media framing, unions, and the security forces have all precipitated the uprising.13 Here, however, we complement such insights by illuminating the Tunisian path from despair to hope, from acquiescent alienation to daring solidarity. After Ben Ali fled the country, a joke spread, “Ben Ali created the National Solidarity Fund. He left with the fund, leaving us with solidarity.” Still, solidarity is not endowed, but created, turning despair into hope. In this section, we try to grasp this unique alchemy by following the stories of three people who helped kindle, and forge, the revolution.

The Fire: Mohamad Bouazizi

Mohamed Bouazizi, an impoverished 26-years old living in the small town of , was, as many Tunisians of his age, selling fruits and vegetables for a living. His dreams of high education were thwarted. Following his father’s death, Bouazizi, merely ten-year-old at the time, became his family’s main provider, sacrificing his education

10 Reyna Hernández-Tubert, "The Politics of Despair: From Despair to Dialogue and Hope1," Group Analysis 44, no. 1 (2011): 28. 11 Albert Camus, The rebel (New York,: Knopf, 1954). 12 Kurt Weyland, "The Arab Spring: Why the Surprising Similarities with the Revolutionary Wave of 1848?," Perspectives on Politics 10, no. 4 (2012). 13 Amira Aleya-Sghaier, "The Tunisian Revolution: The Revolution of Dignity," The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 3, no. 1 (2012/01/01 2012); Merylana Lim, "Framing Bouazizi: "white lies", hybrid network, and collective/connective action in the 2010-2011 Tunisian uprising," Journalism 14, no. 7 (2013). and constantly struggling to find decent employment to support his mother and five younger siblings. Daily altercations with the corrupt police forces were part of the routine, an all too familiar routine for many Tunisian youth.14

Tarnished honor turned into outright humiliation in the morning of December 17, 2010. According to Bouazizi’s family, a female municipal official confiscated his scales, tossed his product cart, and, to add insult to injury, slapped him, spat at him, and made a slur against his deceased father.15 Disgraced by the police, Bouazizi was also ignored by the authorities: denied an audience from the ’s officer. The regime seems omnipresent in debasing citizens, absent when it comes to respecting their human dignity. The government’s interference in – and indifference to – his life and livelihood, led Bouazizi to an ultimate act of despair, and defiance.16 Threatening the officials that “If you don’t see me, I’ll burn myself,”17 Bouazizi doused himself with gasoline in front of the municipality, and set himself on fire. He turned fright into rage – aflame. Two weeks later, Bouazizi died from his wounds.18

Bouazizi’s self-immolation resonated powerfully with the Tunisians. Bouazizi etched Camus’ words of rebellion, “That’s enough,” upon his flesh.19 Looking at Bouazizi’s fright-turn-rage, Tunisians saw their own reflection. Ben Ali’s interminable rule stripped ordinary Tunisians of political agency, reduced them to “humiliated subjects who could be killed without any recognition.”20 The perversion of the social system, pervasive corruption, chicanery and mendacity by the authorities, and the marginalization of the people, dehumanized Tunisians.21 Tunisians saw Bouazizi’s plight as their own: “This pain is also my pain.”22 Like him, they have been subjugated, humiliated, and silenced.23 His suicide became the ultimate sacrifice, a revolutionary ‘martyrdom.’24

Tunisians refused being anonymized, and, together, sought their re-humanization. This defiant alliance encouraged another transformation: from imaginative fear (anxiety) to “imagined solidarity.”25 Bouazizi’s individual rebellion engendered the construction of a joint commitment to a just cause. Personifying despair and hope, Bouazizi’s “I” ignited a political “We,” a collective agent of words and action. This transformation resonated powerfully in

14 Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli, "Geosocial Lives in Topological Polis: Mohamed Bouazizi as a Political Agent," Geopolitics 22, no. 1 (2017/01/02 2017); Lim, "Framing Bouazizi." 15 Rania Abouzeid, "Bouazizi: The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire," Time, 2011/01/21/, 2011, content.time.com, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2044723,00.html. 16 Mounir Saidani, "Revolution and Counterrevolution in Tunisia: The Forty Days That Shook the Country," boundary 2 39, no. 1 (2012): 45. 17 Joseph Pugliese, "Permanent Revolution: Mohamed Bouazizi’s Incendiary Ethics of Revolt," Law, Culture and the Humanities 10, no. 3 (2014): 410. 18 Banu Bargu, "Why Did Bouazizi Burn Himself? The Politics of Fate and Fatal Politics," Constellations 23, no. 1 (2016). 19 Camus, The rebel, 13. 20 Sari Hanafi, "The Arab revolutions; the emergence of a new political subjectivity," Contemporary Arab Affairs 5, no. 2 (2012/04/01 2012): 202. 21 Hernández-Tubert, "The Politics of Despair," 29. 22 Alec Jacobson, "Duality in Bouazizi: Appraising the Contradiction," (2011): 17. 23 Kallio and Häkli, "Geosocial Lives," 105; Meredith Diane Neville-Shepard, "Fire, sacrifice and social change: the rhetoric of self-immolation" (Faculty of the University of Kansas, 2014), 103. 24 Thomas P. DeGeorges, "The social construction of the Tunisian revolutionary martyr in the media and popular perception," The Journal of North African Studies 18, no. 3 (2013). 25 Asef Bayat, "Islamism and Social Movement Theory," Third World Quarterly 26, no. 6 (2005). Tunisia’s, and the Arab Spring’s, widely popular slogan of agency and unity: “The people want(s) to bring down the regime.”26

Tunisian solidarity, however, was not born in the revolution, but rather re-discovered and reconstructed. After all, the Tunisians already joined forces in the past, not least in protests.27 Still, none of these protests yielded what followed Bouazizi’s self-immolation. Why, and how? The roles of social media and networks,28 or of mass rapid communication of Bouazizi’s suicide provide a partial explanation.29 Two other pieces of this puzzle are the new ways Tunisians faced their fear, and met their freedom.

Reconstructing rebellious solidarity, Tunisians deconstructed elements of their inglorious past, declaring the end of dictatorship, and eagerness for democracy. Combating fear was pivotal,30 as expressed by one Tunisian activist: “The fear had begun to melt away, and we were a volcano that was going to explode.”31

While facing fear, Tunisians re-found their freedom. Havel saw hope as emerging from ascribing meaning to life.32 Seeing before them Bouazizi’s life-and-death choice, Tunisians realized their own capacity to choose. The warning signal was clear: if “Bouazizi’s world is our world,” and “his life is our life,” his death too might signal our own – in spirit, if not in body. With Camus, Tunisians could have said, “Nothing remains for us, moreover, but to be reborn or to die.”33 Choosing life, Tunisians re-found their freedom – their capacity to make a reasonable, responsible, and acted upon, choice, one that can give meaning to, thus hope in, life. Tunisians could have fled freedom; they could have, for example, denounced what happened in Sidi Bouzid while still resigning themselves to the regime. Instead, they choose to expressed a moral outrage on a mass scale, denouncing the regime itself as unjust, and Bouazizi’s self-immolation as justified.34

By rebelling, Tunisians defined themselves as subjects of history, rather than its objects,35 free as political subjects through collective action. Using non-violent tactics, such as sustained mass demonstrations, “occupations” and “sits-in” in capital city squares, or union-organized mass strikes, the reclaimed their civil power, the one Bouazizi so fatefully lacked.

The Voice:

“Here’s to you, Mohamed Bouazizi / Rest forever here in my heart / The last and final moments is yours / That agony is your triumph.” If these words sound familiar, but not altogether accurate, it is because they are an rendition of ’s Here’s To You. The song was performed soon after Bouazizi’s death, by Emel Mathlouthi, a

26 Uriel Abulof, "“The People Want(s) to Bring Down the Regime”: (Positive) Nationalism as the Arab Spring’s Revolution," Nations and Nationalism 21, no. 4 (2015). 27 Saidani, 2012: 45 28 Lim, "Framing Bouazizi." 29 Neville-Shepard, "Fire, sacrifice." 30 Aleya-Sghaier, 2012: 43 31 Pugliese, "Permanent Revolution," 413. 32 Václav Havel, "Never hope against hope," Esquire 120, no. 4 (1993). 33 Camus, The rebel. 34 Neville-Shepard, "Fire, sacrifice," 18. 35 Bargu, 2016 Tunisian singer-songwriter, who would soon become the “Voice of Tunisian Revolution.”36 Tellingly, Emel’s path to political protest stated in listening to Baez’s own rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s The Boxer, which itself begins with a personal surrender in the face of disillusionment with the world: “I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises / All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest.”

Emel’s early protest songs are full of frustration, directed not only against the regime’s corruption, lack of vision and deprived policies, but also against her own people, the Tunisian society at large, for its apathetic complaisance. Her most renown song of that period Poor Tunisia rages against Tunisian culture of fear: “They say they are only afraid of God / When I grew up and in front of the world I opened my eyes / I found that they feared everything but the good Lord / The fear is in their bones / Silence is their lot.” This is a song of deep despair, of a dashed dream, “this dream… that was my Tunisia.” Her songs banned from Tunisian airwaves, Emel decided in 2008, at the age of 26, to leave Tunisia to .

It is from afar, looking back home, that Emel heard the news of Bouazizi’s suicide. Her rage, once directed against both the regime and her compatriots, turned into outrage against the former, and – in Here’s To You – into compassion for the latter, through Bouazizi. She returned to Tunisia, and on January 14, ten days after Bouazizi’s death, and sang in Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the central thoroughfare of Tunis, the song that would resonate in the hearts of countless protestors in Tunisia and across the Arab world, becoming, for some, the anthem of the Arab Spring.37

38 Kelmti Horra”) is a voice that carries outrage into courage.37F“ ,ﻛﻠﻣﺗﻲ ﺣرة) Emel Mathlouthi’s My Word is Free One is not just mad at the world, nor merely indignant about its ways, but seeks to bravely partake in the hopeful effort to better it – through freedom. “I am those who are free and never fear,” Emel begins, contrasting her previous enemy – Tunisian culture of fear – with a fresh sense of freedom. The moral outrage is very much present, overcoming angst through free thinking: “I am the right of the oppressed / That is sold by these dogs / Who rob the people of their daily bread / And slam the door in the face of ideas.” The outrage, moreover, drives direct action by an agent who knows her power: “I am a thorn in the throat of the oppressor… I am a bullet.” Hope emerges by asserting meaning amidst chaos, wrought by the regime (and possibly by the revolutionary dynamics too): “I am the voice of those who would not give in / I am the meaning amid the chaos.”

Hope, however, takes another step, conjoining courage and care that extends beyond the rebellious group, indeed beyond Tunisia itself, to humanity as a whole: “Let’s make clay out of steel / And build with it a new love / I am all the free people of the world put together.” Tellingly, in the French version, Emel turns the “I” into “we” (nous), further boosting the sense of human solidarity.

Emel’s call was seemingly answered in kind, her song was sung by millions, her private plea becoming public, her videoclip becoming “viral” (Emel was even later invited to perform it at the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony). Technological dramatization may have played a role; it is unclear whether Emel staged her standing before the protestors at Avenue Habib Bourguiba. What is clear, however, is that her sung standing resonated powerfully with her

36 Sebastian Bouknight, "Emel Mathlouthi: The Voice of the Arab Spring," Afropop Worldwide, 2016, https://afropop.org/articles/emel-mathlouthi-the-voice-of-the-arab-spring. 37 Sylvia Westall, "Voice of Tunisian spring calls for justice, equality," , 4 July 2012 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/tunisia-singer-idAFL6E8I41YZ20120704, www.reuters.com. .(2011) ( ﻛﻠﻣﺗﻲ ﺣرة ) Emel Mathlouthi, My word is Free 38 compatriots. Seeing, and listening to, her – they saw themselves. Indeed, as they saw themselves in Bouazizi. Now, however, this mirror reflection offered a moral path of hope.

Music has played an important role in the Arab Spring but for the musicians partaking in liberation can become chaining.39 Sweeping acclaim of artistic expression comes with a possible price – drowning the personal in the public. Revolutionary courage, we noted, is best when it is also rebellious: Seeking unity of all while asserting individuality of the one, refusing to be “boxed in.” Tellingly, Emel’s titled her second album Ensen, Arabic for “human.” In an interview, she deplored her exclusive framing as a Tunisian protest singer, carrying the ‘world music’ tag, “I would like to be part of a festival where you won’t necessarily find the flag of my country in the description.” She explained: “That’s why I wanted to name the album Ensen. Because all the songs merge towards the contrasting sides of a human being – darkness, light, fragility, strength, madness… Art is human, a beautiful thing that only a human being can do… There could be the human, the political, but also we need hope in everything, in our daily life.”40

The Name: Zied El Hani

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” And so would a revolution? In that blossoming (now withering?) garden of the Arab Spring, would it matter if the Tunisian flower smell as Jasmin, as a rose, or not as a flower at all? Perhaps it does. Naming matters if the people rising up, and those beholding them, ascribe meaning to it.

Zied El Hani certainly does. A Tunisian journalist, Hani is credited for coining the “Jasmine Revolution” to denote the Tunisian uprising.41 Hani had been a dissident well before that flower blossomed. Championing freedom of the press, he organized several protests, campaigned for free radio stations, penetrated the closely-guarded interior ministry to serve a petition – and paid a price. While working in the pro-government newspaper Essahafa, he also run a popular blog: journaliste-tunisien-110.blogspot.com. Its title is telling, alluding to the number of times that it was shut down by the regime.

On January 13, a day before Ben Ali fled the country, Hani published his blog post entitled “The Jasmine Revolution.”42 Experiencing, first hand, the process that led to this point, Hani’s account resonates well with our model. The regime’s “fatal mistake,” Hani tells his Tunisian readers, is “believing that through intimidation it can bring you to your knees.” Fright, however, turned into rage, only now, unlike the past, the people did not settle for letting off some steam, effectively allowing the resumption of the status quo ante: “You refused to reduce your tragedy and anger to just claiming your right to work and a livelihood,” instead demanding the downfall of the regime itself. Angst too, the fear of freedom, made way for embracing the latter. With their “intelligence, fresh bodies and thunderous chants,” the people now bring about “the dawn of victory and the spring of freedom.”

39 Amina Boubia, "Music, Politics and ‘Organic Artists’ during the Arab Spring," Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 12, no. 1 (2019). 40 Stanley Roderick, "EMEL: The Tunisian Protest Singer Breaking Down Boundaries," Good Trouble, 24 February 2017, 2017, https://www.goodtroublemag.com/home/emel-the-tunisian-protest-singer-breaking-down-boundaries. 41 Associated Press, "Tunisian blogger claims 'Jasmine Revolution' slogan," The Independent, 2011/01/19/ 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/tunisian-blogger-claims-jasmine-revolution-slogan-2188340.html. -http://journaliste ,ﺻﺣﻔﻲ ﺗوﻧﺳﻲ Journaliste Tunisien 2011 ,110 ",[ﺛورة اﻟﯾﺎﺳﻣﯾن] Zied El Hani, "The Jasmine Revolution 42 tunisien-110.blogspot.com/2011/01/blog-post_13.html. Finally, instead of timidly wallowing in anxiety, fearing one’s own imagination, people brace themselves to hopefully fulfil their collective “dream.” The regime “believed in your cowardice and humiliation,” but “cowardice is not your character, and that patience has limits and a wall called dignity.” The latter has become especially important, as people find courage to take risks and make sacrifices, realizing that “dignity sometimes comes before bread.”43

That Hani emphatically emphasizes “dignity” as the revolution’s cornerstone summons yet again the question of naming, and branding, a revolution, not least in the context of the Arab Spring.44 Hani titled his post “the Jasmine revolution,” explaining that the people of Tunisia “are like jasmine in its beauty and nobility and in its purity,” the flower reflecting Tunisians’ “tolerance” and “the richness of this country.” The term quickly caught on. A few days before, in a desperate attempt to sustain power, Ben Ali lifted internet restrictions, and Hani’s blog post, now available to all, spread across the social media, making the Jasmine Revolution a preferred term. Some of its appeal was the garbage crisis that had enveloped the country before the uprising, inviting the yearning for the jasmine’s uplifting scent.45 Yet the term was mostly used by outside observers. In Tunisia itself it was far less popular, and far more contentious, not least since “Jasmine Revolution” was also how Ben Ali initially called his reign in the late 1980s.46 Still, Hani’s words ,ﺛورة اﻟﻛراﻣﺔ) did strike an authentic, public, chord: most Tunisians prefer to call their uprising the Dignity Revolution 47 Thawrat al-Karāmah), attesting to the more profound driver of this upheaval.46F

Algeria

Was Algeria an outlier of the Arab Spring, the only “republic” not to go upheaval? Many observers answered affirmatively, confirming the presumed post-traumatic, post-civil war, lethargy of Algerians. They were wrong. For Algerians, the Arab Spring blossomed following “the year of a thousand and one riots.” Riots on a large scale resumed less than a decade later, again surprising observers. Taking to the streets in 2019, Algerian youth have reclaimed political agency to answer their country’s emergency call. Algerians have turned “the smile,” the Berber flag, and “the wall of fear” into key revolutionary symbols.

Algeria’s Smiling

“We cannot hold a dialogue with the symbols of the old system,” claimed one activist.48 Algerians have to create new symbols – and smile became one. It was not an obvious choice. Many Algerians still recall the FLN fighters’ favorite method of execution, the “Kabylian smile” (cutting their victims’ throats pulling their tongues out and leaving them to bleed to death). In 2019, protestors flipped the symbol: The Algerian smile now became a symbol for choosing peaceful civil disobedience: “Algerians want change, but they reject chaos,” one protester claimed, while another clarified: “Algeria is not Tunisia, nor . Algerians have suffered enough from terrorism and do not want to let this scourge re-enter

43 see also Thierry Leclère, "Tunisie : c'était quoi être artiste sous Ben Ali ?," Télérama, 2011/01/28/ 2011, https://www.telerama.fr/monde/tunisie-c-etait-quoi-etre-artiste-sous-ben-ali,65024.php. 44 Imed Ben Labidi, "On naming Arab revolutions and oppositional media narratives," International Journal of Cultural Studies 22, no. 3 (2019). 45 Siad Darwish, "Flowers in Uncertain Times: Waste, Islam, and the Scent of Revolution in Tunisia," Ethnos (2020). 46 Issandr El Amrani, "Why you shouldn't call it the "Jasmine Revolution"," The Arabist, 2011/01/17/ 2011, https://arabist.net/blog/2011/1/17/why-you-shouldnt-call-it-the-jasmine-revolution.html. 3) [اﻟﺣوار اﻟﻣﺗﻣدن] Almawlidy AlAhmar, "In the Meaning of Revolution of Dignity," News website, Civilized Dialogue 47 February 2014 2014). 48 , "You Must Go’ Algerians Tell Leaders at Mass Demonstration," Al Jazeera, May 3, 2019 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/5/3/you-must-go-algerians-tell-leaders-at-mass-demonstration. the country via the demonstrations.” The choice is clear: Algeria rejects violence, the perceived marque-de-fabrique of its neighbors and the core of its historical trauma.

The “smile revolution” a term coined by the people, is a silmiya (peaceful) and humoristic quest for dignity. But the 2019 Algerian Hirak (movement) was not just about smiling faces. The trigger for the smile was a laughter, bitter and raging, against the humiliation and hogra (disdain) wrought by the 82-years-old president ’s insistence to run for a fifth term. Deceived by the amorphous nature of their political scene, the Algerians have long felt disposable and dispensable by their state – a persistent phenomenon experienced by millennials in societies where the art of feeling replaceable is well entrenched.49 Consequently, Algerian youth often opt for cynicism toward political change,50 since Bouteflika’s regime is all they have ever known.

The smiling revolution thus started with a scowl. As one leader of the movement noted: “It was difficult to mobilize people on 16 February because so many have lost hope. Society has lost trust in all organizations. The people must build change themselves.”51 And so they did. As another protester puts it, Algerians have become the beating heart of their revolution: “I protest for a better Algeria. And to regain our real independence. So that this youth can finally live with dignity. So that we can finally take our destiny into our own hands.”52

Laughing or crying, the people, outraged, took a moral stand against the reelection of a president who lost its physical autonomy since he suffered a stroke in 2013, incarnated ever since in a mere framed photograph. Known as “the president who does not speak,” Bouteflika himself became a symbol of an intergenerational rupture as seen by millions who refused to be ruled “by a frame.” Tired and ashamed of being led and lied to by a president who does not address his people, absent and deaf, both physically and politically, the people rebelled.53 As one protester puts it, “The problem is not merely the president, but the whole government and the whole system.” Getting rid of the aging Bouteflika is one thing, dismantling the longstanding Le Pouvoir (“the Power”) – an amalgam of military and unelected civilians calling the shots – quite another.

The popular demand for change runs deep. As one protester said: “We have been protesting since long before the beginning of the Hirak. In the stadiums, our demands are also and above all political for the end of hogra. We have always felt mistreated and humiliated by the police and the state… and we were the first to take to the streets to shout out our anger. We are tired of living in this misery.”54

Since February 22, 2019, Algerians have congregated every Friday to champion the slogan-calls, “the people want(s) everyone [in the regime] to be judged / to get out.” Singing, smiling, “Peaceful, peaceful” on the streets of central Algiers and requesting “Free and democratic Algeria,” the protesters also reiterated that “The people want(s) independence.” Banners from the protests read “You are not God to be believed in without being seen” and “Thieves

49 Sebastian Junger, Tribe: on homecoming and belonging, First edition. ed. (New York: Twelve, 2016). 50 McAllister, 2013: 13 51 Crisis Group, "Algeria: Easing the Lockdown for the Hirak? (Report n. 217)," Middle East & ( July 27, 2020 2020). 52 Sabr Benalycherif, "Nothing Will Fall from the Sky:’ Algeria’s Revolution Marches on – Photo Essay," African Arguments, December 18, 2019 2019, https://africanarguments.org/2019/12/18/nothing-will-fall-from-the-sky-algeria-revolution- hirak-marches-on-photo-essay. 53 Jérôme Duval, "The ‘Hirak’ Movement in Algeria Against Bouteflika’s ‘Mandate of Shame," CADTM, March 8, 2019 2019, http://www.cadtm.org/The-Hirak-Movement-in-Algeria-Against-Bouteflika-s-Mandate-of-Shame. 54 Benalycherif, "Nothing Will Fall." you have destroyed the country!” or “Error 404, president not found.”55 These ritualized twice-weekly gatherings in the country’s major cities have allowed people to find courage in numbers, and regain their political agency. The sheer mass of the protesting crowds provided participants with a sense of secure anonymity while retaining visibility.

The Berber Flag

For decades, the Amazigh population, also called Berber, has been the subject of violent oppression by the Arab regime, often for the sake of a unified Arab identity. In 1980, the Berber Spring, a growing political and civil movement advocating for the recognition of the Berber heritage, was violently suppressed. Later, the regime sought to create a cleavage between and by criminalizing the Berber identity – employing the all too familiar colonial “divide and rule” tactic to thwart any Arab-Berber solidarity.

Overall, the question of identity and its flipside, political exclusion, have been at the center of political contentions in Algeria. As a Professor at the University of Algiers, argues: “In the summer of 1962, Algerian independence was stolen, hijacked. This determined the construction of a system based on the primacy of the military over the civilian, single party rule and political exclusion. Being patriotic meant being pro-government; that was the discourse of exclusion hammered out by the regime.”56 Although the regime successfully instilled the discourse of exclusion in Algerian society, the Hirak still set itself the goal of overcoming it. Advocating for a vision of citizenship that transcends the political, social, and regional divisions, the movement expressed the idea that the people are united in their desire to bring down the regime that tries to separate them.

The Hirak thus fiercely rejected the ban against the waving of the Berber flag. Ahmed Gaïd Salah, the head of the country’s army, justified the ban by ventriloquizing the people. “We have,” he proclaimed, one flag – a flag for which millions of people have fallen to their deaths as martyrs,” and went on to promise firm action against “those who will try again to harm the feelings of the Algerian people.” And the regime did indeed jailed numerous flag-wavers, condemned for “undermining national unity.”57

The Algerian people, however, on whose name the regime spoke, felt no harm done by waving the Berber flag. On the contrary: instead of damaging national unity, the flag ban fostered national solidarity between the two groups who opted to join forces against the regime.58 The ban amplified the popular moral outrage against the regime. The words of one protestor captures well the unintended, indeed opposite, consequence of the regime’s strategy:

Algeria is one and indivisible. This power has always tried to divide us. And it continues to do so with the repression against Amazigh symbols… The Algerians did not speak to each other. They did not trust each other. This Hirak has made it possible to recreate bonds, to bring people together. We felt a new solidarity between Algerians. The government has always favored the division of Algerians: diaspora vs. locals, Kabyles vs. Arabs, French-speaking vs. Arabic, religious

55 Meriem Serhani and Nassima Kerras, "Algeria’s 2019 Uprising and the Significance of Slogans: Towards a Discourse Analysis," Akofena 2, no. 1 (2019). 56 Hassina Mechaï, "Redouane Boudjemaa: The Algerian Hirak Is a Rebirth of the Algerian Nation," Middle East Monirtor, September 9, 2019 2019, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190909-redouane-boudjemaa-the-algerian-hirak-is-a- rebirth-of-the-algerian-nation/. 57 Human Rights Watch, "Algeria: Tightening the Screws on Protests," HRW, September 9, 2019 2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/09/algeria-tightening-screws-protests. 58 Malia Bouattia, "Banning Berber Flags Will Only Reinforce Algerian Solidarity," The New Arab, July 15, 2019 2019, https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2019/7/15/banning-berber-flags-will-only-reinforce-algerian-solidarity. vs. seculars. This revolution made the Algerians overcome these divisions and a new unity was found. There are signs saying thank you to this regime for having united us: ‘Merci de nous avoir unis’”59

The ban thus boomeranged, galvanizing the demonstrators instead of dividing them. In Arab-speaking towns, people without Berber sympathies now courageously waved the outlawed flag, and many Algerians kept defying the ban, some even dressed in traditional Berber outfits.60 Public speeches also reinforced the unity between Berbers and Arabs, as one protester claimed: “Sometimes, we feel like we belong to this country again. Like we have found our place back.”61

The Wall of Fear, Dismantled?

Sidestepping the Algerians’ need to belong, instead focusing on their supposedly superior need for security and political stability, scholars too often ignore that belonging may eclipse physiological and security needs,62 not least amidst political activism. True enough, fear always plays a role in human, and political, affairs, triggering the familiar flight- fight-freeze triad reaction. But while Algerians, as others, have had their share of flight and freeze, the possibility to think – and fight fear – has never disappeared. Has Algeria witnessed the reversal, the disappearance of fear itself?

Tracing the politics of fear is hard; it is harder still when popular narratives eclipse lived experiences. As quickly as experts once proclaimed Algerians are too timid to join the Arab Spring, pundits hastened to assert that “Algerians broke the wall of fear.”63 Notably, Algerians themselves have often reproduced the same rhetoric, often without indicating whether, why and how it happened for them, personally. As numerous interviews feature ordinary citizens rehearse general slogans of fear gone, one protester argues: “The wall of fear has fallen. The balance of power has reversed.”64 But what does this wall of fear entail, and how have Algerians experienced being freed from fear?

In his popular song La Liberté, the activist rapper Soolking connects liberty as passion and inspiration, and liberty as pushing against fear: “Freedom, freedom, freedom / Foremost in our hearts / Freedom, freedom, freedom / It does not scare us.” The song’s leitmotiv is clear: freedom has nothing to do with the regime. It is never granted externally, as it foremost and intrinsically lives in people’s hearts. And its grandeur is not angst-inducing, as the regime would have it, regarding the people as lacking the knowledge of freedom or what to do with it.

In the triad of fear, neither fright nor angst were prominent amidst the revolution, but anxiety was – lingering in people’s memory while shaping their imagined future. It is however those two temporal aspects that the Algerian Hirak has courageously deconstructed. Facing a double anxiety, both about the past (the civil war trauma), and the future (the always lurking violence by the regime), Algerians have (re)constructed an imaginary of the possible, of the revolutionary. Indeed, the Hirak would not have been possible without overcoming the trauma of the “black decade,”

59 Benalycherif, "Nothing Will Fall." 60 Arezki Metref, "Algeria’s Massive Movement for Change," Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2019 2019, https://mondediplo.com/2019/12/03algeria. 61 Benalycherif, "Nothing Will Fall." 62 Shirley Le Penne, "Longing to Belong: Needing to be Needed in a World in Need," Society 54, no. 6 (2017/12/01 2017). 63 Jessica Ayesha Northey and Latefa Guemar, "Algeria breaks the wall of fear: Thousands of Algerians march to say'No!'to a fifth presidential mandate for Bouteflika," Open Democracy, February 26, 2019 2019. 64 AFP, "Social Media Breaks ‘Wall of Fear’ for Algeria Protesters," France 24, March 6, 2019 2019, https://www.france24.com/en/20190306-social-media-breaks-wall-fear-algeria-protesters. nor without defying the regime’s threats. Daringly facing the past is not forgetting it; the protesters held the portraits of famous martyrs from the War of Independence, such as Ali la Pointe or Ait Ahmed as sources of inspiration.

Dismantling the wall of fear, the Algerians built another wall of creative expression, often painting their freedom on actual walls (famously, a wall near the Place Audin). For, as one banner at the entrance of the street states, “People don’t need Facebook to express their freedom on a wall.”65 Trading the psychological wall of fear for the concrete wall of freedom, the Algerians reclaimed their public space, truly showing what hoping against hope entails.

Conclusion: One True Hero, The People

Mohamed Bouazizi died in the same hospital three days before Hosni Kaliya was brought to it, after he too attempted self-immolation. Unlike Bouazizi, however, Kaliya lived to survive, and sadly summed: “There was no Arab spring. We were hopeful, but we Tunisians are not accustomed to freedom.”66 As for Kaliya, for many activists and scholars too, the Arab Spring ended in a long winter of bitter disappointment, even disillusionment.67 After all these broken promises, do we still have hope for hope?

From Tunisia 2011 to Algeria 2019, the Arab Spring evinces that hope is what we make of it. Reclaiming basic human dignity may not suffice in political struggles; gaining respect by taking responsibility is needed. If human dignity is a given, respect – personal, and public – is earned. Tunisians and Algerians have already earned much of it, throughout their modern history, and now face this challenge once more. Responsibility here means not merely demanding change, but continuously acting upon that demand until it is met, in both the streets and the corridors of Power, until that power too transforms.

Still, above all, responsibility means appending negative hope – actively rejecting the bad – with positive hope: working towards the good. This is no easy task, for, as this paper, and one Algerian protester’s sign, show, “When hope dies, action starts.” But here again, in human action, hope is reborn (setting the course for another disappointment, and so on). Hope, we saw, emerges in facing the triad of fear (fright-angst-anxiety) with the triad of rage-outrage-courage. Whether fear has been defeated, or not, the Tunisian and Algerian uprisings reaffirm the politics of freedom: humans always have the choice to imagine, and pursue, better social life.

On the day Kaliya set himself on fire, Ali Rebah started a radio station on the Internet.68 Was there any Arab Spring? “Anyone can speak his mind in Tunisia now,” he said, but “aside from that, not much has changed. We need more time. Much more time.”

65 Ali Ezhar, "Tous les Algériens Sont Devenus Politologues," Le Monde, April 5, 2019 2019, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2019/04/05/tous-les-algeriens-sont-devenus-politologues_5446133_3212.html. 66 Clemens Hoges, ""I wish I could die" - Meeting the man who helped trigger the Arab Spring," Spiegel International, 21 January 2016 2016. 67 Steven A. Cook, False dawn: protest, democracy, and violence in the new Middle East (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017). 68 Hoges, "I Wish I Could."