AFTER THE SPRING
policies affected young people’s sense of trust. The project included the hip hop play ‘The Rebel Cell’, about a clampdown on civil liberties after a terror attack.
“During the performance, the audience
were invited to suggest topics for a free style rap. The Cairo audience shouted out: ‘Votes!’ ‘Democracy!’ ‘Change of government!’,” says Professor Rooney. “Afterwards we had a question and answer session with members of the audience, who said that the play resonated greatly with them over the question of being deprived of civil liberties; they also said that the people were beginning to lose their fear.” The secular nature of the uprisings, with
a focus on democratic change, rule of law, accountability, and an end to corruption and nepotism, kept radical Islamists from taking over the protests and moving into the ensuing power vacuum. The uprisings took them by surprise, Professor Ehteshami points out. “The Islamists’ inability or unwillingness to act as revolutionary vanguards for the protest movements has been very striking. The speed and scale of protests left no time for the Islamists to play a leadership role, and when it came down to it they refused to appear as protest leaders,” he says.
r protests Protests outside the Arab world
“These revolutions have ‘de-problematised
Islam’ – transcending the Islamist-secularist debate and leaving it behind,” argues Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme and Co-ordinator of the Democracy and Islam Programme at the University of Westminster. A key factor to the success of the uprisings was the co-operation and solidarity between all participants in the protests – including Islamists – which undermined the ‘divide and rule’ strategy of the authorities. In his research Dr El-Affendi has examined how ‘narratives of insecurity’, such as the threat of an Islamist takeover, kept dictatorships going for decades. The sheer staying power of the dictatorships has puzzled political analysts, who were wondering about the lack of democracy in the Arab world – but therein lies a potential Western bias. “In many cases, it was like asking why mass slavery has endured for so long in the United States, or colonialism in Africa, or anti-Semitism in the West, or misogyny everywhere – then proceeding to answer the question by saying that it must be something to do with black people who could not handle freedom, or perhaps something amiss with Jews or women,” Dr El-Affendi says. According to this logic, the lack of Arab democracies would be due to the inability of Arabs to understand – or even deserve – democracy. Arab societies, went the argument, are too
Syria Iraq Kuwait Bahrain Saudi Arabia Oman Yemen The scale and speed of the uprisings was unprecedented
attached to religious dogma, too patriarchal, too tribalistic, too inhospitable to civility and civil society to accommodate democracy. “However, it was not clear why, if despotism was really a reflection of Arab cultural preferences, the victims were so rebellious or the dictators so brutal,” argues Dr El-Affendi. “And why did empirical studies persistently indicate that Arabs were, like everyone else, rather keen on democracy?” The belief in democracy as an external, Western idea that needed to be ‘promoted’ to Arab countries has not made for effective foreign policy, as Dr Michelle Pace shows in her research. Dr Pace is lead researcher on the ESRC-funded project ‘Paradoxes and contradictions in EU democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East’. “By focusing primarily on external democracy promotion, the impression is created that democracy is a political concept external to the Mediterranean region…invoking a false image of an unbridgeable cultural rift between the Europeans and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) sides in which democracy is framed as a Western concept,” Dr Michelle Pace writes in the 2009 Democratization article ‘Paradoxes and contradictions in EU democracy promotion in the Mediterranean’. “The recent uprisings have to lead to a paradigm shift in policy,” says Dr Pace. “The assumption in EU policy towards Middle East and North African states has always been that if we support economic development, then a political
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