Posted on 26 November 2012
Citizens in the Middle East and North Africa are being sidelined in post-revolution societies as old institutions and power elites take hold, speakers in a workshop organised by the Max Weber Programme said in November.
The multidisciplinary event on ‘Identity and citizenship in the new Arab world’ on 14 November focused on the evolution and outcomes of uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen.
“There is still a strong feeling among most citizens in the region of being excluded from the political sphere,” said Max Weber fellow Virginie Collombier, whose is researching political developments in Egypt. “I think this is partly due to the fact that the political gain after the revolutions came back to the usual elites and formal institutional area…So now there is a gap between the expectations of the people and then the channels through which their demands can be debated or addressed in the formal political situation.”
Speaking on Yemen, researcher Kevin Köhler said that popular protest in 2011 was hijacked by the Islamic opposition party Islah. “When Islah joined the protests they monopolised protest space in several ways,” he said, “First in the physical sense in that they occupied the stages which were used for giving speeches…In a more symbolic way they occupied protest space by enforcing their vision of morals on the protest movement. You see a decreasing inclusiveness in terms of gender.”
Islah entered into a power-sharing agreement with the ruling GPC (General People’s Congress) party in December 2011, following an assassination attempt on President Ali Abdullah Saleh who later handed power to his deputy.
Köhler argued that protests against Saleh’s rule originally transcended divisions of gender, region or tribe at a grassroots level, but Islah’s involvement reintroduced boundaries and took their own ideas into government. “What you see now is that the whole conflict got retracted into the elite sphere [which led to] a power-sharing agreement between different sectors of the old elite that does not include any of the actors that pushed for the original protests,” he said.
A similar process occurred in Egypt and Tunisia, according to researcher Jana Warkotsch: “In both cases, while marginalised people played quite a substantial role in the protests themselves, when the dictators had fled they returned to their status as marginalised people.” She added that efforts have not been made to include minorities in national institutions or new constitutions.
The outcome for both countries has been similar despite the shape of protest being quite different in Egypt and Tunisia, Warkotsch said. “In Tunisia mobilisation started from the marginalised strata, the unemployed lower classes – the excluded – and only later on did it spread to middle class people when it arrived in Tunis,” she said. The start of the uprising in Tunisia, which led to the ousting of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, was sparked by the death of street-seller Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself on fire after having his goods confiscated by officials.
“In Egypt mobilisation started with youth groups with the help of social media and came from the middle class who had participated in previous political activity. Mobilisation itself attracted people from lower social backgrounds, marginalised people who then fought for themselves in Tahrir [Square in Cairo], transcended identity boundaries in the same way the protesters in Yemen did.”
Köhler sought to clarify the common use of the term ‘youth’ to describe protesters across the Middle East and North Africa, stating that the protesters were youthful in the social rather than literal sense with the core made up of people up to their early 40s.
In Yemen this group of people, later joined by others, originally set aside divisions to make “a claim for universal citizenship as opposed to some national, community-based identity,” he said. But Warkotsch argued that national identity was a key driving factor of the Arab Spring: “Egyptians were proud to be Egyptian and that really meant that they had achieved something; that kind of nationalism was very important [and] it was the same in Tunisia.”
The latter view was echoed by history researcher Giorgio Potì, who turned attention to opposition to colonial rule by France and the UK in the Middle East in the 1920s. “Rebellion to mandatory rule provided ground for the birth or consolidation of a national consciousness among different ethnic and social groups often with conflicting interests,” he said.
While the speakers disagreed on whether protesters were asserting their identity on a national or international level, in all instances people initially set aside deeply-entrenched differences in an attempt to topple an autocratic authority. But the current situations in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen demonstrate that where new rulers stand among the remnants of the old order, citizens risk being marginalised once again by their gender or religious and cultural identity.
(Text by Rosie Scammell)