[This Engaging Books belongs to ASI and MESPI’s year-long effort to mark, interrogate, and reflect on the Arab uprisings by producing resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the lived present. To check out other publications and events from the Ten Years On project visit The Arab Uprisings Project and MESPI.
Engaging Books is a monthly series featuring new and forthcoming books in Middle East Studies from publishers around the globe. Each installment highlights a trending topic in the MENA publishing world and includes excerpts from the selected volumes.This installment involves a selection from Saqi Books on the theme of the Arab Uprisings. Other publishers’ books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
By Jörg Gertel and Ralf Hexel
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Helen Lackner
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Gilbert Achar
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Gilbert Achar
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Jörg Gertel and Ralf Hexel
About the Book
Seven years after the Arab uprisings, the social situation has deteriorated across the Middle East and North Africa. Political, economic and personal insecurities have expanded while income from oil declined and tourist revenues have collapsed due to political instability. Against a backdrop of escalating armed conflicts and disintegrating state structures, many have been forced from their homes, creating millions of internally displaced persons and refugees. Young people are often the ones hit hardest by the turmoil. How do they cope with these ongoing uncertainties, and what drives them to pursue their own dreams in spite of these hardships?
In this landmark volume, an international interdisciplinary team of researchers assess a survey of 9,000 sixteen- to thirty-year-olds from Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, resulting in the most comprehensive, in-depth study of young people in the MENA region to date. Given how rapidly events have moved in the Middle East and North Africa, the findings are in many regards unexpected.
About the Authors
Jörg Gertel is Professor of Arabic Studies and Economic Geography at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
Ralf Hexel is Director of the Department for the Near/Middle East and North Africa at the Friderich-Ebert-Stiftung.
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
‘This is a most useful contribution to the understanding of the upheaval that is shaking the Arab world, a diligent investigation whose value is enhanced by the dearth of reliable statistical sociological surveys of the region.’ Gilbert Achcar, SOAS University of London, author of The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising
‘Youth in the Middle East continue to figure prominently in both political dissent and economic deprivation. The surveys and analyses in this book provide some of the best sources to understand the status of Arab youth in the years after the Arab Spring.’ Asef Bayat, University of Illinois, author of Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring
‘A critically important and sophisticated study of youth in the Middle East following the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis, and recent waves of migration, war, and refugees. It is a must-read to understand how young people maintain their optimism and deeply-held values as they negotiate insecurity and precariousness.’ Diane Singerman, American University, Washington, DC
‘This study presents the results of a 2016 survey of Arabs aged 16 to 30 [which] offer cause for hope.’ Foreign Affairs
‘Hopefully, this book will be read by government officials, people working in developmental aid organisations and others trying to address socio-economic issues related to youth in the MENA region. Because it is so concrete, so well researched and carefully evaluated, this study could be a large help in going beyond platitudes to find tangible solutions for the precarious status of youth today.’ Jordan Times
‘A highly important source for those who would like to read an empirical study and a detailed description/portrayal of the youth in the MENA region … a valuable contribution’ TRT World Research Centre
Excerpt
Coping with Uncertainty – Youth in the Middle East and North Africa addresses two questions: What does the situation look like for youths five years after the so-called Arab Spring? How do young people deal with the new insecurities and uncertainties of their everyday lives? In recent years, terrorism, armed conflicts, and wars have become more prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), while economic conditions and labour markets have deteriorated in many Arab states, often hitting young people the hardest. The actual situation of these youths, however, is largely unknown inside as well as outside the MENA region. In the wake of the social and political upheavals of 2011, renewed interest emerged about the region’s young people, often regarded as the protagonists of the Arab Spring uprisings. Numerous studies, national surveys, and small-scale analyses have been published, but systematic, transnational research on MENA youths, based on intensive and comparable individual interviews, has not, however, been conducted – until now.
The empirical findings of this study reveal the various uncertainties faced by young people in the MENA region. Two structural dynamics coincide in their lives. On the one hand, adolescence, a sensitive period in life, is characterised by the insecurity of finding one’s own position and role in society. The transition to adulthood is uncertain at many stages even under the best of circumstances. On the other hand is the more recent situation of precariousness and unstable social conditions that has rendered the period of youth in the region even more difficult. Insecurity manifests itself as exposure to violence and a lack of resources, hindering one’s capability to act. Therefore, while insecurity affects these youths’ everyday lives, uncertainty relates to the future. What kind of tactics and strategies help young people cope with angst-producing uncertainty and permit them to live confident lives?
This publication provides answers to this question and presents the key results of some 9,000 interviews of young people in the Arab world aged 16–30.[1] The aim of the study is to open up space to examine the situation of youths in the Arab world more comprehensively than previously possible. The focus is on eight countries, which allows for examining a wide range of daily life in the MENA region: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Yemen. In addition, young Syrian refugees living in Lebanon were included to discern issues and problems concerning migration and flight in the region.
Here, the target groups surveyed are introduced, followed by discussion of the study’s design, including in the context of current youth research. The individual chapters of the present volume and findings are then summarised.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
By Helen Lackner
About the Book
Yemen is in the grip of its most severe crisis in years. Fuelled by Arab and Western intervention, the civil war has quickly escalated, resulting in thousands killed and millions close to starvation. Suffering from a collapsed economy, the people of Yemen face a desperate choice between the Huthi rebels allied with ex-President Saleh on the one side and the internationally recognised government propped up by the Saudi-led coalition and Western arms on the other.
The struggle for power in the Arab world’s poorest but strategically vital nation has serious implications for the region and beyond. While Saudi Arabia and its allies fear that a Huthi takeover would threaten free passage of oil through the Bab al-Mandab Strait, Western governments fear an increase of attacks from al-Qa‘ida in the absence of effective governance.
In this invaluable analysis, Helen Lackner uncovers the roots of the social and political conflicts that threaten the very survival of the state and its people. She reveals the corruption of the country’s US-backed autocratic regime, as well as its failure to address national impoverishment and to plan an equitable economy for Yemen’s growing population.
About the Author
Helen Lackner has worked as a consultant in social aspects of rural development in over thirty countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. She has spent the past four decades researching Yemen, working in the country for fifteen years. Lackner is currently Associate Researcher at the London Middle East Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and was the 2016 Sir William Luce Fellow at Durham University. The editor of Journal of the British-Yemeni Society, she is also a regular contributor to Oxford Analytica’s briefs and openDemocracy. Her publications include Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State and Why Yemen Matters: A Society in Transition(editor). She lives in Oxford.
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
‘Comprehensive and in-depth, backed up by statistics and enriched with [Lackner’s] own insights into the major political, social and economic transformations of half a century.’ Jordan Times
‘An outstanding book that provides answers to all of the questions raised by Yemen’s many crises since 2011. Written with compassion and insight, Lackner confirms her standing as the foremost authority on Yemeni politics at work today.’ Eugene Rogan, University of Oxford
‘A superb book written by an outstanding author whose knowledge of Yemen is unparalleled. She combines elegant writing with incisive and lucid analysis to reveal the political, economic and social causes of Yemen’s instability and the origins of its current crisis.’ Dr Noel Brehony CMG, former Chairman British-Yemeni Society
‘An eminently valuable account of Yemen’s modern history and current travails by someone who has made it her life’s work to understand the country and its people.’
Roger Owen, Harvard University
‘Few scholars would be better suited to review Yemen’s recent history … Immensely valuable.’ Marieke Brandt, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Excerpt
Hope. Writing well into the third year of Yemen’s internationalised war, I hope, first and foremost, that the war has ended when you read this. second, that the end of the war brings a lasting peace and that Yemen’s new leadership joins with its people to solve the country’s fundamental social, economic and political problems. Third, that Yemen’s unique culture can re-emerge allowing Yemenis of all ages to flourish and develop their talents. Fourth, that reconciliation, rather than revenge, is everyone’s priority. Fifth, that the states involved with Yemen focus on helping its people, rather than on pursuing their own geopolitical agendas. Finally that this book helps readers to understand why and how Yemen sank into the war, but also provides the elements needed to contribute to a peaceful and equitable future.
Yemen is in the grip of its most severe crisis: the civil war between forces loyal to the internationally recognised government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansur Hadi and the Saudi-led coalition on the one side and those of the alliance between the Huthi rebel movement and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh on the other has devastated the country. on 12 July 2017, the special envoy of the secretary General of the United nations told the security council that
the situation in Yemen remains extremely grave. The intensity of the conflict increases day after day … The humanitarian situation is appalling … The country is not suffering from a single emergency but a number of complex emergencies, which have affected more than 20 million people and whose scale and effect will be felt long after the end of the war. Fourteen million people are food insecure, of whom almost 7 million are at risk of famine … There are now over 300 000 suspected cases [of cholera] and over 1,700 have died as a result of the epidemic … The speed and scale of Yemen’s cholera outbreak highlights the consequences of a collapsed public sector system.[2]
This cholera epidemic was declared the worst ever recorded worldwide. At the end of his briefing, the UN’s special envoy expressed a view shared by many when he reminded the political leadership that history will not judge kindly those Yemeni leaders who have used the war to increase their influence or profit from the public finances, and Yemenis’ patience will not last. The people need an alternative to politicians who work for their own interests and not for their country, who destroy and do not build, and who use the finances of the people and the state to enrich themselves, rather than serve the people.[3]
Despite this calamitous situation, compared with other crises in the Middle east, Yemen remains the least known and most neglected. In March 2017, a poll found that 51 percent of the UK’s population3 (and 63 percent of 18–24-year-olds) did not know about the ongoing war, despite the fact that in previous weeks it had been mentioned daily in the media as one of the four countries where famine was likely to kill many thousands of children, men and women. The nightmare humanitarian crisis had also been subject of a specific appeal from the UK’s Disasters emergency committee in December 2016, which was covered by all media. In the course of 2016, moreover, Britain’s involvement in the war had attracted considerable public attention because of its weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the latter’s role in the many air strikes on civilians in markets, mosques, weddings, funerals and hospitals, among others.
Why is there such widespread ignorance of a country in such deep crisis? Yemen is most definitely part of the Middle east, yet it has been deprived of the mainstream attention which has for decades focused on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and more recently the disastrous wars in Iraq and Syria. The Arabian Peninsula is known mostly as the home of the super-wealthy oil exporters, including the new tourist destination of Dubai. In fact, younger readers may be surprised to learn that Aden was a British colony until 1967 and then became the capital of the only socialist country in the region.
While the current equally devastating crisis in Syria is getting far more attention in the West, this is partly due to the ‘threat’ of hundreds of thousands Syrians seeking safety and refuge in Europe. Yemenis have even more hurdles to overcome before they reach the borders of fortress Europe: travelling through Saudi Arabia is by no means easy, crossing the red or Arabian seas would then mean travelling through many African countries alongside their desperate colleagues from Eritrea, Somalia and beyond. but even with full-scale war and the many dangers of being in Yemen, more people were still heading towards Yemen than away from it during the first two years of the war.
Geopolitics is frequently stated as the reason for international interest. In this respect Yemen should, in theory, receive considerable attention, given that it controls the strategically vital Bab al-Mandab strait leading to the red sea, which is still a major route for international maritime trade. Yemen is also the poorest country in the Middle east and its living standards, prior to the war, were on a par with those of many African countries. ranked 160th out of 188 in the UN’s human development ranking, Yemen is one of the few non-African countries in the low human development category. A possible explanation for the lack of attention on Yemen is that the situation in the country is complex. The humanitarian emergency which exploded in 2017 has been compounded by war, yet the crisis had roots in a combination of pre-existing factors acting in synergy: climate change, extreme water stress, rapid population growth, internal conflicts, a low-skilled labour force, decades of autocratic rule based on divisive patronage strategies, the existence of three states in the last half century, and neo-liberal development policies which have impoverished the majority. To cap all this, Yemen is all too often described as ‘tribal’, a blanket term popularly used as an instant simplistic label to condemn a society as backward and reduce the humanity of its people, as if tribal systems were anything other than just one form of social organisation among others.
Why should Yemen be given more attention? The country’s position on a major international trading route should be sufficient reason for serious interest by the mainly Asian and European states which depend on it. What little concern this country of 27 million has attracted from the outside world in recent decades has been largely as a result of Us counter-terrorism policy, which is focused on the presence of jihadi groups, mainly al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula, that are given far more attention than they deserve.* The reality is that this demon is more a creature of Western political propaganda than a real international threat, and Muslims form the vast majority of those killed by jihadis. Moreover, for most Yemenis, jihadism is an insignificant threat in comparison with hunger, disease and other survival-related issues they face on a daily basis.[4]
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
By Gilbert Achar
About the Book
Since the first wave of uprisings in 2011, the euphoria of the “Arab Spring” has given way to the gloom of backlash, clashes between rival counter-revolutionary forces, and a descent into mayhem and war. Morbid Symptoms offers a timely assessment of the ongoing Arab uprising.
Focusing on Syria and Egypt, Gilbert Achcar analyzes the factors of the regional relapse: the resilience of the old regimes, the power of religious reactionary forces, the exceptional number of rival international and regional supports of both reactionary camps, and the shortcomings of progressive forces.
Drawing on a unique combination of scholarly and political knowledge of the Arab region, Achcar argues that, short of radical social change, the region will not achieve stability any time soon.
About the Author
Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon. He is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has written extensively on politics and development economics, as well as social change and social theory. His publications include The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (2002), published in 15 languages; Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (2008), with Noam Chomsky; the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli-War of Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprisings.
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
‘One of the best analysts of the contemporary Arab world’ Le Monde
‘A sobering yet generous account of the Arab people’s fight for true liberation and the lessons that have been learned from that struggle.’ Jacobin
‘Focusing largely on Syria and Egypt, Morbid Symptoms skilfully explains the mutation of the ‘Arab Spring’ into an ‘Arab Winter’.’ The News (Pakistan)
‘Morbid Symptoms is a masterfully written and challenging analysis of paramount importance.’ Studies of Transition States and Societies
Excerpt
The designation “Arab Spring” was most often used sarcastically during the fifth year since the Arab uprising commenced. Such sarcasms had actually started multiplying ever since the regional revolutionary upheaval began turning sour, in the autumn of 2011. They were facilitated by the fact that “Arab Spring”, in the mind of most of its users at the early stage of the uprising, was not meant to designate one phase in an open-ended sequence of revolutionary seasons, where autumn and winter were to follow spring and summer. It was rather meant as a one-time political mutation; to use a word related to the same metaphor, it was seen as the long-overdue “blossoming” of democracy in the Arab region. According to this view, Arab-speaking countries were finally, albeit belatedly, joining what Samuel Huntington had identified as the “third wave of democratisation” – a chain of political mutations that started in the 1970s.
“Democratic Transition” and Revolutionary Process
The mood was all the more euphoric in 2011 because the Arab uprising happened at a time when the cautious pessimism of the arch-“realist” Huntington looked more and more vindicated. Countering the blissful optimism and Western triumphalism encapsulated in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “end of history” delusion,[5] Huntington – in his 1991 The Third Wave – had warned of the possibility of what he called a “third reverse wave”, enumerating its potential causes with much perspicacity.[6] Indeed, on the eve of the Arab upheaval most indicators pointed in that very direction. The 2008 annual report on Freedom in the World, produced by the veteran US-based organisation Freedom House, had already asked worriedly: “Freedom in retreat: is the tide turning?”[7] The question soon became a gloomy assertion: in 2010, the same organisation noted that 2009 was the fourth consecutive year during which “global declines in freedom outweighed gains”.[8] This, were we told, constituted “the longest continuous period of decline for global freedom in the nearly 40-year history of the report”. A fifth consecutive year, 2010, confirmed the sad record.
Hence the deep sigh of relief that the “Arab Spring” occasioned in 2011. The discussion thereafter turned on whether this dramatic sequence of democratic upheavals represented a continuation of the “third wave of democratisation”, or the beginning of a fourth wave, after a short reverse interlude. For not only did “the political uprisings that swept across the Arab world over [that] year represent the most significant challenge to authoritarian rule since the collapse of Soviet communism”, as Freedom House’s report stated, but they were taking place moreover “in a region that had seemed immune to democratic change”.[9] This purported immunity of Arab countries to democracy was widely held by Western pundits to be due to Islam. Huntington himself made that very tendentious observation in his later best-selling book upholding the Bernard Lewis-inspired “clash of civilizations” thesis, where he asserted that “Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world.”[10]
In 1991, however, the same Huntington could still conjecture that “the wave of democratization that had swept about the world from region to region in the 1970s and 1980s could become a dominant feature of Middle Eastern and North African politics in the 1990s.”[11] This is because The Third Wave’s author was still heedful in his appraisal of Islam, asserting that the Islamic doctrine “contains elements that may be both congenial and uncongenial to democracy”.[12] By contrast, Fukuyama, his former student turned challenger, did not bother with nuances: in the 1992 book in which he developed his “end of history” thesis, one finds statements on “Islam” of a staggeringly crude “Orientalist”, i.e. essentialist, character. Islam, without qualification, is said to constitute “a systematic and coherent ideology, just like liberalism and communism” (sic) that “has indeed defeated liberal democracy in many parts of the Islamic world, posing a grave threat to liberal practices even in countries where it has not achieved political power directly.”[13] The author sought consolation, however, in the fact that Islam has “virtually no appeal outside those areas that were culturally Islamic to begin with” and that “the Islamic world would seem more vulnerable to liberal ideas in the long run than the reverse”.[14]
In the immediate wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001, Fukuyama went yet further. He observed candidly: “There does seem to be something about Islam, or at least the fundamentalist versions of Islam that have been dominant in recent years, that makes Muslim societies particularly resistant to modernity.”[15] More candid yet in its reproduction of Islamophobic clichés was his dismissal of the “politically correct” view that only a tiny minority of Muslims supported “terrorism”:
The answer that politicians East and West have been putting out since Sept. 11 is that those sympathetic with the terrorists are a “tiny minority” of Muslims, and that the vast majority are appalled by what happened. It is important for them to say this to prevent Muslims as a group from becoming targets of hatred. The problem is that dislike and hatred of America and what it stands for are clearly much more widespread than that.
Certainly the group of people willing to go on suicide missions and actively conspire against the US is tiny. But sympathy may be manifest in nothing more than initial feelings of Schadenfreude at the sight of the collapsing towers, an immediate sense of satisfaction that the US was getting what it deserved, to be followed only later by pro forma expressions of disapproval. By this standard, sympathy for the terrorists is characteristic of much more than a “tiny minority” of Muslims, extending from the middle classes in countries like Egypt to immigrants in the West.[16]
The Arab uprising saw Fukuyama, like many others, swing back from that essentialist and demeaning view of Muslims. He suddenly sounded as if he was repudiating what he himself had written over the years. “This change in the Middle East has been incredibly rapid, and it has trumped, for now, old verities about the supposed passivity of Arab culture and the resistance of Islam to modernization”, he asserted in March 2011.[17] In a radio interview two months later, he sounded again as if he was recanting his own previous views, yet without acknowledging it, preferring instead to boast that he was proved right after all in his initial universal optimism:
The one part of the world that did not participate in the global resurgence of democracy – that began in the 70s and continued in the 80s and 90s – was the Middle East. A lot of people said that was (because of) culture – that there was something about the nature of Arab culture that made that part of the world different – and they would not embrace democracy. If you look at the situation in Tunisia and the way it spread to Egypt and other parts of the region, it turns out people there don’t like authoritarian governments that don’t respect their dignity any more than people in Eastern Europe or Latin America or India or other parts of the world. The basic impulse to live in a country that respects you by granting you basic political rights is in fact universal.[18]
My quoting Fukuyama here should not be misconstrued as a tribute to the importance of his thinking for our topic. His relevance is rather due to the fact that, since 1989, he has been particularly successful at expressing the mainstream Western Zeitgeist. The same ingenuous observation offered above was enunciated innumerable times by countless Western commentators during the first months of 2011. Western academia also joined the fray: theories of “Arab exceptionalism” were widely “revisited”, while the field of “democratisation theory” and “democratic transition” studies entered a period of severe turbulence.
The truth, however, is that the Arab uprising was not – or not only or even primarily – a “democratic transition”. The latter turns into a flawed superficial concept when applied indiscriminately to radically different situations, ranging from instances of mere political change to all-encompassing metamorphoses – even though, at first sight, the outcomes of the various sequences of events under scrutiny can be labelled, in part or on the whole, as “democratisation”. There is indeed a huge qualitative difference between processes of political regime adaptation to sustained socioeconomic capitalist development eventually requiring and generating a bourgeois-liberal order – such as the processes that took place in Southern Europe, Latin America or East Asia – and a thorough social–political revolution overturning a whole socioeconomic order after a protracted state of developmental blockage, such as happened in Eastern Europe.
And yet, the world was stunned by the great smoothness with which, in general, the overturning of the “Communist” bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe happened, although it brought about a metamorphosis of the whole region’s socioeconomic order from state-bureaucratic to market-capitalist. The amazement was made all the greater because this happened after decades during which a certain kind of “political science” had decreed that those “totalitarian” regimes were “irreversible”. Thus, when it looked as if the Arab regimes were about to crumble in their turn, by a domino effect similar to the one that was set off by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lingering memory of the “Revolutions of 1989” led observers and actors alike to believe initially that the “Arab Spring” was going to be similarly brief and “peaceful”. Silmiyya, silmiyya! shouted hopeful demonstrators in Egypt, as well as in Syria – a rallying cry that Barack Obama cited, along with a quote from Martin Luther King, in the short, lyrical speech he gave on the occasion of Hosni Mubarak’s downfall.
Regrettably, however, the happy surprise of relative smoothness in 1989 was not repeated in 2011, in spite of all the wishful thinking. Bitter disappointment soon prevailed. Like pre-1989 Eastern Europe, but for longer and with much more acute tensions, the Arab region had experienced a protracted blockage of economic development, but with much direr social consequences. From that angle, the uprisings that started in 2011 in the Arab region were indeed pointing to the pressing need for a thorough social revolution that would overthrow the whole socioeconomic order of the region. Ideally, this would come through radical democratic political change. However, a crucial qualitative difference made it impossible for the Arab uprising to reproduce the pattern of “Velvet Revolution” (as the 1989 revolution in Czechoslovakia was called), which had characterised most of the Eastern European transformation. And that crucial factor is neither religious nor cultural.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
By Gilbert Achar
About the Book
‘The people want …’: the first part of the slogan chanted by millions of Arab protestors since 2011 revealed a long-repressed craving for democracy. But huge social and economic problems were also laid bare by the protesters’ demands. Although Islamist parties did not initiate the protest movement, they have benefitted the most from the power vacuum that followed the ousting of the rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
In this landmark work, Gilbert Achcar sheds light on the social, economic, historical and political background to the on-going Arab Uprising and assesses its future prospects. With incisive and invaluable insight, Achcar investigates why the liberals and the Left failed to capitalise on the initial momentum and assesses whether the Islamist parties will be able to steer their countries out of their present crisis.
About the Author
Gilbert Achcar grew up in Lebanon. He is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has written extensively on politics and development economics, as well as social change and social theory. His publications include The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (2002), published in 15 languages; Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy (2008), with Noam Chomsky; the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli-War of Narratives (2010); The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising (2013); and Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprisings.
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
‘A detailed and searching account of the “Arab Spring”’ Malise Ruthven, New York Review of Books
‘Any reader who would like a clear-eyed, theoretically grounded and lucid assessment of what the Arab uprisings have wrought so far would benefit from this book.’ Laleh Khalili, The Middle East in London
‘This is the first book to locate the Arab uprisings within a broad historical sweep. … Once we accompany Gilbert out of and away from the freak show that is mainstream scholarship about the Middle East, historical events and conceptual constructs start to take a completely different shape.’ Maha Abdelrahman, Jadaliyya
‘[Achcar’s] insights offer a reasoned practical hope, whereas other analysts on the left offer doom and gloom. Moreover, Achcar’s chapter providing a “balance sheet” of what has been achieved so far in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria, as well as an assessment of future prospects in each country, is indispensable.’
Andrew Stimson, director of the American Educational Trust Book Club, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
‘The People Want provides not only a definitive and comprehensive overview of the uprisings but also, and more importantly, identifies the socio-economic dynamics that led to their eruption … An in-depth and critical reading of the Arab uprisings that will undoubtedly enrich Middle Eastern Studies libraries’ Bustan: The Middle East Book Review
‘Offers a valuable, in-depth and original perspective for evaluating the popular revolts which continue to determine events in the Arab region’ Jordan Times
‘The most careful, insightful and erudite study to date of the Arab uprising, written at a time when its fires were still burning strongly’ Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
Excerpt
“The people want!” This proclamation has been and still is omnipresent in the protracted uprising that has been rocking the Arabic-speaking region since the Tunisian episode began in Sidi Bouzid on 17 December 2010. In every imaginable variant and every imaginable tone, it has served as the prelude to all sorts of demands, from the now famous revolutionary slogan “The people want to overthrow the regime!”, to highly diverse calls of a comic nature – exemplified by the demonstrator in Cairo’s Tahrir Square who held high a sign reading: “The people want a president who doesn’t dye his hair!”
“The people want …” first emerged as a slogan in Tunisia. It echoes two famous lines by Tunisian poet Abul-Qacem al-Shebbi (1909–34) inserted in the country’s national anthem:
If the people want life some day, fate will surely grant their wish
Their shackles will surely be shattered and their night surely vanish.[19]
The coming of the day of reckoning expressed in this collective affirmation that the people want, in the present tense – that they want here and now – illustrates in the clearest possible way the eruption of the popular will onto the Arab political stage. Such an eruption is the primary characteristic of every democratic uprising. In contrast to the proclamations adopted by representative assemblies, such as the “We the people” in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, here, the will of the people is expressed without intermediary, chanted at lung-splitting volumes by immense throngs such as those that the world has seen packing the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, and many other countries besides.
The use of the term “revolution” to qualify the upheavals underway in the Arab region has nevertheless been, and continues to be, hotly debated and stoutly contested, even in those victorious cases in which the people have succeeded in ridding themselves of an oppressive tyrant. The more neutral term “uprising” has been used in this book’s subtitle not only to avoid settling the debate on the cover, but also because the word “revolution” has more than one sense.
The Arab region has unquestionably witnessed uprisings. Indeed, it has witnessed the whole gamut of what that word designates, from outpourings of demonstrators to armed insurrections. The Arabic term intifada, which the Palestinian population of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 has added to the international lexicon, covers the same semantic range. The Arabic term thawra also has a broad range of meanings: derived from the verb thara (to revolt), it originally corresponded more closely to the idea of revolt than to that of revolution. Thus thawra is accurately translated in the familiar English names of other events that have shaken the Arab region: the Great Arab Revolt of 1916-1918, the 1920 Revolt in Iraq, the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, and the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936. For the same reason, insurgents, rebels, and revolutionaries alike are called thuwwar in Arabic.
Farsi, together with the languages it has most deeply influenced, has for good reason settled on the Arabic term inqilab (overturning) to translate the Western concept of revolution. In Arabic itself however, inqilab has come to mean “coup d’état,” whereas thawra means not just revolt, but also revolution – in the sense of a radical upheaval including, at the very least, a change in the political regime accomplished in ways that violate existing legality. These diverse semantic developments can help us bring out the imprecision of the terms in our own ordinary lexicon.[20]
The concept of revolution generally evokes, in Western languages, a movement in which the people seek to overthrow the government from below, although a “revolution” need not lead to the use of arms. A coup d’état, in contrast, is the work of a faction, usually originating in the army, which seizes power at the pinnacle of society, always by force of arms. It so happens that the history of the Arab region is dotted with coups d’état that were unquestionably revolutionary, in that they culminated in profound transformations of political institutions and social structures. To cite just one example, the 23 July 1952 coup of the Free Officers led by Gamal Abdel-Nasser unquestionably led to a transformation of Egypt much more radical than anything that has so far resulted from the Revolution of 25 January 2011.
The 1952 coup led to the overthrow of a dynasty, the abolition of the monarchy and parliamentary regime, the creation of a republican military dictatorship, the nationalisation of foreign assets, the subversion of the old regime’s property-holding classes (big landed property, commercial and financial capital), a major drive to industrialise and far-reaching progressive social reforms. These changes certainly better deserve to be called a “revolution” than do the results of the uprising set in motion in January 2011, which so far (at the time of writing) has led only to the overthrow of the small clan that dominated the state, and the democratisation of the semi-presidential regime, pending a change in the constitution by means that seek to maintain juridical continuity with the old institutions.
Indeed, we might go so far as to say that the passive counter-revolution led by Anwar al-Sadat after Nasser’s death on 28 September 1970 also brought about deeper socio-economic changes than those seen in Egypt since the downfall of Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011. Yet the immense uprising that began on 25 January 2011 constitutes a bursting of the masses onto the political stage that had no precedent in the very long history of the land of the pyramids. Hence it has, beyond the shadow of a doubt, set a revolutionary dynamic in motion. It is too soon to pronounce on the consequences. The most radical results of the 1952 coup appeared only many years later. We would do well to bear that in mind.
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[1] Additional empirical findings by country are available online, http://www.fes.de/lnk/youth-study.
[2] United Nations Security Council, 12 July 2017. Briefing of the special envoy of the UN Secretary-General for Yemen to the open session of the UN Security Council
[3] Ibid.
[4] According to the Global Terrorism database, between 2000 and 2016, Yemen and the US both accounted for about 2 percent of world deaths due to terrorism, though their populations are 27 and 323 million respectively, while Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan combined had suffered 57 percent of deaths. In the case of the US, this includes 9/11.
[5] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History”, National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989).
[6] One of the potential causes of a “third reverse wave” identified by Huntington was “a general international economic collapse on the 1929–30 model” (Huntington, Third Wave, p. 293).
[7] Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2008, Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2008, p. 1.
[8] Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2010, Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2010, p. 1.
[9] Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2012, Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2012, p. 1.
[10] Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Touchstone, 1997, p. 29.
[11] Huntington, Third Wave, p. 315.
[12] Ibid., p. 307.
[13] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Avon, 1992, p. 45.
[14] Ibid., p. 46.
[15] Francis Fukuyama, “History Is Still Going Our Way”, Wall Street Journal, 5 October 2001.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Francis Fukuyama, “Is China Next?”, Wall Street Journal, 12 March 2011. This article confirms that Fukuyama’s grasp of Chinese realities is much better than his understanding of Islam or the Middle East.
[18] Rebecca D. Costa, “Acclaimed Political Scientist, Francis Fukuyama, Forecasted Arab Uprising During Clinton Years”, 5 May 2011.
[19] Translated from the Arabic by the author of the present book with the assistance of the translator.
[20] On the comparative etymology of thawra and inqilab, see Bernard Lewis, Islam in History, Chicago: Open Court, 1993, pp. 319–20 and 343. See also Azmi Bishara, Fi al-Thawra wa al-Qabiliyya lil-Thawra, Doha: al-Markaz al-’Arabi lil-Abhath wa Dirasat al-Siyasat, 2012, pp. 25-30.
