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Abstract

This chapter looks at the Arab uprisings and their outcomes, approaching them from the perspective of the peoples of the region. The Arab uprisings are conceived of as popular uprisings against aged and mostly despotic governments, which have long silenced popular dissent. Ultimately, the Arab uprisings demonstrate the weakness of traditional international relations, with its focus on states and power, by showing how much the people matter. Even if the Arab uprisings have not yet delivered on popular expectations, and the Arab world continues to be subject to external interference and persistent authoritarian rule, they are part of a process of global protest and change, facilitated by new media and technology, which challenges the dominant international relations theories.

Fourteen years ago, on January 14, 2011, Tunisians filled Habib Bourguiba Boulevard, the central thoroughfare of Tunis, with cries of freedom and dignity as they celebrated the ousting of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. He had fled the country and announced his resignation after 28 days of relentless civil disobedience expressed by public square “occupations” in almost every city of the country, triggered by the haunting self-immolation of fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi in the town of Sidi Bouzid.

The Tunisian people’s victory against their longtime oppressor and his suffocating, corrupt regime was so remarkable, so spectacular that it inspired a wave of Arab uprisings across the region.

In major cities from Yemen to Morocco, millions of freedom-hungry denizens joined the Tunisian “occupiers” of the Bourguiba Boulevard to celebrate the ouster of their fiercely authoritarian regime and call for their own liberation. With the Tunisian people’s perceived achievement of “karama” (dignity) and “hurriyya” (freedom) a new movement was born that placed the entire region on a revolutionary trajectory of “tahrir” (emancipation).

More than a decade later, the legacy of these uprisings, which came to be known as the “Arab Spring”, is mixed at best. One Arab country, Syria, which began its own revolutionary journey right after Tunisia on March 30, 2011, armed rebels managed to oust dictator Bashar Al-Assad only last month, after 14 years of devastating war and loss. In other Arab Spring countries, including Tunisia, the revolution came faster but has been short-lived with authoritarianism, oppression and conflict re-entering the picture soon after the initial successes of the revolting masses.

All this, of course, does not take away from the moral and political valour of the 2011 uprisings. The moral symbolism of these revolutions – as the remarkable victories of once muted peoples against

Book Reviews The Search Muslim for World Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counterdiscourses 96 O 2 riginal Article MUWO The Blackwell Oxford, 10.1111/j.1478-1913.2006.00134.x © 0027-4909 2006 Muslim Hartford UK Publishing World Seminary Ltd The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counterdiscourses By Larbi Sadiki New York, Columbia University Press, 2004 Sadiki seeks to provide a comprehensive mapping of the discourse about democracy among intellectuals, politicians and political activists within the contemporary Arab world. According to Sadiki, the current Arab search for democracy occurs at a propitious moment and has been produced by two factors. First there is the Arab peoples’ total disillusionment with the emancipatory project of national independence. Arabs believe that democracy is an “uncontested good,” inasmuch as “nothing can be more eloquent or convincing than personal experience with authoritarianism.” (p. 5) The second factor is the foregrounding of anti-foundationalist perspectives (post-modernist and feminist) which has made it possible for “subaltern discourses and counter-discourses to become more vociferous.” (p. 2) Sadiki embraces a middle ground between outright foundationalism and relativism. No democracy makes sense “without accepting freedom or the rule of law,” but this normative standpoint cannot overlook cultural specificities and new possibilities. Democracy in the Arab world does not have to conform to Western liberal norms and practices, including the sanctification of secularism, the market and individualism, discrimination against minorities and nonnationals, and the subordination of women. (pp. 55 and 47– 48) The standard Western category that is most in need of reconsideration within the Arab world is secularism, inasmuch as the Islamic revival “refutes the long held assumption that the advent of modernization spells the slow erosion of re