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  • Mohamed-Salah Omri Traces the History and Influence of Unionization in Tunisia

    Mohamed-Salah Omri Traces the History and Influence of Unionization in Tunisia

    Lac de Bizerte, Tunisia

    Tunisia is gripped by the most serious political crisis since 2011, a crisis in trust between the government and its opponents compounded by rise in violent terrorism and a collapsing economy. Yet, one local trade union may save the day. If it did, it would not be doing so for the first time. For this is no ordinary union. The Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT) has affected the character of Tunisia as a whole since the late 1940s. It impacted significantly the 2011 revolution and the transition period, and is likely to impact the future. In this, it is unparalleled elsewhere in the Arab world. And it is largely because of it that one may confidently say that Tunisia is not Egypt, or Syria or Yemen. Indeed, to understand Tunisia, one must get to grips with its labour movement.

    Trade unions and the construction of a specifically Tunisian configuration of protest

    by Mohamed-Salah Omri
    St John’s College, University of Oxford

    Incubator of protest and refuge

    Trade unionism in Tunisia goes back to the early twentieth century and has had both local and international features since its inception by Mohamed Ali al Hammi (1890-1928), founder of the General Federation of Tunisian Workers in 1924. But it was with the charismatic and visionary Farhat Hached (1914-1952) that a home grown strong organization would emerge. Hached learned union activism and organizing within the French CGT for 15 years before splitting from it to start UGTT in 1946. His union quickly gained support, clout and international ties, which it used to pressure the French for more social and political rights for Tunisia and to consolidate the union’s position as a key component of the national liberation movement. Because of that birth in the midst of the struggle against French colonialism, the union had political involvement from the start, a line it has maintained and guarded vigorously since.

    UGTT has enjoyed continuity in history and presence across the country, which parallel only the ruling party at its height under Bourguiba and Ben Ali. With 150 offices across the country, an office in every governorate and district, and over 680 000 current members, it constituted a credible alternative to this party’s power and a locus of resistance to it, so much so that to be a unionist became a euphemism for being an opponent or an activist against the ruling party. UGTT has been the outcome of Tunisian resistance and its incubator at the same time. For example, in 1984 it aligned itself with the rioting people during the bread revolt; in 2008, it was the main catalyst of the disobedience movement in the Mining Basin of Gafsa; and, come December 2010, UGTT, particularly its teachers’ unions and local offices, became the headquarters of revolt against Ben Ali. The fit between the revolution and UGTT was almost natural since the main demands of the rising masses, namely jobs, national dignity and freedom have been on the agenda of the union all along. The union was also very well represented in the remote hinterland where the revolution started.

    For these reasons, successive governments tried to compromise with, co-opt, repress or change the union, depending on the situation and the balance of power at hand.
    In 1978, UGTT went on general strike to protest what amounted to a coup perpetrated by the Bourguiba government to change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional and too powerful. The cost was the worst setback in the union’s history since the assassination of its founder in 1952. The entire leadership of the union was put on trial and replaced by regime loyalists. Ensuing popular riots were repressed by the army, resulting in tens of deaths. In 2012, UGTT sensed a repeat of 1978 and an attempt against its very existence. On December the 4th, 2012 as the union was gearing up to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the assassination of its founder, its iconic headquarters, Place Mohamed Ali, were attacked by groups known as Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution. The incident was ugly, public and of immediate impact. These leagues, which originated in community organisation in cities across the country designed to keep order and security immediately after January 14, but were later disbanded, and become dominated by Islamists of various orientations. On August 26, 2013, a group of trade unionists founded the Tunisian Labour Organization, which aims according to its leaders at correcting the direction of UGTT. To the first attack, UGTT responded by boycotting the government, organizing regional strikes and marches, and eventually calling for a general strike on Thursday the 13th of December, the first such action since 1978. To the founding of a parallel union, Sami Tahri, the UGTT spokesman responded, not only dismissively but with some arrogance, that this is no more than the reaction of losers who could not win elected offices in UGTT and failed to drag the union into the “house of obedience”, referring to the new organization’s ties to Al Nahdah party. Tahri’s confident tone and political statement are backed up by history, which demonstrates that UGTT has warded off not one but several attempts of takeover, division or weakening over the past sixty years or so.

    Qualified powerbroker

    Despite antagonistic relations with governments before and after the revolution, UGTT remains perhaps the only body in the country qualified to resolve disputes peacefully but also offers mediation with a view to present its own positions. After January 2011, it emerged as the key mediator and power broker at the initial phase of the revolution, when all political players trusted and needed it. And it was within the union that the committee which regulated the transition to the elections of 23 October 20111 was formed. At the same time, UGTT used its leverage to secure historic victories for its members and for workers in general, including permanent contracts for over 350,000 temporary workers and pay rises for several sectors, including teachers.

    Tunisian Flag

    As Tunisia moved from the period of revolutionary harmony in which UGTT played host and facilitator to a political, and even ideological phase, characterised by multiplicity of parties and polarisation of public opinion, UGTT was challenged to keep its engagement in politics without falling under the control of a particular party or indeed turning into one. But, due to historical reasons, which saw leftists channel their energy into trade unionism when their political activities were curtailed, UGTT remained on the left side of politics and, in the face of rising Islamist power, became a place where the left, despite its many newly-formed parties, kept its ties and even strengthened them. For these reasons, UGTT remained strong and decidedly outside the control of Islamists. But they, in turn, could not ignore its role its status, nor could other parties.

    It is remarkable, but not surprising, that the current balance of power and much of the rational management of the deep political crisis is run by UGTT and its partners, the Tunisian Association of Human Rights, the Lawyers’ Association and the UTICA (the Tunisian Union of Industry and Commerce). Today all parties speak through UGTT and on the basis of its initiative, which consists in dissolving the current government, the appointment of a non-political government, curtailing the work of the ANC (National Constituent Assembly), reviewing top government appointments and dissolving the UGTT’s arch enemy, the Leagues for the Defence of the Revolution. Union leaders are known to be experienced negotiators and patient and tireless activists. They honed their skills over decades of settling disputes and negotiating deals. For this reasons, they have been able to conduct marathon negotiations with the opposing parties and remain above accusations of outright bias.

    The construction of a specifically Tunisian configuration of protest

    With a labour movement engrained in the political culture of the country, and at all levels, a culture of trade unionism has become a component of Tunisian society. There has not been a proper sociology of this. But the implications are important. I enumerate some of them here in the form of observations.

    • Protest culture in Tunisia has been deeply affected by labour unionism. It has been tenacious, issue-oriented, uneven and limited in terms of popular reach. The unevenness runs along the degree of unionisation and militancy. For example, the education sector tended to be the most vocal and better organised. The rural areas as well as a large portion of the middle class have been left out of this movement because it had no or less union affiliation. Even intellectuals had to work within the confines or in synch with unions.

    • One challenge to the Leftist parties after 2011 has been how to move away from being trade unionist and become politicians, in other words, how to think beyond small issues and using unionist means in order to tackle wider issues and adopt their attendant methods. This has been expressed by prominent Leftists, such as the late Chokri Belaid, who challenged his heavily unitized party to think like a party, not like a union. This meant finding different, broader bases for political alliances and laying out projects for the society at large.

    • Post 2011 alliances, particularly the current ones, have largely kept the patterns of alliance within UGTT. The Popular Front and its closest allies have been collaborating within UGTT for years. Their interlocutors in Nida’ Tunis are also trade unionists, most prominently Tayeb Baccouche, a former Secretary General of UGTT from 1981 to 1984. Furthermore, the Popular Front parties have been unable to recruit members from outside the union bases. Nida Tunis and Al Nahdha are different in this respect. Nida’ caters to a base along socioeconomic means and tends to attract the middle class and even wealthy, liberal members. Al Nahdha caters to religious or political affiliation which cross the class divide.

    Trade union leaders at the May 1st 2012 protest in Tunis, Tunisia
    Trade union leaders at the May 1st 2012 protest in Tunis, Tunisia

    • There have been close relations between student unionism (UGET) and the wider labour movement both in activism and in membership, as the university tended to be a training ground, which prepared leaders to be active in UGTT once they leave education. UGET, founded in 1952 worked closely with UGTT since then; and both would gradually move away from the ruling party, albeit at different pace. The radicalisation of UGTT in fact finds its roots in this flow as the university in Tunisia, particularly in the 1970s and 80s was a space of radical activism and left wing politics.

    • A key paradox of UGTT has been its support of women causes but scarcely promoting women to its leadership. The widespread practice of limiting women’s access to the glass ceiling does not truly apply to other aspects of Tunisian civil society institutions. The President of business association is a woman, so are the leaders of the Journalists Association and the Council of Judges. While the absence of women in leadership could be explained by the very nature of trade union work, which requires time and presence in public places which are not very friendly to women a such as cafes, but this remains a serious lacuna of UGTT, UGTT is challenged to be in line in this area. In Tunisia, this is particularly important as the role of women has been a marking feature of the society at large and of its protest culture in particular, throughout the post independent period, within and outside the labor movement.

    • The union has also been accused of bureaucracy and corruption at the top level, which triggered several attempts at internal reform and even rebellion over the years. There is in fact a lot of power and money associated with being a top union official in Tunisia, which, in a climate of rampant corruption has led many leaders to cozy up with businesses and government officials, the discredited former Secretary General Sahbbani is an example of this. But this did not affect grass root support and local chapters of the union who did not enjoy the benefits of high union office. Post 2011, UGTT seems to have regained a cohesion it lacked during the ben Ali period when the gap between the leadership and the grassroots were wide.

    • The practice of democracy and plurality in Tunisia over the past half century was almost the exclusive domain of the university and the trade unions. Both had electoral campaigns for office, sometimes outside the control of the state, as was the case in the university during the 1970s and 80s. In fact, the state stepped in specifically to quell such practice when the outcome was not in its favour. Two memorable incidents testify to this. The first one was in 1972 when the majority of students defeated the ruling party lists and secured the independence of UGET. The second was is in 1978 when the ruling party was overruled by UGTT leadership. In both cases, the government proceeded to take over or ban the unions. The type of democratic practice in these two institutions was also in place in the lawyers association and some other minor civil society associations which were all severely repressed, notably, the Judges Association, the Tunisian League of Human Rights and the Journalist Association. It is no surprise that two of these are now leading the reconciliation effort and that all four are working in concert and at the forefront of preserving the aims of the revolution, particularly freedom, dignity and the right to work. The coming together of these associations has, I argue, mutually affected all of them, not only in terms of widening the field of protest, but also in terms of brining to the fore the wider issues of human rights and freedoms, which were not at the forefront of UGTT’s preoccupations, notably at the level of the leadership. .Democratic practice was therefore linked not to normal running of society, i.e., as a practice of citizenship, but as an opposition or resistance activity. This gave democracy a militant edge, which it did not lose but also affected its character.

    • A combination of symbolic capital of resistance accumulated over decades, a record of results for its members and a well-oiled machine at the level of organisation across the country and every sector of the economy, made UGTT unassailable and unavoidable at the same time. UGTT has been key feature of Tunisian political and social life and a defining element of what may be called the Tunisian exception in the MENA region. For this reason, in times of national discord, UGTT is still capable of credible mediation or power breaking. It also remains a key guarantor that social justice, a main aim of the revolution, can remain on the agenda. Its own challenges are to remain the strongest union at a time when three other split unions are in place and to maintain a political role now that politics has been largely turned over to political parties.

    • This gradual coming together of these strong civil society institutions has given shape to a critical mass whose weight is impossible to ignore. I would even argue that whoever manages to dominate this coalition is likely to shape the future of the country and its revolution. Al Nahdha ignores this coalition at its own peril. If Al Nahdha does not accept the solution the UGTT and its partners have negotiated, they will be forced to form an open alliance with the opposition in a coalition, which will become hard to beat. Together, they are capable of ushering the fall of Al Nahdha’s government in stage a repeat of the January 14 mass protests and strikes.• The confluence between a largely secular and humanist education and an engrained labour activism have been, I claim, the main bases of a Tunisian formation, which allowed it to develop a culture of resistance to authoritarianism with a specific humanist and social justice content. An alignment of these two elements against Islamists is now taking place, which, unlike matters in Egypt, leaves the army well out of the game and may bring back hope in the success of the transition period.

  • Mohamed-Salah Omri's original essay on the Tunisian Revolution

    Tunisian Revo

    “The most famous slogan chanted in Tunisia in January, then in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, is a reincarnation of opening lines of the poem “The Will of Life,” written in 1933 by the Tunisian poet Abou el-Kasem Chebbi (1909–1934), which now form the closing part of Tunisia’s national anthem and have been sung by some of the most influential Arab stars, written on protest banners, and shouted by students in the face of French and English occupiers and their own governments.” Continue reading, boundary 2 volume 39, number 1

  • Mohamed-Salah Omri's "The upcoming general strike in Tunisia: a historical perspective"

    boundary 2 extends the work begun by RA Judy in his important dossier on Tunis.

    Tunisian Unrest

    The upcoming general strike in Tunisia: a historical perspective
    by Mohamed-­Salah Omri
    St, John’s College, Oxford

    The first general strikes in Tunisia since 1978 takes place in a much-­‐changed country and against old friends but for rather similar reasons.  To understand post independence Tunisia, one must get to grips with its labour movement.  Successive governments tried to compromise with, co-­‐opt, repress or change the union, depending on the situation and the balance of power at hand.

    In 1978, the powerful General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) went on general strike to protest what amounted to a coup perpetrated by the Bourguiba government to change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional and too powerful. The cost was the worst setback in the union’s history since the assassination of its founder, the legendary Farhat Hached, in 1952.  The entire leadership of the union was put on trial and replaced by regime loyalists. Ensuing popular riots were repressed by the army, resulting in tens of deaths. In few years, however, the formidable trade union would rise gain and continue to play a crucial role as locus of resistance and refuge for activists of all orientations, down to the present time.

    UGTT has been the outcome of Tunisian resistance and its incubator at the same time since its founding in 1946.  Because of that birth, in the midst of the struggle for liberation from French colonialism, the union had  political involvement from the start, a line it has kept and guarded vigorously since. In 1984, it aligned itself with the rioting people during the bread revolt.  In 2008, it was the main catalyst of the disobedience movement in the Mining Basin of Gafsa.  And come December 2010, UGTT, particularly its teachers’ unions and some regional executives, became the headquarters of revolt against Ben Ali.

    After January 2011, UGTT emerged as the key mediator and power broker at the initial phase of the revolution, when all political orientations trusted and needed it. And it was within the union that the committee which regulated the transition to the elections was formed. At the same time, UGTT used its leverage to secure historic victories for its members and for workers in general, including permanent contracts for over 350,000 temporary workers and pay rises for several sectors, including teachers.

    Despite various lacunae, UGTT remained democratic throughout.  All its bodies were elected freely, even as dictatorship continued to be consolidated over the country as a whole.  A combination of symbolic capital of resistance accumulated over decades, a record of results for its members and a well-­‐oiled machine at the level of organisation across the country and every sector of the economy, made UGTT unassailable and unavoidable at the same time.  But it also became the force to beat for anyone bent on gaining wider control in Tunisia.  In other words, as Tunisia moved from the period of revolutionary harmony in which UGTT played host and facilitator, to a political, and even ideological phase, characterised by plurality of parties and polarisation of public opinion, UGTT was challenged to keep its engagement in politics without falling under the control of a particular party or indeed turning into one.  But, due to historical reasons, and partly because of the nature of trade unionism in a country such as Tunisia, UGTT remained on the left side of politics and, in the face of

    rising Islamist power, became a place where the left, despite its many newly-­‐formed parties, kept its ties and even strengthened them.  It is no secret that the top leadership of UGTT is largely leftist, or at least progressive in the wide sense of the term.  For these reasons, UGTT remained strong and decidedly outside the control of Islamists. This was not for lack of trying, through courtship initially, appeasement afterwards and finally and coercion.

    On December the 4th, 2012 as the union was gearing up to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the assassination  of its founder,  its iconic headquarters,  Place Mohamed  Ali, was attacked  by groups known  as  Leagues  for  the  Protection  of  the  Revolution.  The  incident  was  ugly,  public  and  of immediate impact. These leagues, which originated in community organisation in cities across the country designed to keep order and security immediately after January 14, but were later disbanded, are now dominated by Islamists of various orientations. They have been targeting the media, artists and members of the former regime under the slogans: purification  or cleansing of the old regime and protection of the revolution.  A prominent action was their violent attack against the party Nida Tounes, headed by former Prime Minister, Beji Qaid Sebsi, which resulted in the first political killing after the revolution, that of Nida member Lotfi Nagadh in the southern town, Tataouine.

    UGTT sensed in the  attack, which was the latest in a series of actions, such as throwing trash at the unions offices in several regions few months ago, a repeat of 1978 and an attempt against its very existence.  It responded by boycotting the government, organizing regional strikes and marches, and eventually calling for a general strike on Thursday the 13th of December, the first such action since

    1978. For the first time, UGTT came clearly against Nahdah party and declared it enemy number one after stating on many occasions that it stands at the same distance from all parties.  Anti-­‐Nahdah parties and individuals are now banking on this and backing UGTT.  In Tunisia, contradictions have suddenly sharpened, rather not unlike the situation in Egypt, where President Morsi managed to unite warring opposition groups against his party when he gave himself sweeping powers.

    Tunisia today stands divided, with UGTT heading one side and Nahdha on the other.  If history is any guide, UGTT will overcome this time as well. What is in doubt is the cost to a revolution plagued by a set of circumstances and developments largely beyond the control of the country.   This is also Nahdah’s toughest test, internally and internationally.  Internally, UGTT is forcing a rift between the government and the party which dominates it by challenging the former to protect a national organization and apply the rule of law. Internationally, UGTT has already laid bare the para-­‐military nature of the Leagues as danger to social peace in Tunisia, on one hand, and rallied the union’s powerful friends in the international labour movement.  As the 13th approaches, Tunisia is holding its breath, and everyone is involved in one way or another to head off what could be a collision of titanic proportions.

  • Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Editor’s Note
    from Paul Bové
    _

    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

  • Mandela's Reflections

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    Nelson Mandela

    Editor’s Note from Paul Bové

    Preface by Anthony Bogues

    Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale / The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Discomforts by Hortense Spillers

    The Mandela Enigma by Wlad Godzich

    Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise by Joe Cleary

    Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters by Colin Dayan

    Or, The Whale by Jim Merod

    Malaysian Mandela by Masturah Alatas

    Mandela, Tunisia, and I by Mohamed-Salah Omri

    Nelson Mandela by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force by Anthony Bogues

    Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite by Dawn Lundy Martin

    [untitled] by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Mandela’s Gift by Sobia Saleem

  • Mandela's Reflections: Mandela, Tunisia, and I

    I have experienced Mandela as a presence, an absence, and a label.

    During the historic first free elections in Tunisia, held on October 23, 2011, I voted early, then set off to tour the polling stations in my hometown of Kasserine, a neglected and rebellious part of the country that brought the Tunisian revolution to sharp pitch early in January of the same year. The mood was buoyant, and long queues of determined men and women had already formed. I took lots of photos to mark the moment but also to tell the story when I got back to Oxford. But when I wanted to express what the elections were like on my Facebook page, my mind went back to one picture I have had in my office in the United States and in the United Kingdom for many years. It was an AP photo of two Zulu women carrying an infirm friend to the voting station in Usuthu, in the Natal Province of South Africa, on April 26, 1994. Their determination and hope was galvanized by Mandela. Those images and the inspired hope that fed them had stayed with me until the day when that “Mandela moment” came to North Africa, fifteen years later.

    The elections were part of a continuing transitional phase in Tunisia. After several traumatic decades, the country sorely needed reconciliation and healing. But for all the good will, active civil society, several conferences, money, and speeches, Tunisia risks either failing its transitional justice, and reproducing structures of authoritarianism, or being torn apart, like Syria, Egypt, and Libya. Throughout this period, three years now, I kept thinking that what we needed was a Nelson Mandela of our own. We missed having a national hero, a father figure, a reassuring face, a man of consensus able to forgive and inspire feelings of genuine leadership in reconciliation and healing. Mandela seems to have set a model for transitional justice that the Arab revolutions need at this moment. For cultures and societies that have been ruled by strong men and have been internalizing models of authoritarian power, a revolution has been a welcome leveling of authority. But at the same time, the atomization of the scene among numerous parties and figures of limited appeal and influence, as well as the return of harmful and fractious identity politics, left people without a moral force that could broker differences and show the way, the Mandela way. But then again, the Arab revolutions may have shown how specific to South Africa Mandela has been and how difficult his example was to transfer or to emulate.

    Mandela had indeed been an inspiration to many Tunisian progressives in the student and labor movements for decades before 2011. But things being what they are in the market machine, Mandela has become an iconic image and therefore consumed and misquoted at will. The wide dissemination of this image made it inevitable that local versions of Mandela would be invented and circulated, regardless of how flimsy resemblances may be. But for me, the peak of this instrumentalization saw a figure of Islamism in Tunisia, someone who did so much to divide the country and erode its modernity and freedoms before and after the revolution, dubbed “the closest thing to an Islamic Nelson Mandela.” Aside from the absurdity of the phrase “Islamic Mandela,” the label was conferred on Rachid Ghannouchi, by an American “expert” and Harvard academic keen on pushing two agendas that could not be furthest from Mandela’s ideals. The first was developed in Iraq and driven by dreams of reconquest and repartition of the Middle East, led by Bush Junior. The second points to the desperate need “experts” and pundits felt to assign leaders to Arab revolutions and anoint political Islam at the helm. Mandela has become, then, a convenient metaphor at the service of grotesque opportunism to usurp the ideals of Arab revolutions.

    -Mohamed-Salah Omri

  • Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    In Memoriam of Stuart McPhail Hall

    Each crisis provides an opportunity to shift the direction of popular thinking instead of simply mirroring the right’s populist touch or pursuing short-term opportunism. The left…must adopt a more courageous, innovative, “educative” and path-breaking strategic approach if they are to gain ground.
    –Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, “Common-sense Neoliberalism”

    Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    home_cover

    Intervention / Mandela’s Reflections

    Editor’s Note from Paul Bové:
    …We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

    Preface by Anthony Bogues

    Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale / The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Discomforts by Hortense Spillers

    home_cover
    The Mandela Enigma by Wlad Godzich

    Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise by Joe Cleary

    Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters by Colin Dayan

    Or, The Whale by Jim Merod

    Malaysian Mandela by Masturah Alatas

    Mandela, Tunisia, and I by Mohamed-Salah Omri

    Nelson Mandela by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    home_cover

    Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force by Anthony Bogues

    Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite by Dawn Lundy Martin

    [untitled] by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Mandela’s Gift by Sobia Saleem





    _____

    Three Models of Emergency Politics by Bonnie Honig

    Democracy: An Unfinished Project by Susan Buck-Morss

    The Future of Reading? Memories and Thoughts toward a Genealogical Approach by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

    _____

    b2 Interview
    History Unabridged: An Interview with Stefan Collini with Jeffrey J. Williams

    _____

    Articles
    King Kong in America by Arif Dirlik

    How Global Capitalism Transforms Deng Xiaoping by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    Is Dasein People? Heidegger According to Haugeland by Taylor Carman

    It’s Only the End of the World by Ben Conisbee Baer

    Passive Aggressive: Scalia and Garner on Interpretation by Andrew Koppelman

  • There's a Riot Going on: From Haiti to Tunisia

    There's a Riot Going on: From Haiti to Tunisia

    by R. A. Judy

    “The true scandal is not in the proposition of analogy between the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions, but in this epistemological failure, which perpetuates the refusal to recognize that they are not derivative analogues of the French Revolution or the European Spring of Revolution, but are distinctive events of social transformation, which while in part stimulated by a certain set of Enlightenment concepts and institutions, have taken a course that cannot be charted according to the dominate mapping of our common modernity…”

    Given on May 17 2014 at The Tunisian Revolution: Causes, Course and Aftermath Conference, Saint Anthony’s College, Oxford University, Oxford UK

    ©Ronald A. Judy
    (Do not quote or cite without the author’s express permission)

    I should like to take full measure of the gravitas of my charge today, which is to locate the Tunisian Revolution in its international dimension. In doing so, I begin by pressing some on two of the crucial terms of that charge: locate and international. Without appealing to the rather authoritative force of etymology—itself a mode of placement and so begging the question—I’ll merely point out that locating something is to place it within some set of boundaries and to so settle it; to situate it. How does one situate or settle revolution, except to, as in the manner of the National Convention in 1795, having just repressed the last uprising of the Revolutionary Parisian sans-culottes and yielding power to the Directory, stabilize it. Nor is it a trivial fact to our purposes here that chief among the institutions of stability was the comprehensive public education law enacted in October of that year, establishing the Institut national de sciences et arts (National Institute of Sciences and Arts), whose expressed mission was indeed to advise the Directory about intellectual work, both scientific and literary, in France and abroad, which might have been of use in stabilizing the energies of the revolution—in other words, their management for the glory of the republic. This was perhaps most successfully realized in the work of the Institut’s second class, the Classe des sciences morales et politiques (Class for Moral and Political Sciences), in which de Tracy’s Idéologues held considerable sway; a heuristic of some of the pitfalls involved in the academicization of revolution well worth attending to now. Nonetheless, it warrants pointing out that in its voluminous work of memoirs, the Institut national de sciences et arts achieved a corpus of psychological social science, including theories of mind as well as ethics, all focused on the well-tempered individual as the proper embodiment of revolutionary force, that still contributes to our understanding of proper social order in change. And that is precisely why we cannot “locate” the Tunisian Revolution, per se. Even if we were to locate it in the seemingly straightforward geo-political sense of placement, I should still dissent, because it is not merely circumscribed within the ambit of the Arab World in any easy way, and it remains porous both northerly and southerly in a way that severely troubles the distinguishing boundaries of Europe, Mediterranean, and Africa.

    So, then, rather than locating the Tunisian Revolution in its international dimension, I raise, and will try to address the question of what and how it is meaningful as an earthly historic human event. The most succinct answer to this question is that the Tunisian Revolution, “which we have seen unfolding in our day, whether it may succeed or miscarry . . . finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in the game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm, the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race.” The last sentence sums things up: this revolution is evidence that humanity can progress of its own accord. That, I think, is the significance of the Tunisian Revolution of Dignity in all the details of its events beginning in Gafsa in 2008 up through to the moment. And, in that regard, it is far more analogous to the events that shook the Caribbean Island of Saint Domingue from 1791-1804, when the independent republic of Haiti was established,1 than it is to either those that transformed France from 1789 to 95, or those from 1848 to 71, which ushered in the hegemony of the European bourgeois liberal nation-state. I know this seems like a radical provocation. I do not, however, intend it as a scandalous remark, but rather as a serious proposition aimed at getting us to think something else. Its seeming scandalous has to do with its incomprehensibleness, which in turn has to do with a failure of knowledge regarding those events of Haiti that, as the Haitian anthropologist, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, asserted in 1990, persist as “‘unthinkable’ facts . . . for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize.”2 The true scandal is not in the proposition of analogy between the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions, but in this epistemological failure, which perpetuates the refusal to recognize that they are not derivative analogues of the French Revolution or the European Spring of Revolution, but are distinctive events of social transformation, which while in part stimulated by a certain set of Enlightenment concepts and institutions, have taken a course that cannot be charted according to the dominate mapping of our common modernity.

    What I am proposing, then, is that in order to address the significance of the Tunisian Revolution, to seriously ask what this is as an earthly historic human event, we need another historiography of revolution, one that not only makes use of alternative archives but also deploys an alternative anthropology. In addressing the question what is this, we need ask what does it look like; hence, my answer: Haiti. To the extent that this entails locating the Tunisian Revolution within an international milieu, it means situating it in the lineage of, to put it bluntly, “other-than-European” popular revolution. This does not mean non-European, which would assume that the question of Europe itself is settled; which it is not, remaining instead the principal conundrum of modern political science, as well as human sciences: What are we and how can we see ourselves in common? The incomprehensibleness of the commonality of the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions to the current political and sociological analysis is indicative of the utter failure of these sciences to adequately address that question. In the case of Haiti, this is expressed as an outright hostility to the possibility of there ever being let alone ever have been a revolution. In the case of Tunisia, it is manifested as an equally assertive indifference. Both responses have a similar effect: the blockage of destructive neglect of the revolutionary momentum. There are two specific points of analogy to which I wish to draw attention today. The first has to do with why both Haiti and Tunisia are incomprehensible as revolutions in their own right. The second has to do with, incomprehensibleness notwithstanding, the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions’ function in common as actual catalysts for worldwide revolution. Both are emblematic of the movement of les damnes of modernity to realize the better aspirations of humanist modernity: Universal human dignity and rights. This has certainly been so for Haiti historically, which has long been an emblem of radical revolutionary freedom among radicals, and not just Black radicals for 200 years despite, no precisely because of the efforts of the great powers to erase it. Tunisia may perhaps, and this is the aspirational bit, come to be the same for our era.

    Taking up the first point, I’ll remark what I am sure many of you already noted, which is that my proposition the Tunisian Revolution is evidence humanity can progress of its own accord is a paraphrasing of Immanuel Kant’s assessment of the French Revolution given in his treatise on education, Der Streit der Fakultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties). Kant’s pronouncements of revolution have come under considerable scrutiny among political philosophers of late in accordance with a renewed investment in his conception of cosmopolitanism; the reason having to do with the idea that we may be indeed approaching such a world order. Of course, Kant is notoriously counterrevolutionary, precisely because, as Lewis Beck and even Chris Surprenant have pointed out, his theory of the deontological foundation for the origins of civil society dictates absolute prohibition on violent rebellion. Nonetheless, he did publicly express enthusiasm for the French Revolution, seeing in the events of 1789 to 1798, when he wrote The Conflict, a mode of thinking—we might best call it, daring to correct him, an emergent intelligence—that “demonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once.” That this should have emerged all at once, spontaneously, among the populous without the benefit of the discipline, Zucht, achieved through cultured pedagogy, trending toward instituting a civil constitution is precisely what recommends it as evidence of human progress. It was evidence of the inherent universal human tendency of progressive change, where the movement is towards realizing a common association of life and living. The fact that even though, for Kant, this is expressly a communicative association in reason, its conceptual schemata is principally a function of imagination need not concern us here. I merely want to mark it as a useful insight for understanding the eventfulness of Abou el-Kacem Chebbi’s 1933 poem, “If the People One Day Will to Live,” in the spontaneity of the Tunisian’s popular uprisings and their manifesting a certain sort of sovereignty as self-conscious autopoesis; and that it is precisely the unlawfulness of such collective imagination that inclined Kant to view the events unfolding on Saint Domingue during the same time as those in France as the purest instance of collective irrational emotion— in the sense of ill-directed public commotion and unrest: riots—acting against moral-reason, and so absolutely an illegitimate eruption of violence against not only government but also civil society. By that same token, I’ll not rehearse Kant’s account of the origins of civil society, with its complicated elaboration of duties of right—virtue to the self and justice to others—and his notion of authorized reciprocal coercion, which lays the foundation for his views on revolution. It suffices to remark here that his account turns on the postulate that humankind is comprised of individuals who, even in the state of nature, are all rational, autonomous beings. These two aspects of Kant’s thinking are key reasons why all he could see happening in Saint Domingue was a Negro slave rebellion. It is crucial we understand that this was not a failure of personal morals, or some kind of irrational reaction to human difference. It was a fundamental function of Kant’s transcendental deduction, which is to say his account of what is our reality and how we have it, and so what it means to be a free human subject capable of enlightenment, of warranting the motto Sapere Aude. In his assessment of all that, the Negro is a type of hominid firmly situated in the natural domain of things governed by physical law, but not so fully within the supranaturalistic domain of persons governed by the rational moral law. In that light, the basis of the Haitian Revolution’s incomprehensibleness Trouillot references has precisely to do with the priority of the individual in the tradition of European political philosophy; it is because the Negro can not be admitted into the ranks of rational cosmopolitan individuals, and so cannot be the generator of civil society that the prospect of a revolution forming a republic—that is, constituting a civil society—is unfathomable, and nearly unimaginable. My point here— and it is a complicated one that I shall have to make quickly yet I hope coherently—is not about race. Rather, what gets expressed in Haiti’s case as a problem of race is indicative of a more fundamental problem of anthropological psychology and philosophy. That is the long enduring premise that only one mode of subjectivity drives the history of knowledge, as well as history, and it has a definitive singular formation.

    The Haitian Revolution’s being a contradictory corrective to this premise was announced by Jean-Jacques Dessalines on April 28 1804, when he justified the recriminatory violence that had just taken place against the island’s whites with the words: “We have paid these true cannibals back in full; war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage. . . . I have saved my country. I have avenged America.” Just fourth months earlier, Dessalines had declared the establishment of the Republic of Hayti, in his capacity as its first president. Naming the new country by the assumed Taino term for the island of Hispaniola—the very first place to see the arrival of Iberian colonists and the emergence of Europeans on the world stage—was a symbolically powerful statement, as was his reversing the accusation of cannibalism that had long justified the autochthonous people’s enslavement and murder. Dessalines’ April 28 statement signified an act of solidarity with not only all the oppressed populations, les damnes, of the Western hemisphere, but also the entire world, as was made explicit in the language of the 1804 constitution. One is inclined to agree with Nick Nesbitt and recognize in that constitution the first attempt to construct a society in accordance with the radical Enlightenment axioms of universal emancipation and universal human autonomy, in which all human subjects retain their autonomous constituent power. Dessalines thus defined the Haitian Revolution as a war of worlds, one that in “saving” Haiti from colonial slavery had avenged an entire hemisphere. In so doing, he expressly took up the Radical Enlightenment, further radicalizing in turn that very Enlightenment, which had refused to address anyone other than Whites as full subjects of human rights. As Nesbitt characterizes it, the Haitian Revolution amounted to an “invention of an egalitarian freedom unknown in the North Atlantic.” One might quibble with the term “invention,” preferring manifestation, yet concur fully with the assessment of the revolution’s scope, articulating a distinctive historical subjectivity—that is, distinct in its formation from that of the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment. This articulation was remarked by the first properly Haitian theorist and polemicist for the revolution, Pompee-Valentin baron de Vastey, in his An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti where he writes of a population that only twenty-five years earlier was “in slavery and the most profound ignorance, with “no idea of human societies, no thought of happiness, no kind of energy, yet through massive spontaneous individual autodidactic effort— many of them learned to read and write of themselves without an instructor. They walked about with books in their bands, inquired of persons whom they met, whether they could read; if they could, they were then desired to explain the meaning of such a particular sign, or such a word — produced in the span of one generation a corps of indigenous Haitian notaries, barristers, judges, statesmen, that “astonished every one by the solidity of their judgment.” Even more significant than this being a direct contradiction of Kant’s dismissal of the Negro as an inferior more natural hominid, is that the facts of Haitian auto-didacticism is in evidence of his theory of humankind’s capacity for autopoetic progression, and that, even more than the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution proves this. So what the incomprehensibleness of the events of the Haitian Revolution clearly indicates is not merely that they are unthinkable in accordance with the reigning cosmology, but that the cosmology is woefully, on its fundamental premises, incapable of yielding any truly adequate knowledge about the eventfulness of humankind, about how the societies in which we actual live are as they are. Which is to say they are a far ways away from giving a full picture of how humanity lives life in our world.

    To see how this problem of incomprehensibleness and contradiction relates to the Tunisian Revolution, and so underscore this point about the resemblance between the events begun at Bois Caïman on August 28 1791 and those that began at Sidi Bou Zid on December 17 2010, we need merely recall Alain Badiou, just 5 days after the fall of Ben Ali, designating the events in Tunisia as Les émeutes en Tunisie. What struck Badiou about the events in Tunisia was they contradicted the «fin de l’histoire» thesis of globalization that postulates “the end of eventful history (le fin de l’événementialité historique), the end of a moment where the organization of power could be overthrown in favor of, as Trotsky said, ‘the masses entering on the stage of history.’” So that precisely such events as Tunisia were supposedly no longer possible. For the past thirty years, neoliberal globalization has been, as Badiou says, “The only tenable norm of general subjectivity (la seule norme tenable de la subjectivité générale).”

    Once again, we are held captive by a powerful idealist concept of things—and especially so when it is touted as a reductive behavioralism or functionalism—that interferes with our capacity to see what is unfolding before us. Certainly, this subjectivité, this person, becoming the global norm has been the meaning of globalization until now. It has been a globalization from above that we have called, in the French mode, “Américanisation,” underscoring its association with imperialism, or more consistently “neoliberalism,” which is characterized by the premise that market values — the dynamics of high capitalist finance — are the absolute measure not just of human progress but existence as well. And so, the economy of consumption and desire, desire and consumption has been the sole determinate of what we are. Until now. I say until now, because what the Tunisian émeutes have unleashed is another mode of globalization, one expressly based on a set of values — dignity, liberty, and social justice — the very same ones espoused by the Haitians. And as with them, these values were not espoused by the intellectuals of the elite classes (whether bourgeoisie of petty bourgeoisie) functioning as the avant-garde to the masses, but by the masses on their own. “What is fascinating above all else in the Tunisian events,” according to Badiou, “is their historicity, they demonstrate that the capacity to create new forms of collective organization is intact (la mise en évidence d’une capacité intacte de création de nouvelles formes d’organisation collective).”

    I draw your attention here to this distinction between the processes of market- driven subjectivity and the capacity of the Tunisian revolution to create new forms of collectivity. In both instances, we are talking about some process of individuation that has the practical and very material function of socialization, of creating a certain type of individual suitable for a certain type of sociality. The individuation process of the capitalist market — and I mean throughout its history from the early commodity markets of tenth-century Europe to the current neoliberal market of global finance — may indeed have engendered the normative subjectivity of the market through its endless refashioning and management of desire and imagination, but it also engendered something else, as is evidenced by the Tunisian Revolution. This something else is what Zygmnt Bauman termed an aesthetic sociality, the spontaneity of subjective feeling into volatile and unpredictable occasions of consensus. As he says: “The instantaneous sociality of the crowd is a counter-structure to socialization’s structures.” We can understand by this that the cumulative institutionalized practices of disciplining normality, the genealogies of which Foucault elaborated under the lose rubric of biopolitics—to which Bauman includes the legislative rationality of cognitive space thereby referencing the methodological practices of the human sciences in the university—are interrupted by the faceless agency of the crowd.

    On this point, I emphasize the importance of the Tunisian Revolution’s displaying the very real capacity of the spontaneous intelligence of the people to create, to generate new forms of sociality independent of the market-based processes of socialization. These “émeutes” hold the promise of what Frantz Fanon referred to 43 years ago in his hopeful analysis of the potential of the Algerian Revolution as “doing something new,” and which gets paraphrased as neo-humanism, but I prefer to call radical humanism. And what I mean by this is a humanism predicated on something else than the processes of bourgeoisie or even proletariat individuation; that is to say, its values are not reducible to matters of exchange or even the practical, in the Kantian or even pragmatic sense of the term, matters related to exchange-value. I am brought, thus, to the second point of analogy I wish to mark today. Both the Tunisian and Haitian revolutions give manifest expression to a type of human intelligence articulating a self-consciousness that is not identical to the transcendental self behind subjective, as well as objective idealism. It is, in distinction from that subjectivity, an articulation of being among things in the world. It is a figure for a distinctly different epistemology than that of the bourgeoisie, even in the latter’s revolutionary articulations.

    Such was highlighted early on in the revolution by Mongi Rahoui who, just one month after Ben Ali’s flight from power, during a symposium convened at the Temimi Foundation, proclaimed: “I personally do not belong to any party or any association; I have my personal affiliation—I belong to myself . . . I want to be a member of ‘a stone in a larger dam,’ paying the revolution forward together and giving attention to its accomplishments, saying it is from beginning to end a revolution of freedom and dignity.” With this blunt assertion for the self, and his identifying this self-awareness as the fundamental revolutionary project to actualize a free society, Rahoui raises to prominence the question of ethical relations: How am I engaged in ethical relation with others? He has publicly insisted on the centrality of this question in the political process of the revolution in his role as the representative of Jendouba in the National Constituent Assembly, which was charged with drafting the new constitution. Just this January, when the constitution was being finalized, Rahoui became embroiled in a pivotal debate with Habib Ellouz, a founding member of the Nahda over the relationship between the language of Article 1 of the newly drafted constitution, resulting in the language in Article 6 expressly prohibiting charges of apostasy (تكفﯿﻴر /takfir) and incitement to hatred and violence—a clear indication as any that this revolution, whatever it is, is not theocratic. It is not inconsequential that Rahoui’s debate with Ellouz garnered considerable attention in Tunisia and the Arab World precisely because it is a heuristic of the struggle between the native secularism expressed in the spontaneous prolonged insurrection of the streets that began in December 2010 and continued well through to September 2013, and the Islamist agenda to impose what the Tunisian activist and philosopher Muhsin al-Khouni, calls a utopian fiction of the Islamic heritage: their conception of sharī‘a. Nor is it inconsequential in that regard that Rahoui is now the sole member of the leftist Mouvement des Patriotes Démocrates, (Democratic Patriots’ Movement, or MOUPAD) to hold a seat in the National Constituent Assembly. Ideologically Marxist and ardently secular and anti-Islamist, MOUPAD was part of the Popular Front that was formed in October 2012, bringing together various leftist and progressive parties into effective political block. It was the assassination of MOUPAD’s Secretary-General, Chokri Beliäd, by Salafist in February 2013 that precipitated the national crisis in which the coordinated efforts of the Popular Front, the UGTT, and street demonstrations eventually led to the Nahda government’s collapse this January.

    Rahoui’s persistence in emphasizing the Tunisian Revolution’s fundamental insistence on individual responsibility for life in association with others in the political reformation of Tunisia gives a certain actuality to what was initially signaled by the multitude in the streets with the slogan كراﺍمة اﺍلإنسانﻥ (kāramat-ul-insān/ “human dignity”) during the initial insurrection, and was fiercely defended by the syndicalists during the Nahda government. It is a manifestation of what the late Chokri Beliäd spoke about as the “Tunisian intelligence” (al-dhikā al-tunisī/ لذكاء اﺍلتونسياﺍ) by which he meant a critical mass of educated subjects, including the labor movement and the various institutions of civil society, formed through a specific educational system and a confluence of historical and geographic factors, unique to the country. That intelligence, he argued, is both what would save the nation, having sparked the revolution, and what the emerging constitutional order should invest in and strive to preserve.

    Beliäd’s designation and description of Tunisian intelligence, Rahoui’s activism, and especially the vernacular invocation of human dignity are all indicative of a particular process of individuation that was not so much inaugurated by the postcolonial Bourguiba government’s enactment of the Education reform law number 58-118 of November 1958, but rather traceable back to the older Tanzimat- style reforms implemented by Khaïreddine al-Tunsi in the nineteenth-century at al- Zaytouna University and Collège Sadiki, which the 1958 reform gave a more popular institutionalization and instrumentality. This process of individuation can be regarded as resonant with Gramsci’s fundamental focus on the relationship between material conditions of life- practices and the institutions of human intelligence, so that the popular Tunisian intelligence Beliäd described is an emergent formation—it is a moment of subalternity, the precise moment when a set of life- practices give expression to a set of intellectual practices of reflection and organization that articulate a narrative of historical constitution and change. Mahmud al-Mas‘adi, who undertook institutional execution of the 1958 reform as Secretary of State for Education, Youth and Sports, designated this condition “restlessness” ( َعلى قَلَ ٍق /‘ala qalqin), describing a mode of sociality in which each individual accepts the responsibility, as well as risk of living life in relation and common with others. In effect, the Bourguiba/Mas‘adi reform engendered a population that is قلوقﻕ / qalūq (restless), capable of an ongoing open-ended practice of discovery, which is precisely what Fanon was describing with the term individuation. The Tunisians’ identification of this restlessness with كراﺍمة اﺍلإنسانﻥ (kāramat-ul-insān) is akin to what Tony Bogues has recently designated as “common association” in his attempt to think the centrality of artistic and poetic expression in the Haitian peoples effort to actualize a free revolutionary subject in the immediate aftermath of the 1804 revolution. Indeed, The 1958 Bourguiba law was as extensive in scope as were the education law promulgated by Henri Christophe when he became King of Haiti in 1811 after the dissolution of Dessalines’ imperium with his death in 1806, precipitating the division of the country into warring northern and southern realms; and then again in 1816 by Pétion who, after Christophe’s assassination, restored the united republic and established an extensive system of education, including a national school of secondary education for girls in Jacmel, as well as the Pensionnat National des Demoiselles in Port-au-Prince declaring: “Education should be the fundamental basis of any program in a true democracy, because education raises man to the dignity of his being.” In that vein, the human condition both the Haitian and Tunisian revolutions describe as well as enact is perennially transitional, or to use an older language, metabolic. This, I think, is currently at stake in Tunisia right now, expressed in the eloquent local metaphor شرﯾﻳعة اﺍلثورﺭةﺓ. /shari‘at-u-thawra. I translate this in deliberate deviation as “the ethics of the revolution,” rather than the more conventional “law [as in Sharia] of the revolution,” to remain in solidarity with the Youth of the Revolution in their ambition to sustain an open-ended possibility for a myriad of ways of taking care of the self, an unending restlessness.

    Arguably, the spontaneity with which the people of Kasserine established structures of order in all the chaos during those dark days of early January 2011 is illustrative of such restlessness as a societal force. And when those events are considered in light of Mohamed-Salah Omri’s claim that a constancy of Tunisian social life is the culture of dialogue and what may be called institutionalism, we must seriously ponder the hard question of whether the Tunisian events of this moment, like the Haitian events of the long nineteenth century, do not so much announce a new paradigm of revolutionary transformation, as they manifest a history of individuation in modernity that escapes comprehension from a certain perspective. This is a matter of the seer and the seen. And, in that regard, the assessment of the Tunisian revolutionary unionist and theorist, Mouldi Guessoumi, is extremely pertinent: “This is a revolution that has not affected Tunisia’s mode of production, or the overall structure of its society, or even the political consciousness and reasoning. Rather, it has been a surgical intervention undertaken by the citizenry in the daily life practices of society.” Perhaps the clearest, although not simplest, illustration of this is the insistence of the people in Sidi Bou Zid that they be able to eat bread without having to beg. Calling this كراﺍمة اﺍلإنسانﻥ (kāramat-ul-insān), human dignity, they aim at achieving a society in which one’s desire is not the instrument of one’s exploitation.

    notes:
    1. Make note that when President Boyer secured France’s recognition of the republic in 1825 at a devastating cost, he effectively ended the revolution’s political expression.
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    2. He made this assertion in Haiti: State against Nation. The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, reiterating what he had already set out in his landmark 1977 work, Ti difé boulé sou Istoua Ayiti, which was the first book-length monograph in Haitian Creole on the origins of the Haitian Revolution.
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  • The Tunisian revolution three years on

    Djebel Rassas

    Mohamed-Salah Omri takes stock of Tunisian language, and thus Tunisian cultural production and political sentiment, three years into the revolution: “The revolution in Tunisia was in many important ways a revolution in language.” Read full article here.

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    cover photo: the peaks of Djebel Rassas, southeast Tunis, Tunisia

  • The Thinking of the Arab Revolution: Humanity,  الإنسانية

    The Thinking of the Arab Revolution: Humanity, الإنسانية

    Arab_World_Green

    New essays from Mohamed-Salah Omri and Miriam Cooke follow up on Omri’s first paper and continue the work of The Tunisian Dossier, these two interested in the “re-packaging and marketing of a ‘moderate’ Islamist leader” and the building of the Qatari empire. We invite you to read and comment on these materials and to place your comments on this topic here and elsewhere on the site.