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Zeghal On Arab Spring

This document discusses several questions and issues that have emerged from the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. It notes that the uprisings were primarily driven by economic grievances against inefficient and corrupt state institutions. It questions how economic protest transformed into political demands and why this occurred now in the region. It also discusses how resistance movements had started organizing in prior decades and will need further study. It notes that participants expressed political demands without invoking specific ideologies like political Islam. It raises questions around how preexisting ideological trends in the region may change, including political Islam, liberalism, and leftism. It discusses how political Islam may evolve and maintain relations with other groups if more competitive political environments develop. It also discusses

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62 views1 page

Zeghal On Arab Spring

This document discusses several questions and issues that have emerged from the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. It notes that the uprisings were primarily driven by economic grievances against inefficient and corrupt state institutions. It questions how economic protest transformed into political demands and why this occurred now in the region. It also discusses how resistance movements had started organizing in prior decades and will need further study. It notes that participants expressed political demands without invoking specific ideologies like political Islam. It raises questions around how preexisting ideological trends in the region may change, including political Islam, liberalism, and leftism. It discusses how political Islam may evolve and maintain relations with other groups if more competitive political environments develop. It also discusses

Uploaded by

Sam Kigar
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 43 (2011)

maintaining Islam as a solution. The question remains whether this trend simply went unnoticed by the majority of the scholarly community working on the Middle East or whether it is something that emerged in the dynamics of the uprisings themselves. Either way, the phenomenon must now be analyzed. Does it mean a decline of the Islamist ideology? Will it permit an empowerment of existing liberal political movements? Of trade unionism? What does it reveal about the integration of the Middle East within global political trends?

Resistance Movements, the State, and National Identities MALIKA ZEGHAL


Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; e-mail: [email protected]
doi:10.1017/S0020743811000511

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) were primarily centered on profound economic grievances, which protestors addressed directly to state institutions, thereby making the grievances political. As a political scientist, I ask: under what conditions does economic protest transform into political demands? How and why did this happen in the MENA region, and why now? A deep exploration of authoritarian state institutions will be necessary to understand how a young generation that graduated from public educational institutions was unable to find economic opportunities and eventually lost all trust in an inefficient and corrupt state. Workers protests and resistance movements had started to organize in the decade before the uprisings and need to be studied as well. Participants in the uprisings have expressed political demands without invoking specific ideologies, notably, political Islam. How will the preexisting ideological trends in the region express themselves and change? This question refers not only to political Islamalmost the only ideology that Middle East scholars have studied thus farbut also to liberalism and leftism. As political and economic ideologies, they should be approached historically, not only as secular formations but also in relationship to the religious traditions of the Middle East. Also, the post-Islamism hypothesis can now be tested: how will political Islam evolve, and how will Islamist movements build or maintain relations with other groups if more competitive environments develop? More particularly, what will be the relationship between the state and Islam? How will it be formulated constitutionally and legally? Beyond the post-Islamist probl ematique, electoral politics will become an interesting domain of exploration. Comparison with other democratic transitions in the world will show MENA to be less exceptional. Histories of nationalism have served as propaganda machines for authoritarian regimes. Arab historians and social scientists who live and work in the Middle East might have the opportunity to write about themes formerly considered taboo. How will national memory be reconfigured in cases of regime change? How will the revolutionary turn be written? These new articulations of memory might also accompany new contentions around the definition of national identities in the Middle East that will be worth studying.

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