Abstract
This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to show why Western social scientific explanations of political crowds in North Africa and the Arab Middle East have failed to provide an understanding of the causes and effects of popular revolt. I trace these misunderstandings to an inherited body of European writings on crowd theory and on Islamic and Muslim political power. Some scholars who have also criticized mainstream analysis of the so-called “Arab Street” are shown as relevant to a new understanding of political crowds.
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Notes
See “The Arab Street: Tracking a Political Metaphor” Regier and Khalidi (2009).
La Presse “Le scénario algérien”, 10 August 2011. My translation.
SIGMA poll, 8 August 2011. According to this poll, the PDP only garners 10% of the projected vote.
Op. cit.
Hugh Roberts (2002) and Larbi Sadiki (2000) are not in agreement about whether “bread riots” in the region are economic or political. This divergence is theoretically a divergence in their use of E.P. Thompson’s notion of “moral economy”. Roberts argues that “moral economy” does not apply to Algeria in 1988. According to Roberts, the riots were the result of a discontent with the Algerian “moral polity.” Sadiki, on the other hand, agrees with and uses Thompson’s notion of “moral economy” and shows the moral, and specifically Islamic moral, objections to economic injustices as the underpinnings of popular revolt in the region throughout the later part of the twentieth century.
The thesis of Regier and Khalidi in their article “The Arab Street: Tracking a Political Metaphor” is that while the Arab street metaphor is used in western media to mean a “volatile and irrational” mob while the term Arab public opinion seems to denote a rational “locus of people’s considered stances”. Regier and Khalidi (2009), p.14.
This distinction is made by Burke: Islamist movement versus a popular movement within a Muslim-dominant country. See Burke and Lapidus (1988)
This is the subject of a chapter of my current manuscript on political crowds, under the working title Productive Instability: The Political Crowd in North Africa.
Deleuze and Guattatri’s notion of the molar, as a state of being, and of conceptual wholes versus the molecular, which is becoming inherently political (Deleuze and Guattatri 1987).
Ibid. “Becoming” is defined as “...an equilibrium-seeking system at a crisis point where it suddenly perceives a deterministic constraint, becomes “sensitive” to it, and is capitulated into the highly unstable supermolecular state enveloping a bifurcating future” (Massumi 1992, p. 95).
Interview conducted by the author with Zyad Krichen in Tunis, July 2011.
“Par une ironie de l’histoire, j’ai été torturé a 100 mètres de l’endroit ou mon père a été torturé par les paras français” (Octobre, 1988, p.99).
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Khalil, A. The political crowd: Theorizing popular revolt in North Africa. Cont Islam 6, 45–65 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-011-0182-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-011-0182-7