Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies

Engin Isin, Peter Nyers, Engin F. Isin, Peter Nyers, Engin Isin, Engin F. Isin, Peter Nyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136237959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Citizenship studies is at a crucial moment of globalizing as a field. What used to be mainly a European, North American, and Australian field has now expanded to major contributions featuring scholarship from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies takes into account this globalizing moment. At the same time, it considers how the global perspective exposes the strains and discords in the concept of 'citizenship' as it is understood today. With over fifty contributions from international, interdisciplinary experts, the Handbook features state-of-the-art analyses of the practices and enactments of citizenship across broad continental regions (Africas, Americas, Asias and Europes) as well as deterritorialized forms of citizenship (Diasporicity and Indigeneity). Through these analyses, the Handbook provides a deeper understanding of citizenship in both empirical and theoretical terms.

This volume sets a new agenda for scholarly investigations of citizenship. Its wide-ranging contributions and clear, accessible style make it essential reading for students and scholars working on citizenship issues across the humanities and social sciences.

Part I

Struggles for citizenship

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1

Contested citizenship of the Arab Spring and beyond

Gal Levy

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Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire, 2003¹

When do we know that something that happens is an event, that is, ‘produce[s] a rupture in the given order’ (Isin 2012: 131)? How can we be informed about an event while it is ongoing, as we are trying to capture the transformative moment? Eric Hobsbawm, in the wake of a controversy about the French Revolution gave a pretty simple answer. Rejecting the revisionist interpretation of this event, he sided with contemporaries, because they ‘were not concerned with historical analysis for its own sake [and hence] tended to emphasize what they saw as new and dynamic, rather than what they regarded as relics of the past due to move to the margins of social reality’ (Hobsbawm 2004 [1989]: 477). This view tacitly implies a rejection of the notion that an explanation can outweigh the experiences of the actual players. Accordingly, even the lack of adequate words to describe the new social reality could not take away from the discovery of contemporaries that what they were experiencing was a new reality. Thus, when the existing epistemological frameworks no longer satisfy the search for an explanation we may hear, as Roy did a decade ago, ‘another world that is on her way’.

How can we conceive of these times, after the ‘Arab Spring’ and the protests that engulfed the world from 2011? The answer, I propose here, should be sought not in ‘the search for an essence hidden behind human activities’, but rather ‘the surface aspects that give them meaning and significance’ (Tully 1999: 163). In other words, the meaning of the Social Protest – encompassing the events of the Arab Spring, the encampments of 15M in Spain and the Tents Protest in Israel, and the Occupy Movements in democratic capitalistic regimes – needs to be construed not from explanatory frameworks that left us misinformed about the possibility of a protest of this magnitude until the very moment of its eruption. Instead, it is perhaps timely to focus on the actors themselves, to explore their vocabulary, and to listen to the words they weave into their actions Emmerich 2011).

This chapter seeks to discern the new voices and vocabulary that redraw the extent and expanse of political subjectivity in a post-protest era. Rather than imposing explanations, I first examine the unfolding of the protest and its coalescence across various locations, spaces, and contexts, to create a single event which, for the sake of simplicity, I term the social protest. Evidently, this event was at once directed against dictatorial and neoliberal regimes, and despite these diverse contexts, it spoke in one language. Next, I explore this language of citizenship as a site and a means of resistance, making particular reference to New Social Movements (NSMs), civil society, and radical democracy. These paradigmatic epistemological frameworks of analysis have shaped our understanding of social change and critical thinking in the post-World War II period, and animated the extension of citizenship and the rendering of rights discourse universal. In the final part I revisit the notion of rights in order to point out its limits and to explore the new language of democracy that emerged in the course of the social protest. More particularly, I propose to see the social protest as a game-like activity that has broadened the struggles of and for democracy and, all the more, reshaped the ways of participation and representation, thereby offering citizenship new trajectories in the post-protest era.

Protest

Anti-establishment and anti-capitalism protests are neither new nor exclusive to specific societies in the post-World War II era. In this period, the world has witnessed the growth of capitalist democracies and the birth of new states in the wake of decolonization, and also seen New Social Movements advocating against the malaise of ‘modernization’ (e.g. Slater 1985); the expansion of civil society against the shrinking of the political (Cherniavsky 2009); and the call for radical democracy to undercut the limits of liberal democracy (Purcell 2013). These conceptions have been at once descriptive and prescriptive. Their power lies in being not merely analytical tools, but informing our sociological and political understanding on what is to be done. NSMs, civil society, and radical democracy called upon citizens to act, while reshaping our vocabulary about social change. However, in light of the social protest it becomes timely to revisit them and ask what is and what is not left of their legacy that would render explicable contemporary conceptions of citizenship and democracy beyond the Arab Spring.

When the social protest erupted across the globe in 2011 it soon became evident that one major trigger and source of inspiration for it was the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, each marking an earthquake that shook the ‘old global order’ within and beyond the Arab world. If, as is commonly contended, the Arab countries constituted the last bastion against democratization, then these uprisings unearthed repertoires of action that were seen to be absent in this part of the world. However, the ‘Arab street’, notoriously and unjustly known as a space for futile political rage and harsh oppression (Bayat 2010), spawned a new public sphere, a space that has been reappropriated by subjects of despotic regimes, who sought to reconfigure themselves as political activists. Technology was part of this, but it was the physical contact and presence in the urban space that mattered (Lopes de Souza and Lipietz 2011: 620). At least in Egypt, this was in addition to the building of a counter-political society in the streets of the large cities (Bayat 2010; el-Ghobashy 2011). In ‘the West’, these events were observed with astonishment and scepticism, at least in the highest echelons of power and amongst brokers of ‘knowledge’ in the corporate media (DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun 2012). Soon, this ‘knowledge’ turned out to be partial and stereotypical, as professionals, workers, and political activists were inspired to act by new knowledge that emerged from the streets of Cairo and Tunis (Trudell 2012), and formed the basis of a new subject – an activist citizen, who is not merely a player in the political arena, but, rather, willing to redefine the rules of the game (Isin 2009). When this happened, it also became clearer that the Arab Spring was about toppling not only the old despotic regimes from within, but also the global economic neoliberal order from without (Armbrust 2011; Bergh 2012). Against this shared enemy, the protesters in the affluent economies and in the forsaken South could articulate a common call for a new democratic order.

Inspired by the events, mainly in Egypt as well as Tunisia (Kerton 2012), before long the protest unfolded at a rapidly increasing pace. On 15 May 2011, the harsh repression of a small demonstration by Democracia Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now),² ignited a larger-scale protest in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, known as 15M and also as the indignados (‘the outraged’). No single issue united the protesters. Yet, they shared a resentment toward the political partisan system for being corrupt and detached from the people, rage against the banking and financial systems, and anger for being dependent upon a precarious labour market (Marti-Puig 2011). The immediacy of technology allowed the protest to spread rapidly both geographically and through various public spaces, rendering, to a degree, traditional concepts of leadership undesired. The virtual networks thus summoned the protesters, while concomitantly allowing them to sound their own voices (Fuster-Morell 2012). In an echo of some feminist movements of earlier decades, being leaderless was a praxis of liberation (Gautney 2011). Soon, the virtual space translated into a real physical space of encampments and assemblies, where spaces for open discussion and debate were formed, rendering meaningful the ideas of deliberative and direct democracy and non-hierarchical decision-making (Hughes 2011; also Benhabib 1996; Young 2003).

The new space foregrounded a new political subjectivity, at first in the Arab cities and later in the different sites of the Occupy Movement (Abourahme and Jayyusi 2011; Kerton 2012). One symbolic figure who marks this transition is Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who, like Jan Palach in Prague, set himself on fire on 17 December 2010 in protest against his humiliation by municipal officials. Thus, the Arab Spring, like the Prague Spring of 1968, was literally ignited. The subsequent image that comes to mind is of young men and women – in Prague and in China’s Tiananmen Square, and again in Cairo’s Tahrir Square – standing still, unshielded in the face of the armoured tanks surrounding them. Abourahme and Jayyusi (2011: 626) echoing Michel Foucault’s observations from revolutionary Iran, argue that this ‘is the most enduring aspect of the Arab revolts: the sense that people, ordinary people – through this novel relationship between politics and experience – were remaking themselves, shedding off years of conditioning and inertia to emerge as political subjects’.

It was also, the authors propose, a moment of creation of new collective subjectivities, when people self-organized to protect and care for themselves in newly created public spaces. It was a moment of both confusion and clarity. The realization of a new self, capable of transcending the neoliberal moment, had given the protesters a sense of clarity in becoming political subjects and moreover in articulating their collective subjectivities (Harvey 2012: 161–2). Thus, one participant in an Occupy UK encampment testified:

The striking and amazing thing in those first weeks was how much people were actually listening to each other. Many of us came from a fairly radical political background, and had strong opinions, but Occupy seemed to promise a way of getting beyond all sitting in separate corners, shouting, ‘You’re wrong!’ at everyone else.

(Anonymous 2012: 442)

This (female) observer was soon disillusioned, especially by the difficulty of keeping the camp safe, mostly for women, but also by the challenge of remaining inclusive in an unwelcoming environment. In a different manner, six months into the protest and after the toppling of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, it appeared that ‘there is no counter totality, no ideological assemblage to carry us into the “permanent revolution” and towards new formations of political structure’ (Abourahme and Jayyusi 2011: 626). The subsequent ousting of the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by a military coup was a bloody testimony to this sense of uncertainty. While not suggesting that the purpose and reasoning underlying this series of events were unclear to its participants, it brought to the fore the discrepancy between a new will for collective action and a reality of fragmented social solidarity and continuous de-politicization of citizenship under neoliberalism and tyranny (Brown 2011; Dean 2011). Nonetheless, the absence of readily available ‘ideological assemblages’, in Egypt or elsewhere, was not necessarily a misfortune for the moment of the protest.

This moment was an opportunity to form a ‘broad-based democratic uprising’ (Brown 2011); it created new openings for deliberation, largely previously unknown to many of its participants. From Tahrir Square to Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, it was a moment ‘to foster the creation of sites and processes of deliberation among diverse and disagreeing elements of the polity’ (Young 2003: 104). A new language of hand gestures that emerged from the indignados encampments in Spain alongside other innovations like the ‘human megaphone’, traversed the globe, compelling the protesters to rethink ‘old’ notions of deliberation, connectedness, and communality, and, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, to escape domination in ‘smooth space’, where ‘desire is relatively free from the apparatuses of capture and can produce according to its will.’ (cited in Purcell 2013). This was a moment when the absence of a new vocabulary for participation and representation stimulated an open-ended deliberation which allowed others’ points of view to be heard (Halvorsen 2012: 428), and hence made it possible to transcend particularistic interests (Young 2003: 106). This was, in other words, a ‘smooth space’ where, to paraphrase Young, deliberative democracy theory qua democratic theory understood itself as a critical theory, exposing ‘the exclusion and constraints in supposed fair processes of actual decision-making, which make the legitimacy of their conclusions suspect’ (2003: 118).

As protesters around the world were occupying, indeed reclaiming, the public space, they not simply ‘revived the classical image of the nation as res-publica’, as Brown (2011) contends. They indeed spawned new relationships between the public and the private, whether by redefining the spatial boundary between them or by rendering the interests of citizens visible in the public sphere (Harvey 2012: 159–164; Aslam 2012).

At the time of writing (2013), two years after the kindling of the worldwide protest against the tyrannies of authoritarianism and neoliberalism, it still remains to be seen where this event is heading. Whichever way one turns, our understanding of the social protest should not, however, be separated from a critical reading of the 2008 global financial crisis, and of the traces of the distancing of the major democratic capitalist economies from the post-World War II Keynesian model (Streeck 2011). It was not by happenstance that ‘the end of the Cold War pronounced the free market victorious and neo-liberalism the best growth policy for countries’ (Sassen 2011), rendering the financial markets free from territorial constraints. Nor was it surprising that the most famous utteranc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Globalizing citizenship studies
• Navigating global citizenship studies
• Part I Struggles for citizenship
• Part II Positioning citizenships
• Part III Africas
• Part IV Americas
• Part V Asias
• Part VI Europes
• Part VII Diasporicity
• Part VIII Indigeneity
• Epilogue
• Index