The Arab Spring and Arab Thaw

Unfinished Revolutions and the Quest for Democracy

John Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317044888
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

What were the unifying principles or strategies that governed the protest movements that swept the Middle East and North Africa in the spring of 2011? Who were the protestors and how did the different authoritarian regimes respond to them? How did regional and international institutions react to a region in turmoil? The Arab Spring and Arab Thaw; Unfinished Revolutions and the Quest for Democracy addresses these questions by examining a range of successful and unsuccessful protest strategies and counter revolutionary tactics employed by protestors and autocratic regimes. Contributors explore the reactions of the USA, EU and Arab League to events in the region and provide insight as to the gendered dimensions of the struggle along with the ethnic and tribal divisions that continue to impact the post-revolt period. By addressing these critical queries the book demonstrate how the Arab Spring has evolved into a protracted Arab Thaw that continues to profoundly affect regional and international politics.

PART I:
Revolts and Counter Revolts in a Turbulent Region

Chapter 1
New Discourse, Old Orientalism: A Critical Evaluation of the “Arab Spring for Women”?

Laura Sjoberg and Jonathon Whooley

Introduction

Feminist theorists have long asked “what assumptions about gender (and race, class, nationality, and sexuality) are necessary to make particular statements, policies, and actions meaningful.”1 In so doing, feminist work uses “lenses” to foreground variables of particular interest, specifically sex, gender and gender hierarchy, and looks through “gender lenses” at global politics.2 Looking through gender lenses is a way “to focus on gender as a particular kind of power relation, or to trace out the ways in which gender is central to understanding international processes.”3 While there have been a number of attempts to understand the role(s) of women in the Arab Spring, very few have thought about assumptions about and power relations of gender explicitly.

These attempts to understand the role of women in the Arab Spring, though, seem as common as any other analysis of the Arab Spring. An author in the 26 April 2011 issue of The Nation declared it “the Arab Spring for Women,”4 a nomenclature that caught on in a number of other media outlets. The article went on to suggest that most of the media had neglected to cover the fact that “women have been and often remain at the forefront of these protests,”5 and that this fact was itself anomalous. Referencing examples from Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia, The Nation’s report argues that women’s “bold gestures” merit news coverage because “women could not have been more visible in the big demonstrations” and “this should in itself have been news.”6 The article goes on to contend that the most difficult mission will be “protecting women’s gains,” especially given that “Muslim fundamentalist movements” believe that “women’s rights should not be expanded in the wake of these political upheavals.”7 Still, the article’s overall tone is hopeful, as it asserts that, “before, women could be marginalized at will by the dictators whenever they made demands on the regime. Now, at least, they have a fighting chance.”8 A number of other news reports used similar words and expressed similar ideas, suggesting that gender equality is one of many positive political developments suddenly gripping the Arab world. These accounts place value both on the presence of women in these movements and the potential for gender liberation in their advocacy. These reports signify gender equality as a significant issue in the social movements of the Arab Spring, both in their advocacy and in their composition. Many of these accounts suggest that we are witnessing the modernization of the Arab world in the lives of its women.

Still, many other reports were not as hopeful. For example, Shirin Ebadi (the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Winner) wrote “A Warning for Women of the Arab Spring,”9 which was published in the Wall Street Journal. Ebadi drew a comparison between the Arab Spring and the 1979 Irani revolution, expressing the concern that revolutionary men often use women to achieve their political goals and then cast them aside in the aftermath of the revolution.10 She suggests that the Arab Spring is an illusion, and warns that “the true ‘Arab Spring’ will only dawn when democracy takes root in countries that have ousted their dictatorships and when women in those countries are allowed to take part in civic life.”11

These are two very different discourses about women in the Arab Spring, and it is initially tempting to look for one “true” narrative of what “really” happened to women during the Arab Spring, and whether or not it was truly beneficial to women as a class. This chapter takes a different approach, sharing with feminist research in IR the contention that discourses about women in contemporary conflicts tell us something not necessarily (only) about women but (also) about the conflict. Seeing gender as a signifier and a power relation has led feminists to critical approaches to the war(s) in Afghanistan,12 Iraq,13 and most recently, Libya.14 Though mainstream accounts of those conflicts strongly feature women’s rights and women’s needs, women’s lives have been affected in ways that can optimistically be described as mixed.15 While that is partly due to the complexity of these issues, especially when culture is taken into account, we argue that it is mostly due to the fact that women’s lives (and their rights) are being instrumentalized. By “instrumentalized” we mean that “images of women are coopted into public political narratives to achieve political goals or as lenses through which to understand and justify political conflicts.”16

This chapter explores the position of women in the Arab Spring in media coverage of it, particularly as gender plays a role in political accounts of race, class, religion and democratization. It asks where the women are in the Arab Spring and if locations in their societies may be changing with or as a result of these political changes.17 In so doing, it finds two very different accounts of what happened to women (and what women did) during the Arab Spring, one which characterizes the Arab Spring as a time of gender emancipation, and another which casts it as a time of gender oppression. To understand this dissonance, the remainder of the chapter looks at the Arab Spring through gendered lenses—asking what questions about gender (and sex and race and culture) are necessary to particular scholarly, media and pop culture representations of the events of the Spring of 2011, both projected outwards from the Arab world and projected onto it, and how that can be read into women’s experiences of the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring

The term Arab Spring was the popular term in the media to refer to a progression of uprisings and protests in the area broadly known as the “Middle East” in the Spring of 2011, generally understood to have followed the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit vendor on 17 December 2010. In Tunisia, this Bouazizi’s protest was followed by 29 days of political revolt that resulted in the deposition of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali on 15 January 2011. The Tunisian “Jasmine Revolution” was followed by an intensification of workers’ strikes and other protests in Egypt, which eventually led to the long-time Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, stepping down from office in February. Protests in Pearl Square in Bahrain followed, but turned violent, and were suppressed. A similar story can be told in Yemen. Protests and political violence in Libya turned into a civil war, which led to the assassination of Moamar Gaddafi on 20 October 2011. NATO intervened in the Libyan civil war on behalf of the protestors. International debate continues on whether it is necessary to intervene in an ongoing conflict in Syria, which began in January of 2011 and continues still. That conflict has claimed thousands of lives, and without an end in sight.

The idea of the Arab Spring, then, is not without its problems when looked at across the borders of different states and with the properties of different national movements. This is not least because this is not the first time Western academics have declared the outbreak of democracy in the Middle East. Most recently, in 2005, there was an abortive Arab Spring, where politicians and scholars predicted a wave of protests would cascade when in fact they were quickly and effectively suppressed.18

Even without that mixed empirical record, the idea of an Arab Spring is, to some, oversimple, especially given that it is increasingly used to cover a wide variety of hopes and ambitions both stemming from inside the protest movements and their international audiences. For example, universal rights, suffrage, democracy and gender equality are broad goals that do not always go hand-in-hand with coups against dictators.19 Even when revolutions last, their results are often not what audiences expected and/or desired. The term Arab Spring has been used alternatively by those who desire and see a simple result to the protests, and those who aspire to see an Arab world as the home of safe and stable (Western) democracies. The process of actual achievement of those goals (or even the evaluation of the worth of those goals) is automatically removed from the conversation with the rhetoric of the Arab Spring.

This is the same with the “Arab Spring for Women,” where what happens to women, how women negotiate new social and political circumstances, and how women participate in shaping the societies that they live in, becomes secondary to a simplistic ideal and an easy catchphrase. If the Arab Spring is not as simple as the label, neither is the “Arab Spring for Women,” which the remainder of this chapter investigates.

Where are the Women?20

We went looking for the complexities of the “Arab Spring for Women” first in the media coverage of the Arab Spring, by Western media (the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Newsweek and Der Spiegel) and English-language media (Al Jazeera English) from December 2010 to December 2011. We found in that news coverage two perspectives on women in the Arab Spring, sharply differentiated and relatively consistent across the time span.21 One perspective understands the Arab Spring as a moment of victory for women’s equality in the Arab world as a result of successful protests that led to the implementation of (western) liberal democracy in the states in which these (formerly oppressed) women lived. A second takes almost the opposite approach, suggesting that, after the Arab Spring, as before, Arab women are almost universally grievously oppressed by Arab men. These reports suggest that it is possib...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Arab Spring and Arab Thaw
• Part I: Revolts and counter revolts in a turbulent region
• Part II: Regional and non-regional institutional involvement, american perspectives and winners and losers
• Index