The Condition of Democracy

Volume 3: Postcolonial and Settler Colonial Contexts

Jürgen Mackert, Hannah Wolf, Bryan S. Turner, Jürgen Mackert, Bryan S. Turner, Hannah Wolf, Jürgen Mackert, Bryan S. Turner, Hannah Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367745387
• eBook ISBN: 9781000401936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Classical liberal democratic theory has provided crucial ideas for a still dominant and hegemonic discourse that rests on ideological conceptions of freedom, equality, peacefulness, inclusive democratic participation, and tolerance. While this may have held some truth for citizens in Western liberal-capitalist societies, such liberal ideals have never been realized in colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial contexts. Liberal democracies are not simply forms of rule in domestic national contexts but also geo-political actors. As such, they have been the drivers of processes of global oppression, colonizing and occupying countries and people, appropriating indigenous land, annihilating people with eliminatory politics right up to genocides. There can be no doubt that the West – with its civilizational Judeo-Christian idea and divine mission 'to subdue the world' – has destroyed other civilizations, countries, trading systems, and traditional ways of life and is responsible for the death of hundreds of millions of human beings in the course of colonizing the world from its Empires of trade through colonialism to settler colonialism and today's politics of regime change. The book discusses the settler colonial regime that Israel has established in Palestine while still claiming to be a democracy. It discusses the failures of liberal democracy to overcome the structural and racist inequalities in post-Apartheid South Africa, and it presents hopeful outlooks on new ideas and forms of democracy in social movements in the MENA region.

Part 1

Democracy as a progressive force and the failure of liberal democracy

1 The Algerian hirak

Citizenship, non-violence, and the new movement for democracy

Jessica Ayesha Northey

Introduction

On 22 February 2019, Algeria saw the launch of a massive, peaceful movement for democracy. A revolutionary turning point in the history of the country, the social movement known as the ‘hirak’ brought ordinary people to the streets on an unprecedented scale. Mobilizing millions of Algerians in unifying, peaceful demonstrations, weekly marches resulted in President Bouteflika standing down and in the arrest and trial for corruption of business elites and senior politicians, including former prime ministers. The hirak emerged initially in response to President Bouteflika’s humiliating decision to stand for a fifth mandate, which contravened the constitution. Succeeding in their goal to remove the president, protesters went on to demand increasingly ambitious objectives, including real democracy, rule of law, and an independent justice system. Calls for true democracy found expression through slogans, songs, humour, and artwork. These drew on symbols of national unity, Algerian history, and transnational identities. Yahia Zoubir describes the hirak as a ‘stunning development’ of a ‘powerful civil society, with incredible organizational, nonviolent skills’ (Zoubir, 2019, p. 12). Young people and women played important roles in the weekly marches and in reclaiming public spaces. Equally important were key figures of the Algerian Independence struggle, students, the unemployed, and particularly young men, who had initiated many of the political messages and slogans, in the football stadiums (Amara, 2012; Dine, 2017). As well as uniting what has often been presented as a divided population (Benkhaled & Vince, 2017), particularly since the violent conflict of the 1990s, the hirak has progressively re-politicized Algerian society (Benalycherif, 2019; Zoubir, 2019). Prior to the 2019 protests, it was widely considered ‘that the national trauma of civil war made the Algerian people apolitical’ (Zeroualia, 2020, p. 2). As such, it is important to understand the significance of this year-long peaceful protest movement, in terms of citizenship, identity, and democracy, for Algeria and the wider region.

In the 1990s, an extremely violent period known as the Black Decade, around 200,000 people lost their lives during a conflict that pitted Islamist insurgents against the Algerian military. At its roots were declining living standards, rising prices, high unemployment, and lack of freedom, which had led to wide-scale riots in 1988. These protests initially led to the opening up of the Algerian political system in the early 1990s, including to new political parties. The concurrent rise in radical Islamist ideology in the 1980s meant the Islamist party the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) was the only organized political movement able to challenge the ruling Front de Libération National (FLN). The second round of general elections, in January 1992, which the FIS were on track to win, was cancelled by a military coup. Many FIS politicians were interned in camps in the Sahara and the party was banned, leading to widespread insurgency and the national tragedy of a decade of violent conflict and repression that devastated the country. Assassinations and massacres touched almost all sections of society, from journalists, teachers, and artists, working women, lawyers, and state officials, to anyone classed as a traitor if they did not support the Islamist project. With often equally violent state responses, Algerians were trapped in a cycle of violence that only ended with President Bouteflika’s Reconciliation Charter in the early 2000s. This charter was also contested. Though it ended the violence, it did not bring truth or justice to the families of the victims. As Faouzia Zeraoulia (2020) notes, most Algerians abandoned politics after the traumas of the 1990s.

Political life in Algeria however must also be seen in the context of its long and well-documented history of political struggle for freedom and justice, including precolonial community-based activism, politics, and decision-making (Roberts, 2014; McDougall, 2017). Whilst the brutality of French colonial rule decimated many of these original political structures, under colonialism Algerians found new ways to mobilize through everyday forms of resistance (Northey, 2018, p. 2) and ultimately in the violent struggle of the War of Independence of 1954–1962 that so powerfully shaped the independent nation. The independence period was a challenging one in which Algerians had to rebuild a country devastated by violence, exploitation, and inequalities, and reunite the population. This led to the single-party system of the FLN and the suppression of many autonomous political movements.

This challenging history and struggle for justice, and the ever-present threat of political violence, make the peaceful hirak movement of 2019 all the more significant. Yet, despite the scale of the marches, involving millions and in every city of the country, the hirak demonstrations were largely unnoticed or underreported outside Algeria (Northey & Guemar, 2020). European reporters were largely absent from Algiers, and the infrequent reporting that did appear in the Western press often focused on ‘clashes,’ or ‘teargas’, even though such incidents represented a small minority in 56 weeks of marches, which only halted with the global coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Scholars such as Yahia Zoubir (2019) and Asef Bayat (2013a, p. 3; 2013b, p. 589) point to similar oversights within scholarly analysis of internal processes of transformation by Middle East observers or transitologists in the build up to and during the Arab Spring. Bayat also argues that it is important to understand what he describes as ‘non-movements’ – that is, the everyday practices of resistance, volunteering, and online activism which led to the Arab Spring, and which were largely absent from much of the analysis (Bayat, 2013b, p. 589). Britta Hecking (2017) further argues that ‘youth non-movements’ are particularly important to understand in the case of Algeria, where more subtle forms of protest have existed over some time. Across the Middle East and North Africa, and Algeria in particular, the focus however has mainly been on ‘authoritarian resilience’ rather than on civil society, activism, or the potential for change, even after the Arab Spring (Heydemann & Leenders, 2013; Josua, 2016; Hill, 2019). Bayat categorizes such analyses that focus predominantly on authoritarianism, or the impossibility of change, as the ‘exceptionalist lens’, a culturalist paradigm equating Islam with the lack of democracy in Arab Muslim states. Rentier state theories have equally been used to explain the absence of democracy in Algeria and in other oil-rich states, which, it is argued, have little need to engage with their populations (Muradova, 2016). Whilst it remains important to recognize the challenges to achieving and sustaining democracy, similarly, the dismissal of popular activism by ordinary people may simply reinforce pre-existing hypotheses, or overlook new or potential political trends towards change in the region.

This chapter argues that this exceptionalist lens has prevented and continues to prevent us from fully understanding the nature of mobilization in the Arab world. The Arab-Muslim exceptionalism thesis underpins the absence of reporting and of academic analysis of the Algerian movement, and of similar trends in the region that clash with this narrative. Building on Bayat’s argument about the importance of what he describes as ‘non-movements’, the chapter uses this concept to develop his thesis around the sustainability of social movements. It aims to understand the nature and unique potential of this new Algerian democracy movement in a longer-term perspective, and it examines the process of the hirak itself as a hugely significant development in Algeria, and beyond, with implications for democracy, citizenship, political engagement, activism, and reconciliation. How have Algerians taken on such a powerful regime, without violence, despite deep frustrations and a history of violent political change? What are the implications for future democratic reform, civil society, and citizenship in Algeria? How did the absence of clearly identified leaders affect the movement’s capacity to negotiate political transformation (Dris Aït-Hamadouche & Dris, 2019)? Importantly, does the use of peaceful resistance within a social movement, such as the Algerian concept of ‘silmiya’, enhance the chances of success, in its aims to transform political life and achieve democracy, as recently argued by scholars (Chenoweth & Stephan, 2011)?

In the chapter, I firstly explore theories of democratization, collective action, social movements, and non-movements, analysing how scholars apply these in Middle East and North African (MENA) contexts, and how this might affect our understanding of processes of change in the region. Secondly, I analyse the Algerian hirak movement. What were its causes and repertoires of action and how do these fit with previous understandings of how people mobilize? Thirdly, I examine questions of citizenship, unity, and organization and the implications of the symbolic reclaiming of the public sphere. Lastly, I look at the role played by peaceful resistance and reconciliation amongst Algerians throughout the hirak and what perspectives these aspects of the movement might offer for political reform and transformation in the future.

Democratization and collective action

Theories of democracy have long sought to explain the role of contentious politics, social movements, and civil society in democratization processes (de Tocqueville, [1840] 1994; Oberschall, 2000). With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, civil society organizations and social movements were particularly important in framing the possibilities for democracy inspiring the Eastern European political transitions that followed (Glenn, 2001). In the Middle East and North African region, there was similar optimism in the early 1990s, about the potential for democracy. Scholars felt that rising numbers of civic associations in particular signified a growing civil society that could contribute to democratization (Zoubir, 1995; Ibrahim, 1998; Ben Nefissa, 2002). By the early 2000s, however, the absence of any significant political transformation led scholars to question the assumption that civil society in the Arab world was capable of such a contribution. For some, Arab civic associations simply supported the conservation of authoritarianism (Liverani, 2008; Wictorowicz, 2000) or were too weak and divided to bring about any real change (Cavatorta & Elananza, 2008). More recently, Cavatorta and Durac argued that in the absence of political parties, civil society associations did form a framework in which politics could happen, and that Arab civil society was not simply a tool of the state (Cavatorta & Durac, 2011, p. 27). Nevertheless, it could not contribute to democratization, as it operated within a context of corrupt regimes. Social movement theory, which focused on structural and institutional opportunities for protest, was seen as applicable in the Arab region, though those structures and opportunities as mainly absent. For most researchers, authoritarian regimes prevented civic organizations or movements from developing democratic practices within such controlled spaces (Jamal, 2007).

Authoritarian resilience

The focus of much of the academic analysis of political regimes in North Africa and the Arab world has therefore been on authoritarianism and its resilience. Even after the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, the tendency to view these as failures, or to focus on the absence of any successful attempts towards democratic transformation, has remained a key strand in the analyses (Hill, 2019; Del Panta, 2017). Del Panta explains the failure of the Algerian movement for democracy in 2011 as stemming from the absence of a united working-class movement, the weakness of the union movement, and distrust between groups in society – a legacy of the 1990s violence. With difficulties in securing transitions following revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, Lafi argues that, ‘academia is concentrating on the understanding of the severe disenchantment that saw armed fanatics, foreign interventions and/or new dictatorships confiscate the struggle for democracy’ (Lafi, 2017, p. 701). This focus on authoritarian resilience arguably affects our understanding of the processes of change in the region, and in particular the more recent Algerian hirak movement. What was happening in terms of collective action, and – if this existed – why was it overlooked? With the scale of the hirak marches, involving millions of citizens across Algeria, the international underreporting does seem surprising. The ignoring of transformation processes by Middle East observers has bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: A ‘master-race democracy’: Myths and lies of Western liberal civilization
• PART 1 Democracy as a progressive force and the failure of liberal democracy
• PART 2 Palestine: Settler colonialism and the impossibility of democracy
• Index