Local Politics and Contemporary Transformations in the Arab World

Governance Beyond the Center

M. Bouziane, C. Harders, A. Hoffmann, M. Bouziane, C. Harders, A. Hoffmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137338686
• eBook ISBN: 9781137338693
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The contributors link innovative analytical concepts and ethnographic in-depth case studies from the Arab world. Based on the debates on politics from below and dynamic concepts of state, all the chapters focus on informal institutions, non-elite actors, and the dynamic and contradictory relationship between state and society.

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Analyzing Politics Beyond the Center in an Age of Transformation

Anja Hoffmann, Malika Bouziane, and Cilja Harders

1. Introduction

Recent upheavals in the Arab world¹ have challenged both statist and centrist assumptions about Middle Eastern politics. New social movements in the urban centers and virtual networks, as well as actors and actions from the so-called periphery, have changed the political landscape of the region within months. Still, these developments are rooted in long-term processes: until 2011, massive social, political, cultural, and economic transformations did not lead to regime change. The dynamics of these social ‘transformations without political transitions’ (Harders, 2009, p. 301), as well as the current developments, which fall between transition to democracy and civil war, deserve a closer look. 2008 alone saw various protests and social upheavals, such as in Bahrain in early February, where workers demonstrated against their decreasing purchasing power; in March, riots led to violent clashes in Yemen; in May, young football fans took the defeat of their football club in the Algerian city of Oran as an occasion to release their anger against the lack of prospects and the arrogance of power. Similarly, the following years witnessed numerous small-scale protests and local riots (Bayat, 2010; Beinin and Vairel, 2011; Catusse and Vairel, 2010), which culminated in the mass mobilization of 2011. This pattern of local challenges to central power re-emerged intensively in the Tunisian (Allal, 2012; Allal and Bennafla, 2011), Libyan (AbiYaghi and Catusse, 2011; Brahimi, 2011; Paoletti, 2011), and Syrian uprisings. And even in the highly centralized polity of Egypt, the dispersion of protest to many cities across the country was crucial for the success of mass mobilization, the cities of Suez and Alexandria being cases in point (Amro, 2013; El-Ghobashy, 2011).

This book contributes to the theoretical and empirical exploration of these dynamic, ambivalent, and open-ended processes of transformation. It brings together critical reflections on space, power, state, and agency from the fields of political science, anthropology, and critical human geography. Our starting point is a simple question: How do local institutions, agents, and their practices contest and shape the authoritarian state and its centrally institutionalized modes of governance? Building on this, how and why do these processes transform or perpetuate authoritarian rule? By locating its analysis in seemingly peripheral spaces, the volume addresses an important research gap. So far there are very few systematic, comparative analyses of the roots of the Arab Spring, and none deals with the way that these transformations have played out on the local scale.

Political science has often concentrated on formal institutions, regime elites, and questions of stability when addressing authoritarian politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In structural approaches to examining the durability of authoritarian rule, factors such as rentier-economies, international dependencies, and/or religion have been dominant as explanatory frameworks (Anderson, 2006; Heydemann, 2007; Posusney, 2005; Schlumberger, 2007). Therefore, the 2011 events not only changed the political landscape, but also initiated an auto-critique in Middle Eastern studies questioning the dominant paradigm of authoritarian resilience (Bayat, 2011; Casey, 2012; Pace and Cavatorta, 2012). While not denying the relevance of structural categories, this book aims to advance the debate by suggesting an approach that focuses on the (everyday) practices of state and citizenship.

But how does one analyze these everyday practices in a way that neither romanticizes the ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985) nor reflects the structuralist and elitist bias of much of the available literature on state and governance in North Africa and West Asia? In recent years, political science and anthropology have developed innovative interdisciplinary approaches, initiating a cultural and a spatial turn in the study of state–society relations. Examples include Scott’s work on hidden resistance (Scott, 1990), Bayart et al.’s analysis of ‘politics from below’ (1992), Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan’s work on the local state in Africa (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan, 1996; 1998), and Migdal’s ‘state-insociety’ approach (Migdal, 1988; 2004), to mention just a few. At the same time, anthropologists of the state, such as Sharma and Gupta (Gupta, 1995; Gupta and Sharma, 2006), Das and Poole (2004), and Hansen and Stepputat (2005), have contributed important new ways of thinking about the state. Building on social theory as developed by Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, Agamben, and Lefebvre, these works have greatly contributed to denaturalizing the state. Moreover, they illustrate how state–society relations are constantly constructed and negotiated through everyday life, as much as through policymaking processes or within political organizations. In doing so, they have challenged conventional, mostly Weberian conceptions of the state and its institutions.

Following this reasoning, our approach further redefines the terrain for the analysis of state, politics, and governance (for a definition of ‘governance,’ see below) as experienced and practiced on the ‘local scale.’ Furthermore, the Arab revolutions have demonstrated that ‘so-called peripheral’ spaces and seemingly marginal actors have been vital in triggering major changes on the regime level; challenges to authoritarian governance are often first visible and viable in these local spaces of both resistance and acquiescence. It is on the local scale that power relations become tangible and abstract concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘politics’ observable. Thus, our approach contributes to a new perspective in Middle Eastern studies that focuses on local politics as a starting point to analyze authoritarian governance and its transformations (as initiated by Bayat, 1997; Harders, 2002; 2009; Ismail, 2006; Kienle, 2003; Singerman, 1995; Wedeen, 1999; 2008). We emphasize the importance of actors and their agency, arguing that power dynamics in authoritarian polities are therefore much more complex than structuralism and other related paradigms presume. To grasp those complexities, we look at the micro-dynamics of participation, shedding light on struggles for power over resources, interpretation, adaptation, and resistance. We understand these struggles as simultaneously localized and globalized, connected to different scales and timeframes by the constant flow of material and immaterial resources, people, discourses, and ideas (Arbeitsstelle Politik des Vordern Orient, 2012; Lenner, 2009). However, we hold that ‘the local’ is both the ‘testing and a contested ground’ for new developments (Harders in this volume, p. 113). In order to capture these processes, their agents, and their structures appropriately, we propose a relational spatial conceptualization of the local. By localizing political dynamics while also recognizing that the ‘local’ is always interrelated with and embedded in political processes on other scales, we seek to capture the sophisticated nature of inter-scale politics beyond the center. Moreover, by using a broad concept of politics that encompasses—among other things—governance, we are able to capture practices beyond institutionalized forms of formal political organization. This offers a critical approach to the state that transcends the notion of a welfare state, so common in governance debates, and allows a nuanced deconstruction of discursive and practical social constructs of state as experienced by people on the ground.

Building on these reflections, the theoretical contributions in the book’s first part and the anthropologically inspired empirical contributions in the second part examine micro-politics beyond politically, socially, and economically privileged centers in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, and Lebanon. They theoretically and empirically elaborate on the dynamic, contradictory, and dialectic relationships between state and society as they play out in the multiple spaces and scales of everyday politics.

In the following section, we will begin by discussing our conceptualization of the ‘local,’ which refers to socially constructed, small-scale spaces and takes into consideration heterogeneity and power relations as structuring factors within these spaces. After illustrating our approach to ‘local politics beyond the center,’ we will sketch out the implications of this analytical tool for the analysis of state, politics, and governance. Finally, we will briefly introduce the contributions in this volume.

2. Dimensions of the ‘local’—reflections on space and politics

The notion of the ‘local’ has a prominent place in both social sciences and area studies. However, depending on their disciplinary background and theoretical perspective, scholars use the concept of the ‘local’ in ambiguous, sometimes even contradictory ways. Particularly absent are political science debates about what the ‘local’ is, what it contains, and what it implies. And the existing contributions remain widely disconnected from the deep anthropological debate (mentioned above) or from critical human geography (notably Agnew, 2002; Agnew et al., 2003; Cox and Low, 2003; Harvey, 1973; Soja, 1989; Toal, 1996). Inspiring works of the ‘spatial turn,’ in particular by Doreen Massey (1984; 1994; 1999) but also by other critical scholars in post-colonial, cultural, and feminist studies (Hall, 1992; Lossau, 2002; McDowell, 2007), focus on the political construction of space as a representation of social power; unfortunately, this scholarship remains widely neglected in political science. Building on this critical literature, we hold that the ‘local’ as a metaphor is both a specific perspective on power and politics through which we approach state–society relations and, analytically, it encompasses a specific space.²

The ‘local’ is conceptualized in spatial terms and understood as a territorialized small-scale place that is demarcated from and interlinked to other scales. Place is hereby characterized by ‘geographical proximity, local embedding of social relations as well as patterns of horizontal spatial differentiation’ (Brenner, 2008, p. 60). In our understanding, place becomes a particular and territorialized space and refers to the notion of lived experiences and interactions. While place is specific, space is general (Agnew, 2011). We conceptualize space as socially produced (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]) and dynamic, ‘continually constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed through a historically specific, multiscalar dialectic of de- and re-territorialization’ (Brenner, 1999, p. 43). Space is a vital part of the battle for control and surveillance and therefore always relates to questions of domination and power (Brenner et al., 2003; Foucault, 1977). In accordance with Neil Brenner, we then understand ‘scale’ as the vertical differentiation of social relations, for example along the supra-national, national, regional, urban, and/or local (Brenner, 1999; 2008), including the hierarchies of power deriving from it (Reuber, 2012).

The ‘local’ always needs to be analyzed in relation to other socially produced scales because it ‘is geographical scale that defines the boundaries and bounds the identities’ (Smith, 1992, p. 66) around which power is exerted and contested. Politics of scale(-construction) are therefore a prominent medium that translates social and economic inequalities into geographical realties, as well as the subject of intensive political contestation palpable on the respective constructed scales (Hoffmann in this volume). Furthermore, we acknowledge that, by focusing solely on the local scale without contextualizing and historicizing the ‘local,’ one risks running blind into the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994). By adopting homogenizing and romanticizing local discourses that neglect categories such as gender, class, political ideology, and race, one can easily ignore processes of othering and exclusion and thus glorify the ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1989; see Amar in this volume for a similar reasoning). Taking this into consideration, we emphasize the necessity of deconstructing local discourses to make underlying interests and strategies visible. Consequently, we do not claim that the ‘local’ is superior to any other scale. As Griffin already stated in 1981: ‘It is conceivable, even likely in many countries, that power at the local level is more concentrated, more elitist and applied more ruthlessly against the poor than at the centre’ (Griffin, 1981, p. 225). To avoid a harmonizing perspective, we conceptualize the ‘local’ as a socio-political spatial construct shaped by ‘multiplex ties’ (Olivier de Sardan, 2011, p. 23) between agents with different interests, strategies, and dispositions who at the same time share a ‘localized imagination of togetherness and belonging’ (Bouziane in this volume, p. 138); the ‘local’ is always related to other scales of power.

The contributions in this volume are particularly interested in local places ‘beyond the center.’ We hold that the center is a geographical place constructed through a contested social and political process that cannot simply be equated with the capital. In line with our understanding of the ‘local,’ we argue that what lies within or beyond the center is determined by and depends upon the respective context. Although politics in the slums of Cairo, as discussed by Cilja Harders, or the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, as analyzed by Hala Abou-Zaki, may follow their own local logics that can be at odds with those inside the privileged city centers, they are not essentially different. Moreover, they share many characteristics with the far-away spaces of the desert, mountains, and borderlands addressed in the chapters by Malika Bouziane, Anja Hoffmann, Naoual Belakhdar, and Thomas Hüsken. Thus, into the phrase ‘beyond the center’ we subsume local places that are economically, socially, and/or politically disadvantaged—whether in rural or in urban areas. While economic distance from the center might be measured by citizens’ access to infrastructure and welfare, it is difficult to quantify people’s self-perception of being socially or politically marginalized. Nevertheless, the spaces discussed here are characterized by a certain distance from the center with regard to power, practices of sovereignty, logics of violence, and allocation of resources.

By using the metaphor ‘beyond the center,’ we want to stress the complexity of power relations within local spaces as well as between different scales. This approach allows us to introduce the idea of multiple centers and thus multiple contentious spaces, challenging the notion of centralized governance institutions. In other words, every local space has its own center or centers of power that are interlinked to, but at the same time in competition with, centers on other scales. Every local space contains spaces ‘beyond the center’ that challenge and shape politics on all scales. Abou-Zaki’s chapter, for instance, illustrates how illegalized migrants who settled in a Palestinian camp have become the marginalized among the marginalized (Abou-Zaki in this volume).

Furthermore, we assume that what is defined and produced as ‘beyond the center’ is dynamic and dependent on scale and time, and is always the result of political struggles rather than a structural condition of space (Lang, 2011). Consequently, ‘spaces beyond the center’ are not a natural phenomenon but r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Notes on Transliteration
• 1. Analyzing Politics Beyond the Center in an Age of Transformation
• Part I: Theorizing (Local) Politics—Conceptual Contributions
• Part II: Localizing Theory—Case Studies
• Index