By John Ballard
Trouble in Tunisia seems like last week's news, but Newshoggers has been tracking events there since December 28. Any clear outcome seems a long way off.
Those new to the story can access our past snapshots here. And this morning I have two additional links, one of which includes an excellent Bloggingheads hour-long video.
These two additional links should not be overlooked.
?Mark Lynch comments on how media influences have (and are) interacting with events in Tunisia. A couple of the other links suggest that what happened in Tunisia is a spin-off of "social media," calling it a Twitter Revolution or some such over-simplification. Those familiar with that part of the world know how superficial those suggestions are because the underlying issues predate the internet by decades. That said, the impact of media is not trivial.
Al Jazeera may be so 2005, but it is still by far the most watched and most influential single media outlet in the Arab world. It has also embraced the new media environment, creatively and rapidly adopting user generated content to overcome official crackdowns on its coverage of various countries -- a practice perfected in Iraq, where it had to rely on locally-generated content after its office was closed down in 2004. Other satellite television stations have followed suit, leading to genuine and highly significant integration among new and slightly-less-new Arab media. All of these media platforms and individual contributors layer together to collectively challenge the ability of states to control the flow of information, images, and opinion. This is the latest stage in the new media revolution in the Arab world about which I've been writing since the early 2000s, and it's profoundly exciting to watch.I'd point to one other aspect of this which often gets overlooked. Al Jazeera and the new media ecosystem did not only spread information -- they facilitated the framing of the events and a robust public debate about their meaning. Events do not speak for themselves. For them to have political meaning they need to be interpreted, placed into a particular context and imbued with significance. Arabs collectively understood these events quite quickly as part of a broader Arab narrative of reform and popular protest ---the "Al Jazeera narrative" of an Arab public challenging authoritarian Arab regimes and U.S. foreign policy alike. Events in Tunisia had meaning for Jordan, for Lebanon, for Yemen, for Egypt because they were framed and understood within this collective Arab narrative. From Al Jazeera's talk shows to internet forums to the cafes where people talked them out face to face, Tunisia became common focal point for the Arab political debate and identity.
Media forces, including social media, have an undeniable effect. But shaping a narrative and causing a revolution are as unrelated as starting a pregnancy and rearing the result.
(Related echo from the US -- Speaking of how media impacts popular narratives, forming and guiding public opinion, take a moment to scan Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read. It would be a mistake to imagine that alternative sources of information, social media and such, are without relevance. I'm beginning to think populations in traditionally totalitarian systems "get it" in ways that most Americans do not. I don't know how else to explain the chasm of ignorance in which I live.)
?Read First thoughts on the overthrow of Ben Ali for a measured, intelligent picture of how matters in Tunisia stand at this writing. Kal's summary post is not too long and is clearly written.
...although Ben Ali was removed from power in a revolutionary fashion it remains to be seen if the country�s political leadership can (or) provide revolutionary change without further goading from the population.[...] Ben Ali, a long time operator in the security services, had favored the the police to the military and it makes very good sense that his partisans are coming from the parts of the deep state he helped create and sustain. Through the whole crisis it is the Tunisian military and not the police that appear professional and worthy of some kind of public trust. A great many Tunisians view the military as having �saved� them from the police during the crisis, though some news reporting has translated this as some desire for military rule or guidance. [...] The military has been reported to be a strong force in the moves taking place in the interim government and one should keep look out for personnel changes (promotions, retirements, etc.) in the military staff and the moves of Gen. Rachid Ammar (the army chief of staff) in particular. [...] The demonstrations cut across class and geographic lines and a variety of political tendencies joined the protestors. But Islamists were hardly anywhere to be found....hierarchical Islamist factions may be on their way to co-opting the uprising but there is little evidence of that happening.... It is important to note that labor has played an increasingly important role in channeling and focusing popular discontent in Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria in recent years while organized Islamism has suffered from official repression and from a loss of popular credibility. [...] In a region where autocracy is dominant, Tunisia was the cream of the crop: a country with close links to the west, a relatively prosperous economy and a government with full spectrum political domination over its people. It was among the most secure and politically passive states in the Arab region....Ben Ali�s handling of the crisis was provocatively violent, with the police brutalizing and shooting at demonstrators and killing tens of people. The government came off as desperate and brittle and its responses invited only more outrage. Other regimes will likely seek to avoid Ben Ali�s mistakes.
I found his link to the hour-long bloggingheads video instructive, not only because of content but in letting me see what The Arabist (Issandr El Amrani) looks like. His conversation with Shadi Hamid from Brookings was candid and informative.
(And no, I didn't sit still and listen for the entire hour. My main self-assignment this morning is to put up a bunch of links about healthcare reform, that quicksand and serpent-invested swamp that still has a long way to go before being drained.)
Update -- added hours later
?Kal, The Moor Next Door, just published Kaplan on Tunisia, or, defending autocratic stability. This is a deconstruction of a piece by the estimable, but in this case open for correction, Robert Kaplan.
The Arabist said this is an important post and I agree.
I think Kal is still in his twenties and Kaplan is pushing sixty, so a generational difference of viewpoints may be at work. But Kal's points are embarrassingly compelling.
Here is an example.
[Kaplan:] Even today, many of the roads in the country, particularly in the north, were originally Roman ones. For 2,000 years, the closer to Carthage (roughly the site of Tunis, the capital, today), the greater the level of development. Because urbanization in Tunisia started two millenniums ago, tribal identity based on nomadism � which, as the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun says, has always disrupted political stability � is correspondingly weak.After the Roman general Scipio defeated Hannibal in 202 B.C. outside modern-day Tunis, he dug a demarcation ditch, or fossa regia, that marked the extent of civilized territory. The fossa regia remains relevant. Still visible in places, it runs from Tabarka on Tunisia�s northwestern coast southward, and then turns directly eastward to Sfax, another Mediterranean port. The towns beyond that line have fewer Roman remains, and today tend to be poorer and less developed, with historically higher rates of unemployment.
[Kal:] Stop. Here Kaplan reaches too far back in time partly to establish credibility by showing familiarity with Tunisia�s Latinate history and partly to interest the reader in the story by referencing a more exotic feature of the region�s history. But the affect is plainly superficial. The prevalence of Roman ruins has little to do with developmental inequality Tunisia. It is true that tribalism is weak in Tunisia and especially in urban areas. But Scipio has nothing to do with the urban-rural divide in Tunisia today. Part of this owes to the fact that coastal zones are almost always richer than those on the rural, agricultural interior in the Maghreb. City people in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and many other places have high standards of living, higher literacy rates and more education their their rural cousins. That this is the case in Tunisia has nothing to do with Roman settlement, Scipio Africanus, Hannibal or any other classical figure (Kaplan could have saved word space by cutting Scipio�s line out all together). That these disparities endure are partly the result of failures in recent official Tunisian development policy, the gap between ends and means in the post-colonial period. The irrelevance of the observation about the prevalence of Roman ruins is shown by the fact that the uprising spread rapidly into better off coastal towns and cities for political and economic reasons. This seems to have the purpose of giving an academic glossing to what is really a political argument about the efficacy of supporting authoritarianism in the Arab world.
You see what I mean?
Go read the rest.
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