Problematizing Two Faces of Western-Centrism : A Testimony of the Middle East After 2011 1 (original) (raw)
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Eurocentrism Awakened: The Arab Uprisings and the Search for a "Modern" Middle East
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The 2011 Arab uprisings were initially hailed by many observers in the Western world as the harbinger of a “modern” Middle East. Finally, it was believed, the hegemony of corrupt autocrats and the prolonged “dark age” of the Arab world were coming to an end. In the context of this narrative, the so-called Turkish model gained popularity as a potential guide for the modernization of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Accordingly, modernization has been defined as the inevitable path to a liberal democratic, free-market capitalist, and secular society within non-Western settings. This conceptualization is highly Eurocentric as the contents of modernization are solely limited to the contemporary characteristics of social, economic, and political life in Western Europe and Northern America. This study criticizes much of the literature on the Arab uprisings, arguing that the excessive enthusiasm shown by Western mainstream media and governments toward the promotion of the Turkish model reveals the limits of their understanding of the complexities of MENA societies and polities. Modernization is actually a highly customizable path whose nature is determined mainly by the contingent socioeconomic and political characteristics of each country. Therefore, in order to develop a generalizable understanding of modernization in the MENA region and beyond, the Eurocentrism of mainstream literature needs to be replaced with more flexible frameworks such as the ones developed in recent years by proponents of postcolonialism, multiple modernities paradigm, and the uneven and combined development theory.
This article engages the problem of Orientalism in Western elite foreign policy discourse on the Arab uprisings. Reconstructing discursive representations among US and EU foreign policy elites, it argues that the Arab uprisings were inserted into a liberal civilizing narrative that emphasizes the underlying identity of 'the Arab world' and 'the West.' In this narrative, human rights play a crucial role. Difference, to the extent acknowledged, is inscribed temporally rather than spatially. Such a narrative thus breaks with Orientalizing ways of representing the Arab world as irredeemably different. Having noticed the hierarchical rendition of subjectivity that the liberal civilizing narrative nevertheless enacts temporally, the article also discusses challenges to the liberal civilizing narrative. It concludes by arguing for a politics of rights claiming approach to make sense of the Arab uprisings.
Reorientalizing the Middle East: The Power Agenda Setting Post-Arab Uprisings
Claims to new or critical knowledge can often be non-performative. Building off of this assumption, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the 2010-2011 uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa have been analysed through approaches that claim to be critical and post-Orientalist and yet reproduce problematic assumptions about the region, revealing their connection to a longer genealogy dating back to Orientalism. This serves to sanitize the uprisings by virtue of a neoliberal agenda that reproduces the ‘Middle East’ straitjacket, in turn creating a typology not too different from realist analysis in the region that (re)posits ‘Arab exceptionalism.’ Claims to being critical, or making a critical turn, are thus questioned in this paper through an analysis that shows how theory has been in the interest of power through the appropriation of native informants into the academic complex of think-tanks, Western donor institutions, and foreign media. Taking our cue from Edward Said, we explore how new approaches have presented themselves as critical and have disrobed themselves of their exotic and explicit racist discourse, despite the fact that the same assumptions continue to lurk in the background. Using Sara Ahmed’s notion of the non-performativity of claims to being critical, we survey how the Middle East is being reshaped through these ‘new’ and ‘critical’ approaches that in essence are apologetic to neoliberalism and liberal governmentality at large. We show how minorities continue to be an intervention mechanism under the so-called ‘freedom of belief’ agenda, how the ‘democracy paradigm’ advances electoralism as freedom, and how rights-based approaches with their underlying (neo)liberal assumptions continue to determine gender politics and analysis despite postcolonial interventions. By creating a contemporary genealogy of Middle East area studies and surveying calls for proposals for journal articles, media publications, Western think-tank reports, donor programs and Civil Society Organizations' (CSOs) expansion into the Middle East, this paper argues that this form of surveillance, though masquerading as ‘critical,’ builds off of neoliberal governmentality. This, in turn, molds a subjectivity that reifies the Middle East as a stagnant entity.
Clash of Civilizations" Revisited in the Era of Arab Revolutions
2010
Tunisian Revolution, starting out in December 17, 2010 with Muhammad Buazizi's, who was a 26 years old high school dropout having to support his extended family of eight as a street vendor, setting himself on fire in front of a local municipal building in the protest of mistreatment by local police officers and physical harassment and humiliation by a municipal officer and her aides, incited protests and uprisings throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region heralding the era of Arab Revolutions, populary coined as "Arap Spring," with a participation from all walks of like regardless of age, gender, occupation, social strata, and political standing, yet with youth domination and active use of the social media. Since the coinage has mistakenly minimized the radical transformation that the entire region has been going through in ethnic, geographic, and social terms, it would be noteworthy reminding the "Green Movement" led by the youth in Iran in 2009 protesting the Presidential elections held in June the same year and even the earlier youth demonstrations of North African, particularly the Algerian, background in the suburban areas of Paris in 2005 and 2006 respectively as the early harbingers of this new era for the MENA region. Furthermore, it would be appropriate to conceive the Arap Revolutions in the context of belated arrival of the waves of democratization from Eastern Europe to the region, including Tunus, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Bahrain, Syria, and Yemen, more than twenty years after the breakdown of the Berlin Wall, symbol of the Cold War, in 1989 followed by the toppling of the Stalinist regimes one after another in Eastern Europe and by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Given the fact that those mass protests and uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East did not remain confine to the region, but similar demonstrations took place in capital and various big cities of Europe such as Madrid and Athens mainly for economic reasons and in the United States such as New York City where the "Occupy the Wall Street" movement, led by the youth for economic and social inequalities and corruption as well as for the influence of corporations on governments, stirred a chain of similar "occupy movements" in many other cities in the country while displaying solidarity with the Arap uprisings have underlined the global nature of the Arab Revolutions, which burst out to demand the very basic universal human rights such as bread, freedom, and human dignity. These developments put the popular thesis of Samuel Huntington in dispute that the international affairs in the post Cold war period would be determined by cultures rather than ideologies and that the clashes would take place among civilizations based on identity and culture. Therefore, this presentation will look into the ongoing revolutionary process in North Africa and the Middle East within the thesis and anti thesis of clash of civilizations.
The uprisings of 2011 in the Middle East and North Africa opened the way for a potential reimagining of the role of the Arab socio-political militant and the work of the public intellectual. Much change was achieved and the action of postmodern social activists played a central role in this historical undertaking. Deeper examination of the discourse and subsequent positioning of a large segment among these newer actors reveal, in the post-Arab Spring period, neo-Orientalist traits whereby Western metropolis concerns and phraseology overtake the domestic requirements of political transition. Self-representing themselves and their theatres by way of borrowed perspectives proceeding from external, paternalistic logics has led this new generation of actors to a series of contradictions as to the very democratizing rupture and rebirth of the region they have been advocating for. Borrowed prisms and subservient agency are the consequential drivers of this mode, which proceeds paradoxically on claims of independence and ownership.