Archival
Key institutions of the pre-modern Middle Eastern economy, all grounded in Islamic law, blocked the development of democratic institutions. This talk identifies three mechanisms that played critical roles. Islam’s original tax system failed to produce lasting and credible constraints on governance. The waqfs (Islamic trusts) founded to provide social services to designated constituencies were politically powerless. Profit-making private enterprises remained small and ephemeral, hindering the formation of stable coalitions capable of bargaining with the state. The last two mechanisms jointly delayed the rise of a civil society able to provide the checks and balances essential to democratic rule.
This article explores issues around the changing nature of social networks and social movements involving youth in Nigeria. Using the youth-driven 2012 fuel subsidy protests, the article raises two fundamental questions. First, do the youth-led protests represent a genuine shift for the youth from being mere subalterns to neo-patrimonial power groups to a more assertive role, which seeks to challenge the power structure in the country, or are they simply frustrated expressions of marginality? Second, in what ways have social media affected social networks and movements and their capacity for mobilization in Nigeria? It appears that the bourgeoning youth population in Nigeria has led to a realization by youth groups of their power to substantially affect the course and conduct of governance in the country. On 1 January 2012, the Nigerian government unilaterally decided to remove the subsidy on petrol leading to a 120 per cent increase in the price of the product. The move provided opportunities for youth resistance through social media. This article uses insights from this protest to explore these questions and show the fluid nature of youth social networks and movements.
Following a number of events including the sweeping revolutionary trends in North African countries of Tunisia and Egypt (the Arab Spring), the Libyan people on February 15, 2011 began a series of peaceful protests which were met with violent responses by the government. The protests escalated into an uprising that spread across the country with the forces opposing Gaddafi establishing a government based in Benghazi named the National Transitional Council whose goal is to overthrow the Gaddafi-led government and hold democratic elections. The Gaddafi regime brutally and violently responded by attacking the protesters killing many civilians with rising number of casualties raising humanitarian concerns, which on grounds of humanitarian intervention or responsibility to protect doctrine, ultimately necessitated the imposition of no-fly zone by the UNSC. The study concludes that the implementation of no-fly zone worsens rather than ameliorates the humanitarian conditions in Libya.
Much ink has been spilt over the study of the causes and reasons behind the rise of the Arab people in what was called the “Arab spring” or the “Arab awakening” after decades of stagnancy and silence. All attempts have been overwhelmed and distorted by the concurrent conditions of the Arab world in relation to its social, political and cultural structure. Despite the fact that the Arab revolutions that swept important Arab countries by the beginning of 2011 from North Africa to the Middle East fall under such criteria, still the causes and roots of these uprisings at this very moment indicate some inherent potential drives that are the result of years of simmering. Even more strikingly, the underpinnings of the Arab revolutions can be traced also to a distrust of people in their governments and a deep understanding of the new world order triggered by the 9/11 events and the invasion of Iraq. This paper traces the impact of the 9/11 events on the Arab mindset ever since the Iraq war and how it resulted in the turmoil of the Arab revolutions.
The beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts working in Libya, as shown in video footage released by the Islamic State on February 12, 2015, made headlines across the world. The story was variously framed as one more vicious murder of Middle Eastern Christians by militant Islamists, one more index of chaos in post-Qaddafi Libya and one more opportunity for an Arab state, in this case Egypt, to enlist in the latest phase of the war on terror. What was left unaddressed was the deep and long-standing enmeshment of the Libyan and Egyptian economies, embodied in the tens of thousands of Egyptian workers who remain in Libya despite the civil war raging there. There is a history of maltreatment of Egyptian migrants in Libya spanning more than 60 years. The abuses date back to the organized migration of Egyptian teachers, bureaucrats and other professionals under Gamal Abdel Nasser, and have continued with increasing brutality until the present. From the beginning, whether under King Idris, under Muammar al-Qaddafi or following the colonel’s downfall, the causes of the violence have been distinctly political, with Egyptians in Libya always vulnerable to the vicissitudes of Egyptian-Libyan state relations as well as to regional crises. The welfare of these workers has always been subordinate to strategic concerns in the calculations of both states.