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Crowds and Politics in North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya by Andrea Khalil

2015; Indiana University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-2886577

1558-9579

Valentine M. Moghadam,

Multiculturalism, Politics, Migration, Gender

Drawing on theories of crowds—as elaborated by such scholars as George Rudé, Elias Canetti, Hannah Arendt, E. P. Thompson, Ervand Abrahamian, and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt—Andrea Khalil seeks to explain dynamics and developments in Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia. The chapters on Libya and Tunisia focus on events during and after the Arab Spring protests, while the chapter on Algeria puts the spotlight on 1988–89. Khalil is interested in the politics of noninstitutional actors; she is sympathetic to crowd politics and notes that crowds are always confrontational in their performance of power relations, although she concedes in passing that a crowd may be violent and fascist.Khalil first introduces her classification of crowds in the Arab Spring: political crowds (heterogeneous and homogeneous); nonpolitical crowds (consumer, sports, religious); invisible crowds (Internet, tribal, the ghosts of martyrs). The first chapter in her slim book elaborates on crowd theory, showing its evolution from Gustav Le Bon’s notion of irrational and unruly crowds to the more recent presentation of the “person-as-crowd” (16). She states that crowds exhibit emotions, such as anger, fear, anxiety, uncertainty, joy, exhilaration, unity, and bonding, and a sense of purpose. The book proceeds with a chapter on each of the three case-study countries.Among the strengths of the book are Khalil’s detailed descriptions of events in the three countries, including her observations and interviews. She writes very well: “The crowd resembled a desert space, open and inhabited by a moving nomadic population whose interaction prompted a constantly changing shape” (60). She brings her considerable literary analytic knowledge to bear on the discussion of Assia Djebar on the Algeria war of liberation. The Libya chapter shows sympathy for the “revolutionaries,” although she cites survey data on the subsequent entrenchment of sex segregation and the exceedingly conservative nature of Libyan society on such issues as the hijab and the role of the state in enforcing it.I should point out that I contributed a foreword to an issue of the Journal of North African Studies on women, gender, and the Arab Spring (vol. 19, no. 2, March 2014), guest-edited by Khalil. It is an excellent compilation, and Khalil’s own article on Tunisia is a detailed and original analysis of women’s roles in the revolution and the transitional government. Her expertise on Tunisia comes across in Crowds and Politics, too. But aspects of the book’s overall analysis are problematic.First, it is not clear why Khalil focused on crowds rather than on social movements or revolutions or other types of mobilization, with which most of the literature on the Arab Spring has dealt. There is no discussion of why crowd theory has more explanatory power, given that it tends to preclude an analysis of social classes or politicized social strata. Khalil refutes the role of intellectuals and trade unions in the political protests (28) and writes of North Africa that “there are no classes essentially determined by control of means of production as there are perhaps in modern post-industrial capitalist societies” (31). However, she approvingly cites the position of the historian and Algeria specialist Hugh Roberts that the 1988 Algeria protests over the free market policies of Chadli Bendjedid opened the door to contestation from the Front Islamist du Salut, though the Islamist party did not address or contest the structural adjustment policies, given that they “oppose[d] state intervention and regulation and nationalization and generally side[d] with the law of the market against the paternalistic and redistributive impulses of the state” (34). Others too have noted that Islamist parties are generally accepting of laissez-faire capitalist political economy. The point is that the presence of such a capitalist economy presupposes social classes in relation to either private or state ownership of the means of production and that this pertains to all modern states in the global economy, including those in North Africa.Second, there is no systematic comparison across the three cases. How did crowds in Tunisia differ from those in Libya? Why should the chapter on Libya merit a focus on women when women played a greater role in the Tunisian revolution and afterward? When Khalil writes that the Libyan case disproves “the notion that a patriarchal society translates into the absence of women from situations of war, revolution, or even the public sphere” (103), has she forgotten revolutionary France, Russia, China, Algeria, and Iran? Women take part in revolutions, of course—but what happens to them afterward is what distinguishes a patriarchal from an egalitarian revolution (or democratic transition). The cases of Libya and Tunisia are worlds apart in terms of the nature and gender dynamics of the crowds, the normative environment, and the unfolding of the transitions. Khalil perhaps focused on Libyan women because that issue is underresearched, but why neglect the gender and sexual dynamics of the Algerian case? Why not tease out the similarities and differences in gendered ideology of the Algerian and Libyan Islamists? Why not compare and contrast the reactions of women’s rights groups in Algeria and Tunisia to the emergence of Islamists?Early in the Algeria chapter, Khalil has a vignette of a big crowd on January 11, 2012, in front of a mosque (formerly a French-built cathedral) that was celebrating a Japanese convert to Islam. She writes, “Mosque crowds are overwhelmingly peaceful and purposeful, and this one was exemplary of that general trend” (73), approvingly citing John Entelis to the effect that political Islamist groups stabilize crowds. Entelis and Khalil alike seem to have forgotten about the crowds that called for Salman Rushdie’s head, for the murder of the producers of the Dutch film Submission in 2004, and for the death of the creators and publishers of the cartoons about Muhammad that ran in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. And I wonder what the crowd—and political Islamist groups—would have done had there been not a Japanese convert to Islam but an Algerian convert to Christianity?When “the crowd” exhibits joy, exhilaration, and a sense of unity and purpose in mass social protests, this is a transient, almost ephemeral phenomenon and very risky in the absence of strong political institutions and leadership. Hence the problems that Libya has faced compared with Tunisia. But even in Tunisia “the crowd” turned out to be divided and indeed polarized, as evinced by the intense debates in the constituent assembly around women’s rights and sharia and the formation of an electoral bloc to prevent another Islamist victory. My observation about the ephemeral nature of the crowd applies equally to Europe, where the 2011 anti-austerity protests were divided between progressives and xenophobes. Such ideological or class-based differences raise fundamental questions about the salience of concepts of “the multitude” and “the crowd.”My critique notwithstanding, scholars and students alike will learn a great deal about the politics of crowds in Algeria in 1988–89 and in Tunisia and Libya in 2011. In addition, they will generate discussions among themselves about the political and gender dynamics of mass protests in the Arab region.