BACKGROUND IDEAS



Contemporary Insurrections and Political Formations
Most uprisings are thought of as a unitary truth made up of a group of people with like ideas, in fact, a unified ideology.  These groups form a leader-led organization or set of organizations and form coalitions.  There must be a clear goal.  The end justifies the means. 
The situation has been so different in the last part of the 20th and early 21st century. The contemporary insurrections have given us a whole new way to look at Africa, the Middle East, gender politics, youth, class, and the world. In addition to further anti-colonial and decolonial movements and activism (e.g., in South Africa) the anarcho-tendencies and direct democracy actions that we are seeing in some of the collective actions of the last decade or so, e.g., in the Zapatista movement in Mexico; in the anti-capitalist, anarcho-oriented revolt against the World Trade Organization summit meeting in Seattle, Washington in 1999; in various environmental movements; in the Occupy movements; in Sudan with the Girifna (“We Are Fed Up”) movement;  in Egypt with the Kefaya (“Enough”) movement and its anarchist tendencies; in Spain with the Indignados/as (“Indignant Ones”) movement; in Iceland with the so-called “Kitchenware Revolution”; in the “Arab Spring” insurrections in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya; all over Brazil; and in the actions emanating from Taksim Square and Gezi Park in Istanbul.  Some insurrections have even started all over again (e.g., Algeria, Tunisia, and now Lebanon, a late entry).  We have seen the prominent role women are playing in the national struggle. Women in Liberia took unprecedented actions in 2003, refusing to leave a sit-down at a peace conference between adversaries—all men— until the men had come to a resolution. We have also seen women take center stage in the December 2018 Sudanese revolution[i] that toppled Omer Al-Bashir and in the process of dismantling the grip of his cronies on the country’s economy and military and security apparatuses.
            Many of these contemporary insurrections have used experimental strategies and new formations and associations.  Some of these new manifestations have been built on postcolonial ideas, critical pedagogies and feminist strategies. We can see tendencies in recent political actions that indicate that political actors, including some vanguard transnational feminists, are “doing” a whole new politics that does not mimic the characteristics of modernism. They are anti-statism (perhaps nothing suggests modernism as clearly as the formation of a state), anti-authority, and are opposed to hierarchal organization. Some of them do not even have a set end in mind, perhaps stressing process over product.  They are all searching for new and freer forms of association that have already had, and will continue to have, a profound effect on gender, ethnicity, race, and class relations. The Resistance and Neighborhood Committees that led the street protests in Sudan and the Sudanese Professionals Association that formed the political leadership during the protests, the various negotiation tracks that formed with the peace process that is currently underway, are all examples of new actors in the Sudanese political landscape, taking on the roles played in the past by trade unions and political parties. MANSAM, a new coalition of Sudanese civil society and political women’s groups, or many of the women’s groups that formed during the Khartoum sit-in such as Women from the Marginalized Regions, Hirak (Motion) or Al-Haresat (The Keepers), are also good examples of new formations with the December revolution and are at the forefront of the struggle for justice for women, in political and social realms. 
           
Creativity and Solidarity while Building Movements
Many of the contemporary actions can even be characterized as having a playful and creative aspect to them—often in the form of performance: “flash” demonstrations and guerilla theater, for example, among various youth groups such as Sudan’s Girifna with its street performances of political opposition or their “flash” appearances in public space; or Egypt’s Kefaya, which also used sarcastic and biting humor in posters and graffiti. We can see the humor even in the names these various collective actors have chosen—e.g., “We are fed up,” and “Enough!”  The use of a different language to describe one’s political opposition is indicative of the current youth movements. It is difficult to move into an era of free association if one is using old language, suggestive of old structures.  For humor and playfulness, Manual Castells points us to Iceland’s “Kitchenware Revolution” following the 2008 economic meltdown, named for the pots and pans that were used in the protests to express outrage and also to be inclusive of everyone. “Shukran Hamdok,”[ii] a popular signature in Sudanese social media, is a dig at those working against the popular revolution in Sudan. A recent slogan said “Hunger is better than al-kizan,”[iii] in reference to the severe shortages in basic commodities and high prices.  Hunger and pots and pans not only could rally people, but symbolized the common people. We can also consider that some of the groups engage in self-management of community, a non-linear process of decision-making; a respect for all ideas (no voting), a future-less condition (the “right now” is stressed), no bosses, non-representational (direct democracy instead), non-violence, decommodification, creativity, and slowness.
            The collective set of oppositional actions, all the way from African women’s public displays to shame men into actions, Western feminist street theater of the 1970s and 1980s, and the more recent--the Occupy Wall Street movement with its geographically widespread effect.  They say about themselves on their website:

Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

The Occupy General Assembly is a “horizontal, leaderless and consensus-based open meeting” that uses hand signals, partially as fun and self-expression, partially to replace technology. Part of the irony is that although much has been made of these political actions being “internet and social media revolutions,” a parallel stream is a rejection of technology and of the capitalism that propels it.  Most Occupy groups are highly diverse, with women playing a major role. It is self-reflexive and highly mutually respectful. They are more interested in building new forms of association than in making demands. Castells discusses these “no-demand movements” that use slogans like “The Process is the Message” or famous sayings like “Revolution is an Idea; it Cannot Die”. Thawra!
            Our reading of these formations is that there is no central Truth by which people must abide, and no unitary subject, much ambiguity. The groups do not seem perplexed over this uncertainty, nor over not having a clear direction or a unity, certainly not a unity of ideology. With regard to the Occupy movement, participants seem comfortable with the fragmentation and ambiguity that reigns. These are open, contingent, overlapping, and fluid actions. We have seen the Sudanese Resistance Committees change their main role of leading the street protest to guarding the revolution from the deep state or the counter-revolutionary forces. They are manning petrol stations and bakeries and pressing for the realization of the foremost revolution’s slogan “Freedom, Peace and Justice.”
            There have been calls to recognize and/or put into practice a new ethics, a rethinking of self and community through the practice of emancipatory education, a rethinking of the workings of power and strategies of resistance in both grassroots movements and academic institutions. There are calls for theorizing and practicing an anti-capitalist and democratic critique in education, and through collective struggles in a constantly moving world,” a transnational world.
            Taksim Square, in the heart of Istanbul was a chaotic, fast-moving, and modest square accompanied by Gezi Park.  In 2013 there was a populous uprising in the making to save the park from “development.”    
Taksim again reveals itself as fundamentally more powerful than social media, which produce virtual communities. Revolutions happen in the flesh. In Taksim, strangers have discovered one another, their common concerns and collective voice. The power of bodies coming together, at least for the moment, has produced a democratic moment…. [iv]

            Sudanese surely must recognize this from their own tent city and what it did to one’s consciousness—that democratic moment.  About Taksim one participant remarked, “We have found ourselves.” In the Khartoum sit-in, every tent represented a self in a city that stood for nationhood. Both collections of the people had found themselves in opposition to a scripted public realm of the state’s conception, not theirs. In this undertaking, the protesters of Taksim/Gezi and the sit-ins in many cities in Sudan, were engaging in a “fluid, irregular, open and unpredictable” set of actions. One of the slogans in Gezi said “Taksim Is Everywhere.” On the Occupy Wall Street web site we can read, “Occupy is Everywhere.” At the height of the police repression of the Sudanese uprising, a slogan emerged that said “The Revolution is Everywhere.” These slogans speak to the decentralized and even fragmented nature of these movements, the permeability, perhaps the seeping into our souls.
            The murals and the poetry tell the story of the Sudanese revolution—as does the “Tent City.”  Three months after that sit-in in front of the military headquarters was dismantled 3rd of June, 2019, in a most brutal way (regarded as a massacre by the populace) that embodiment of the Revolution, was memoralized in September of the same year in Omdurman, involving not only mourning the martyrs but of one of the desirable futures that was created in that space in front of the military headquarters. It is freedom, peace and justice inside of us.  Remember many Sudanese were chanting “We are all Darfur.” Whether the country is on the way to resolving its “existential questions”[v] of identity and of its nature as a political entity, many things came out for the individuals who protested on the streets and saboha (stayed put) at the sit-in.
            Insurgencies like the ones we have seen in the last few years have all been messy, unfinished.  What have Sudanese given the 21st century of insurrections?  What projects came out of the Uprising?  What is being built from the ground up?  How Does One Grow?


NOTES:


[i] While the events in Sudan do not follow the textbook definition of “revolution”, they have been popularly dubbed so and often called a “revolution of consciousness”. We choose to follow the people’s lead and aspirations by using “revolution.”
[ii] Thank you Hamdook (the Prime Minister of the Transitional Government in Sudan 2019 – 2022).
[iii] A colloquial term for the Islamists (in particular those adhering to political Islam).
[iv] Michael Kimmelman (2013)In Istanbul’s Heart, Leader’s Obsession, Perhaps Achilles Heel.” New York Times (June 8), pp. A1 and A6.
[v] In his recent book The Problem of Transition in Sudan (2019), Atta Al-Battahani focused on the current, what he calls the 5th transitional period (2019 – 2022). He compares the power dynamics that existed in the different periods observing a common failure in resolving the “existential questions” or the relationship between the centre and the marginalized regions in a justly and fundamental way.

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