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.”
[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.
Comments
Post a Comment