During the last decade, demands for dignity (karama) and social justice (al-‘adala al-ijtima’iya), represented the common denominator of the Arab uprisings. Social justice demands framed the denunciation of clientelism (zaba’iniyya) and corruption (fasad) as emanations of inequitable redistribution of wealth, work opportunities, health, and economic security, and pointed to, both, peoples’ social precarity, and a crisis of legitimacy of the authoritarian regimes (Camau and Vairel 2014).
A wide literature has highlighted the genealogical and processual nature of the Arab uprisings. Researchers have stressed their intimate relation with a broader – and still unfolding – process of disaggregation of the political and social contract within Arab societies (Allal 2013, Camau and Vairel 2014, Hmed and Laurent 2016). This emerging approach has challenged the mainstream understanding of the uprisings as circumscribed, eventful democratisation processes that merely seek to transform the existing authoritarian regimes into Global North-styled liberal democracies. Sectoral yet iterative phenomena of mobilization such as workers’ struggles (Benin 2015, Allal 2013, Makram-Ebeid 2012, Scala 2020), unemployed protests (Fioroni 2017, Emperador-Badimon 2020), as well as social movements or campaigns (Vairel 2014; AbiYaghi and Catusse 2014; El Chazli 2020), have preceded and sometimes anticipated the Arab revolutionary processes in the region. The mobilizations that took place throughout the 2000s, as well as the Arab uprisings of the last decade, point to a progressive corrosion of the authoritarian social compact and its moral economy. The transformations of the social question – intended as "a fundamental aporia on which a society experiences the enigma of its cohesion and tries to ward off the risk of its fracture” (Castel 1995: 11) – in the region have, however, remained quite overlooked by scholars.
This webinar series seeks to explore the construction and the erosion of the authoritarian social contract by questioning the emergence and the reconfigurations of a social question in the Middle East and North Africa.
Throughout their history, Arab authoritarian regimes have attempted to muzzle their societies through the combination of consent and coercion. On the one hand, the adoption of universalistic – yet regressive and inegalitarian in outcome – forms of social protection, such as subsidies on basic items (Harris 2019), for instance, have represented one of the basic pillars of the authoritarian bargain. On the other hand, clientelism and corporatist strategies have been used to “buy the social peace” (Hibou 2006), as much as corruption and fraud have been employed as “hegemonic tools” to inflate consent (Achkar 2021), especially among - but not limited to - emerging economic elites (Heydemann 2004, Kienle 2009).
These formal and informal mechanisms lying at the foundation of the authoritarian social compact have been put under pressure, readapted, and contested since the neoliberal shift from the late 1970s and onwards. The so-called “bread riots” that occurred in several Middle Eastern and North African countries throughout the 1980s and 1990s (as well as elsewhere in the Global South) (Dakhli and Bonnecase 2021) followed structural adjustment programs pushed by the Bretton Woods institutions worldwide. Their outbreak, as well as their violent repression by the regimes, revealed the social and political dimension and impact of neoliberal politics far beyond the Arab region. On the other hand, the Arab uprisings have called for social justice through the denunciation of another dimension of the authoritarian manufacturing of consent: clientelism and corruption. The current revival of authoritarian practices and regimes has not eradicated social demands or ended social protests throughout the region. Rather, it has pushed to the reconfiguration of contention practices and mobilizations driven by demands for social justice. The social question, incorporated within overarching political demands during the Arab uprisings, still constitutes a framework of contention in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa.
By undertaking a historical and political survey of the progressive reconfigurations of the social question in the region, this webinar series wishes to contribute to better understand the construction of social justice demands in contemporary Middle East and North Africa.
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