Comments on: Tunisia and Egypt: Questioning Insurrections

By: Alex Zimmerman

Alex Zimmerman — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 05:16:00 +0000

“Look at Iran or Turkey”?

What about Turkey? It’s become quite a bit more liberal, progressive and democratic since the Islamists took over. The only real data point for the theory that Islamic parties will erase democratic institutions is Iran; more often it’s been the military preemptively erasing democratic institutions in order to prevent the Islamists from doing so, as in Algeria. The idea that we should ignore public opinion in order to safeguard democracy is ipso facto undemocratic; political Islamism, on the other hand, is not necessarily at odds with democracy.

By: free online grocery list

free online grocery list — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:14:00 +0000

cvs printable coupons…

[…]ebay deals dillards coupons discountsdeal t[…]…

By: Eric Friedman

Eric Friedman — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:34:00 +0000

I am reflecting on the ever-insightful Foucault when I read this blog entry. He wrote, in his seminal text Discipline and Punish (1977): “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. He asks us to think about what power produces; “it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.” People gathering in a central square constituted power. Certainly we can consider this facebook-stimulated set of political actions as the power of small things. Foucault argued that claiming power, however fleetingly, produces the social facts of the moment (consider the Egyptian protestors). He saw power as a fluid process: grasping power, or letting it go, he claimed, is constitutive of the social construction of reality and the “production of truth”.

By: Scott

Scott — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 17:10:27 +0000

It is interesting that this revolution was, as far as I know, entirely an urban phenomenon. In the case of Thailand, there is a great urban/rural divide that was at the center of the conflict that took place in that country, where the rural population is the majority, hence the urbanites disdain for democracy there. If there is a similar urban/minority and rural/majority divide in Egypt, with a similar divide in sentiments about how the country should be run, this could reflect at the ballot box if and when elections take place. I don’t know enough about the demographics of Egypt to speculate on what the results of that might be. It is my understanding though that despite government censorship Egypt has the most active blogosphere in the Arab world, which could prove significant.

By: Michael Corey

Michael Corey — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:20:44 +0000

Do we know if the values and the aspirations of the activists who participated in the uprising/revolution are compatible with the values and aspirations of the public taken as a whole? I’ve heard some analysts refer to polling data taken over the last few years that suggests that they may not be aligned, and might be at cross purposes.