Tag Archives: Tunisia

Bad ideas, Empire, Frontiers, Law, Mirror Worlds, Violence-Conflict

‘Who isn’t a Shabaab these days?’: Alia Allana reports from the Tunisia-Libya border

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This guest post by ALIA ALLANA is part of a Kafila series of despatches from the Arab Spring

When does a boy become a shabaab?

Literally, in Arabic, shabaab means young men. Before the fever of the Arab Spring raged in the minds of the youth, back when boys used to gather in squares aimlessly, girls eyeing them would call them shabaab.

But that was then; before the political architecture of the Arab world was reconstructed.

Today the shabaab are the disenchanted youth, the angry boys of Benghazi with deathly toys devoid of opportunity, angry at their condition, aware of the world through the Internet and their mobiles, acting out their rebellion. Today the shabaab, the rebels of Libya, want what they think is theirs: the right to self-determination, a say in politics and freedom.

Continue reading ‘Who isn’t a Shabaab these days?’: Alia Allana reports from the Tunisia-Libya border →

Everyday Life, Excavation, Frontiers, Politics, Right watch, Violence-Conflict

The Synagogue and the Jihadi: Alia Allana reports from Jerba

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This guest post by ALIA ALLANA is part of a Kafila series of ground reports from the Arab Spring

Inside the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba, an island off the south coast of Tunisia

Out of all the outrageous questions I have asked in my life, this one has to be amongst the top ten:

“Are you a jihadi?” Continue reading The Synagogue and the Jihadi: Alia Allana reports from Jerba →

Government, Identities, Law, Mirror Worlds, Movements, Violence-Conflict

“We are not like Iran here”: Alia Allana reports from Tunisia

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This guest post by ALIA ALLANA is an account of polling day in Tunisia

They had already waited so long, what was a few more hours? Continue reading “We are not like Iran here”: Alia Allana reports from Tunisia →

Frontiers, Government, Identities, Movements, Violence-Conflict

Mickey wants to be the first one to vote: Alia Allana reports from Tunisia

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This guest post for Kafila by ALIA ALLANA from Sidi Bou Said on the outskirts of the capital Tunis captures the mood a day before Tunisia goes to the polls. Photos by Alia Allana

Continue reading Mickey wants to be the first one to vote: Alia Allana reports from Tunisia →

Bad ideas, Capitalism, Ecologies, Media politics, Movements

The Answer My Friend, is Blowin’ in the Wind…

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Even as the western and Indian media go ecstatic over the new democratic upsurges in the Arab world, something else has begun to happen. The Tunisian ‘virus’ that spread rapidly via Egypt, is now finding newer and equally hospital bodies elsewhere – that is to say, bodies made vulnerable by the years of plunder by corporate capital. Now, what precisely, is the connection between corporate capital and the Arab ‘jasmine revolutions’? On the face of it, nothing. However, as the state legislature in Wisconsin sat considering a bill to severely curb state workers’ rights of collective bargaining a few days ago, thousands of state employees descended on the building, virtually occupying it.

And as protests against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining rights entered the fifth day, the support for the movement has begun to expand. Demonstrators were joined by union supporters from Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as national union leaders and civil rights advocate the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

An interesting article by Dan La Botz, “A New American Workers’ Movement Has Begun“, underlines the connections of the ongoing struggle in Wisconsin with the Arab virus!

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Ecologies, Government, Media politics, Movements, Politics

The ‘Viral’ Revolutions of Our Times – Postnational Reflections

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The Arab Turmoil

According to a  report in The Guardian, the movement in Egypt that overthrew the regime of Hosni Mubarak is “a movement led by tech-savvy students and twentysomethings – labour activists, intellectuals, lawyers, accountants, engineers – that had its origins in a three-year-old textile strike in the Nile Delta and the killing of a 28-year-old university graduate, Khaled Said”. It has emerged, says the report, “as the centre of what is now an alliance of Egyptian opposition groups, old and new.” The April 6 Youth Movement (primarily a Facebook network), came into existence in in 2008, in support of the ongoing workers’ struggle in the industrial town of El-mahalla El-Kubra primarily on issues related to wages. The struggle in the past few years, also moved towards a restructuring of unions with government appointed leaders. The list of demands for the April 6 strike also included a demand for raising the national minimum wages that had remained stagnant for over two and a half decades. Increasing workers militancy over the past few years was a direct response to the World Bank imposed ‘reforms’ that had pushed lives of industrial labour to the brink. It was this sharpening conflict, consequent upon the serious impact of structural adjustment policies, that provides the backdrop in which the middle class youth decided to rally in support of the April 6 2008 strike. It was they who converted the call for an industrial strike into a general strike, according to some reports.  It is virtually impossible to get a sense of any of this in the ecstatic reports of the ‘networking babalog’ making a revolution that is now all over the Indian media.

Continue reading The ‘Viral’ Revolutions of Our Times – Postnational Reflections →