"Our inheritance was left to us by no testament" – René Char
Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract
Amro Ali, “Kinetic Karama: Bargaining for Dignity in the Pursuit of a New Arab Social Contract” in The Modern Arab State: A Decade of Uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Ed. Youssef Cherif, (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2021) pp. 41-67.PDF version
“Dreams of the detainee” (1961). Painting by Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun. Courtesy of the Barjeel Art Foundation.
Summary: The protest cries of karama (dignity) in 2011 saw the emergence of a new subjectivity in the Arab world that birthed a new citizenship paradigm and elevated the citizenry as a compelling sovereign collective. Karama developed not only as a form of bottom-up universal humanism but also independently outside the confines of academia, religious-secular debates, and even human rights organizations. For many decades, karama had been reserved for the loftiness of the nation and liberation struggles, whereas karama for the individual meant a moral virtue that constituted an apolitical being. In 2011, however, the understanding of karama made a phenomenal leap from the moral into the political realm and thus became a political force in its own right. Karama developed into a self-contained movement, a philosophy that people yearned to develop, encapsulating a story that expands the moral imagination and asks its protagonists to imbibe the rhythm of life with a higher temporal calling. It is the citizen’s inherent worthiness and inalienable right to make the social contract.
“The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.” – Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941).
As the train gradually accelerated along the Alexandria to Cairo tracks in the early morning of September 6, 2017, an aging inspector walked toward a young plain-clothed passenger and asked for his ticket. The passenger replied he does not have one to which he was told he would have to buy a ticket on the spot. The passenger replied, “I’m an officer in the army.”
The inspector remained polite and offered him a discounted ticket. The officer gave an incredulous stare when his supposed authority made no dent.
“I’m not paying for any ticket!” he retorted.
“Yes, you will,” said the inspector with a confidence that signaled experience with entitled junior officers and passengers of all stripes.
The passenger said something to the effect that he paid his taxes, repeated that he was in the military, and threatened the inspector with reporting him to the officer’s superiors.
The inspector shouted “I don’t care if you’re the son of a government minister! You will buy a ticket like everyone else!”
After 15 minutes of heated back-and-forth altercation, the flustered inspector walked back through all the carriages, gathering up a number of his train staff colleagues, returning to the officer as one mighty gray-coated posse. The staff pulled the unruly passenger to the side, to the in-between carriages, yelling at him and collectively countering his intimidation attempts.
A seated, casually dressed military officer felt embarrassed and approached the suspect to talk him into paying saying he should not abuse his privileges. The same officer chipped in with others to help pay for his ticket. The situation was defused by the end of the 3-hour journey.
This animated incident is a common occurrence across the Arab world that gets lost in the noise of history; perhaps the only surprise in this case is that justice wins. The event encapsulates everything wrong with a broken social contract that threw rights, expectations, and boundaries into a big blur. Social contracts set the rights and obligations between citizens and government through formal and informal agreements with each other. The citizen surrenders some freedoms to the powers that be in exchange for having their rights protected, services provided, and social order maintained. The social contract infuses state-society interactions with a promise to each party that helps to stabilize the future and make it more predictable. The soldier was clearly in the role of a citizen receiving a service for which he was obliged to pay for. While the inspector performed the role of the state by providing him with that service, pending payment. Yet the absence of a semblance of a social contract deepened the haze in which, for example, both men saw themselves in some capacity as representing the ministries of defense and transport, as well as the soldier’s appealing to the amorphous prestige of the state, while the inspector rightfully appealed to the law and equality.
When I commended the inspector for his stance, he responded: “If he said he did not have money, then I could have found a workaround. It is not like I was going to kill him because he could not pay. He needs to know that he will not get special treatment because of who he is.” Yet the subtext of his overall grievance was that the passenger had inadvertently undermined his position and showed a lack of etiquette toward an older person. Here was the blind spot of the social contract: karama, the Arabic word for “dignity.” The inspector was salvaging his dignity as someone disrespected him and did not give him the reverence of an older person. This was an echo to the karama paradigm born in the 2011 Arab revolutions and uprisings.
The protest cries of karama in 2011 were a new subjectivity in the Arab world as they carried modern notions of human rights, respect, and recognition of the “citizenry as a sovereign collective” (Khosrokhavar, 2019, p. 99). In effect, dignity was tied to a “new citizenship paradigm among Arab youth” (Khosrokhavar, 2019). This was a marked shift from the traditional concept of sharaf (honor) that had strong motifs of patriarchy, sex, shame, “honor killings,” and a fragile identity that can only be reasserted by resort to violence (Khosrokhavar, 2019). Dignity has rarely been considered a political matter and hence why it rarely featured in the world’s protest movements, long crowded out by familiar demands of unity, freedom, justice, bread, and jobs. While the term had long been reserved for the loftiness of the nation and liberation struggles, dignity for the individual meant a moral virtue that constituted an apolitical being. Its Arabic counterpart, however, made a phenomenal leap, like a rare beneficial cross-species transmission, karama jumped from the moral into the political realm and thus becoming a political force in its own right.
Karama originates from the root “krm” in various verses of the Quran, and it essentially means “to venerate,” “to treat with deference,” “to like better” or “to give preference to” (Maróth, 2014, p. 156). Although karama means dignity, it goes deeper as it partners with ʿizz (prestige), jāh (repute), iḥtirām (respect), hurma (sanctity), manzila (inherent status and rank), and qīma (one’s inalienable worth; Shah, 2017, p. 108). What was perhaps surprising, with Tunisia the first to demonstrate, was that karama emerged not only as a form of bottom-up universal humanism, but independently and outside the confines of academia, religious-secular debates, and even human rights organizations (Marzouki, 2011, pp. 150-151). Despite the despair and misery in the following decade of the Arab Spring, the karama paradigm is arguably one of the enduring legacies of 2011 that purport the citizen’s inherent worthiness and inalienable right to make the system, even if that reality is still mostly far off. Illuminating the citizen leads to a different interpretation of the MENA region and the social contract. After all, many of the changes in the state are a result of indignant citizen pressures. A descent from the colossal state to the citizen as agent and subject of the state can help one “look at the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, passive and active citizenship, depoliticization and politicization, and mobilization and demobilization” (Meijer, 2014, p. 10).When dignity is factored in, it moves the social contract from self-interest to one of obligations requiring respect for each individual. On its own, dignity is not sufficient to solve problems in the absence of legal frameworks and norms. However, it is a guiding principle that has two advantages, “it helps define what humanity is and gives us the opportunity of a discussion on the limits of human power” (Byky, 2014, p. 364). It does not implement the legal aspects of the social contract as much as it animates it.
Ilan Pappé referred to the Arab Spring as the “second phase of decolonization” and the collective “assertion of self-dignity in the Arab world” (Schroeder & Ṣadr, 2017, p. 5). This came after decades of brutalization of Arabs that exacerbated their sense of worthlessness that produced what Rashid Khalidi described as an “internalized and . . . pervasive self-loathing and an ulcerous social malaise” (Khalidi, 2011). Arab countries had come a long way since the old populist authoritarian social contracts that unraveled by the 1980s, only to be replaced with the post-populist social contracts that severed the state from the citizen’s welfare as neoliberal reforms enriched the close-knit patronage networks of presidents and kings. The 2011 revolutions ripped the threadbare social contracts apart. The revolts and the following political journeys spawned different social contracts that included the participatory social contract (Tunisia), repressive social contract or protection pact (Egypt), eroded social contract (Lebanon), pseudo-reconstructed social contract (Jordan, Morocco) (Loewe et al, 2020, p. 12), security pacts (Gulf countries) and state failure (Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria). While it is too early to comprehensively examine the evolving social contracts for Algeria and Sudan given their political orders were only recently and severely disrupted.
The hope for an East European-style transition has long been abandoned as the rot in the Arab state has shown itself to be worse than what analysts have predicted over the years. Think tanks at times seek to sound a note of hope by making comparisons to Indochina in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Balkans in the 1990s to say that perpetual conflict is not always inevitable. Indeed, every conflict has a possible resolution, yet the Middle East is no ordinary place, and its problems are a confluence of social, political, and geopolitical interactions amplified by nihilist values, attacks on pluralism, and zero-sum game power struggles, with each party backed by a different regional power. In light of this, it is not only important to flesh out the social contracts that are developing, or not, but to unpack the karama paradigm that was birthed in 2011 to great academic and activist fanfare, but tapered off from erudite spaces over the years under the weight of endless catastrophic events. While it did make a reappearance in 2019 following the uprisings in Algeria, Sudan, Iraq, and Lebanon, it became clear that global conversations of dignity in the Arab world were tied around political events of a theatrical nature rather than the reverberation of dignity after the event. This is understandable as political events surface ideas and practices which help us to examine them better. However, an absence from discussion does not equate with an absence from reality. A political idea introduced into the world does not die. It takes a detour.
On account of the events since 2011, perhaps we can speak of the active dignity, or kinetic karama, that finds resonance in Erich Fromm’s (1941) “Freedom to” more than “freedom from” (p. 26). The latter is a negative type of freedom that deals with emancipation from restrictions while “freedom to” engages with the creative use of freedom to create something new. Contrary to the widespread view, the Arab protest movements were never just locked in a “freedom from” frame. There were thousands of initiatives bubbling in the squares and streets geared toward “reconstructing” the future; the protest movements sought a utopia in their respective civic and national localities where the future would be envisioned by enacting it in the present. Karama re-rooted itself in praxis, or action, the human capacity to build a public world that is not given. The Arab Spring was to enable a civic utopia to be fabricated through human will in which karama would be the foundation for spaces of conciliation, communication, community, education, and civic duty.
Could a supra-national social contract (similar to the EU) be the growing discourse and logical end of an active dignity paradigm? It could be one built on the idea of the Arab public sphere and space that not only formed a “shifting frontier between state forces and ordinary citizens” (Tripp, 2013, p. 131), but commenced in 2011 as a “single, unified narrative of protest with shared heroes and villains, common stakes, and a deeply felt sense of shared destiny” (Lynch, 2012, p. 8). This phenomenon internalized a “new kind of pan-Arabist identity” while not contradicting the protest energies directed toward domestic change (Lynch, 2012, p. 8). The idea of a supra-national pact may seem remote, and it is, but this is partly because the frame of analysis is looked at through the state. Rather, transnational citizen engagements can provide more answers when we consider structural and agency forces that may facilitate this. This could include, among others, the decline of oil rents, youth values that stubbornly refuses to be tamed, rise of new Arab voices, role of the digital sphere, Tunisia as a relative success story, exile communities reimagining political visions and practices, and the bankruptcy of state legitimacy that leaves a door open for new narratives.
Any social contract needs a legitimizing narrative, karama was reborn not simply as a theoretical concept or an enhanced individual virtue, but a self-contained movement, a philosophy yearning to be developed, encapsulating a story that expands the moral imagination and asks its protagonists to imbibe the rhythm of life with a higher temporal calling than biological and work cycles. The reason why the Arab Spring is still noteworthy is not only because of the colossal events that unfolded, but it was able to crystallize karama then and for a decade onwards through a chorus of political imaginaries, relationships, art, versatile use of emerging technologies, and the maximalist exertion of the role of state and citizen. The political and karama were brought into alignment and sharper focus that would not have been possible nor perhaps even understood to previous generations reared on a dignity that was cornered by officialdom only to be dispatched through predictable state tropes.
Salvaging Dignity in the Shadow of the “Coldest of Cold Monsters”
The Arab state with its impersonal scale and long reach to make its overbearing presence felt on the citizen’s skin is reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s chilling attack, perhaps in all of political philosophy, on the state in his 1882 seminal novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears for me, for now I say to you my word about the death of peoples.
State is the name for the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people….’
But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it talks about, it lies – and whatever it has, it has stolen.
Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and it snarls. Even its very entrails are false.
Confusion of the language of good and evil: this sign I give you as a sign of the state. Verily, the will to death is what this sign signifies! Verily, it beckons to the preachers of death!..
All things it will give you, if you worship it, the new idol: thus it buys itself the luster of your virtue and the glance of your proud eyes….
State I call it where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the base: state, where all can lose themselves, the good and the base: state, where the slow suicide of all – is called “life.” (p. 28)
Nietzsche’s prophetic take on the state would materialize in the later dystopias of European fascism and totalitarianism that would leave dark traces for the Arab world to embark upon when it belatedly ventured into the political discourse and treacherous terrain of the modern state. Western liberal democracies have largely outgrown this particular monster, albeit now overtaken by the “consuming monster” (Moore, 2004, p. 93) and the “corporate Global Golem,” (p. 92) are able to with relative success galvanize civil society, social movements, and political publics to tirelessly keep the state accountable. But it is the individual in the Arab world that mostly finds life usurped within Nietzsche’s bloodcurdling parable. A human being largely disenfranchised from a meaningful social contract and incapacitated from keeping the state in check.
This malady is widely reflected in contemporary Arab poetry, novels, art, films, theatre, and cultural productions that paint a picture of smallness in the face of shapeless crushing bureaucracies, armies, and security forces. “Every man is from dust and unto dust he shall return, except the Arab. The Arab is from the secret police, and unto the secret police he shall return” (Tramontini & Milich, 2014-2015, p. 114), wrote Syrian poet Muhammad al-Maghut (1934-2006). If one evades the secret police, they would still have to confront the modern technical-bureaucratic monster that devours and chews the citizen through a nightmare bureaucracy, as noted by French philosopher Georges Sorel and Italian economist Vilfredo Paret, that has no face in which one can present grievances and to exercise some aspects of the social contract. In effect you have a “tyranny without a tyrant” (Arendt, 1972, p. 178). The overall crisis is captured by al-Maghut in one simple line, “We lack nothing, but dignity” (El Bernoussi, 2015, p. 374). It is no wonder that karama became the uniting theme across the Arab world in 2011, with al-Maghut’s homeland declaring the first Friday protest of the Syrian revolution as the “Friday of Dignity.”
The story of dignity is the story of shifting worldviews. Prior to the 20th century, a Moroccan that relocated to Egypt would be considered by the inhabitants in their newly adopted home as different, not foreign. Colonial powers and the accompanying emerging state canonized smaller subsets of nationalities that included the stateless, refugee, foreigner, and minority. Individual identity was traditionally reserved for one’s name, occupation, place of origin, religion, and physical description, historically hardwired markers of dignity (Ali, 2017). The state’s imposition of nationality disguised “colonialism’s will to categorize populations and its pervasive expressions of power through small mechanisms and technologies and its modernity” (Hanley, 2017, p. 7). Even the notion of human rights has been inherent with tension in the quest to acquire them, as Hannah Arendt (1968) argued, as it presupposed membership in a nation or political community “in the new secularized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and religious forces” (p. 291). Yet even for citizens in Arab countries, the local elites adopted the statist mantle in order to wield “the resources of the state in their own interest” and to follow through that “nationalism expanded along the stolid avenue of self-interest” (Hanley, 2017, p. 288). In other words, the social contract was long geared to deprive the citizen of certain rights. Karama transcends these segmental cleavages and political flannel as it recognizes inalienable rights and worthiness as being divinely sanctioned and therefore it does not make sense for dignity to be left to the mercy of universal declarations and regional agreements. Essentially, dignity was part of the humanizing arsenal employed to resolve inherited problems produced by the state. Individual dignity in particular was a suspect in the lineup of political questions that the Arab state felt uncomfortable in addressing.
An Elusive Arab Social Contract
In March 1954, a group of academics at Alexandria University took the lead in opposing martial law and the emerging military regime; to which the recklessly ambitious Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser denounced the university as an enemy of the revolution. The coastal city’s academy was quick to remind him that it was the first institution to support the 1952 revolution and “its teachers were the only group in the country to have refused to meet the deposed King . . . the university supported the ends of the Revolution and not its means since the university believed strongly in freedom, democracy and individual dignity” (Abdalla, 1985, p. 120). The mention of individual dignity (karama fardiyya) must have been alien to Nasser as it did not square with the zeitgeist that reserved dignity for the nation and national struggles. The tiny social groups who mostly supported this conception of individual dignity in the Arab world were “intellectuals and some members of educated classes as minorities” (Khosrokhavar, 2019, p. 99). In the early 1940s, the then-young Army Lieutenant Nasser wrote, “Until now the officers only talked of how to enjoy themselves; now they are speaking of sacrificing their lives for their honour. It has taught them that there is something called dignity which has to be defended” (Nutting, 1972, p. 20). Nasser not only accurately separates honour from dignity, but ominously marks the former for the individual and the latter for Egypt.
This “minor” semantic shift would have tremendous consequence for the development of political rights in Arab social contracts. Frantz Fanon (2004) justified the de-prioritization of individual dignity in this manner:
For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with the dignity of the human individual: for that human individual has never heard tell of it. All that the native has seen in his country is that they can freely arrest him, beat him, starve him: and no professor of ethics, no priest has ever come to be beaten in his place, nor to share their bread with him. (p. 44)
Fanon did not necessarily dismiss individual dignity as evidenced by his earlier work. Ziauddin Sardar explains in the forward to Fanon’s Black Skin, White masks:
Dignity is not located in seeking equality with the white man and his civilization: it is not about assuming the attitudes of the master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table. It is about being oneself with all the multiplicities, systems and contradictions of one’s way of being, doing and knowing. It is about being true to one’s Self. (Fanon, 1986, p. vii)
It was, however, the conception of dignity in Wretched of the Earth that reflected the temper of the times in which to speak of individual dignity was misconstrued as betraying the greater cause, unlike the vortex of the 2011 uprisings that engendered individual dignity and swept it up into an aggregate force of collective dignity. For Fanon, the “western notion of human dignity that is essentially linked with an individualist system of ethics does not suit the objectives of the colonized mass” (Vivaldi, 2007, p. 32). Nasser set the tone for the new era of Arab social contracts when he, one of countless measures against society, executed a purge of Alexandria University by arresting, dismissing or co-opting staff and student activists. Arab leaders increasingly followed a similar framing of dignity with the limited exception of Tunisia’s Habib Bourguiba. The nationalist leader, influenced by the “romantic strain of French nationalism” and the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, was rhetorically nuanced and spoke glowingly of individual dignity yet in reality paid it lip service in light of his regime’s trampling on Tunisian rights and freedoms (Moore, 1965, p. 43).
The Arab regimes’ skewing of dignity enabled social and economic rights to be expanded at the expense of civil and political rights. The freedom of expression, freedom of association, right to assemble, and fair trials were, even if constitutionally sanctioned, all but dismantled to nurture the depoliticized individual who would be rewarded for their loyalty to the state with access to education, medical care, public sector employment, and housing. The authoritarian bargain was founded on “performance-based forms of legitimation” (Loewe el al, 2020, p. 9.), while “citizenship was sacrificed on the altar of welfare” (Santini, 2018, p. 9). Yet despite the differences that characterized each Arab country, they all followed a similar rentier path, be it oil revenue flowing to the Gulf monarchies or Suez Canal fees and foreign aid to Egypt, that enabled the rise of the “Arab social contract” in the literature of political economies on the Arab world. It was to be understood as a “particular configuration of political and economic arrangements dominant in core Arab countries after their independence… the Arab social contract is a historically specific form of regulation between the social, political, and economic spheres of society” (Benner, 2019, p. 13).
The post-colonial social contracts gradually came undone when Arab leaderships could no longer keep up with rapidly growing populations, particularly after the fall in world energy prices in 1985 caused rent and remittances to decline. Financially stricken Arab governments embarked on neoliberal restructuring that saw economic liberalization divorced from political liberalization. The welfare state was largely dismantled giving rise to the post-populist “unsocial” contracts (Loewe, 2020 p. 10). Deteriorating services, diminishing subsidies, shrinking middle class, endemic corruption, wasta (favoritism), and human rights abuses became the order of the day.
Meanwhile, dignity and honor grew into two strands of ethical logic that came into tension with one another. Arab dictatorships, officialdom, state media, and national movements, were seasoned at mobilizing “a sense of threatened honor in order to deny dignity to their citizens” (Khosrokhavar, 2019, p. 99). Honor lubricated the language of conspiracies as new crusaders, imperialists, Israel, the US, and the West in general were paraded as the villains (real or imagined) that enabled Arab regimes to evade accountability. Moreover, honor nurtured an obsession with public image and a stable order. A frequent line told to women in Cairo’s streets when they attempt to voice their grievances was, “You should not complain about sexual harassment because it makes our country look bad.” This took no regard of their dignity that confers inherent worth independent of any context and perceptions. Dignity is a moral equalizer, a matter that honor struggles to attain.
As Khosrokhavar (2019) succinctly puts it:
In the logic of dignity, both parties to a dispute are understood to share equal rights and responsibilities. But in the logic of traditional honor, there is no such mutual regard, no possibility of negotiation or compromise: wounded honor demands nothing less than total satisfaction, either through death or some other socially-accepted compensation.
(p. 99).
The deprivation of dignity to the citizen and an honor under siege contributed to, or perhaps was caused by, the conceptual muddle up that long became apparent in the way an Arab head of state responded to questions about the lack of democracy and human rights in their respective countries. When Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a reformist Saudi prince, asked Crown Prince Faisal in 1960 to consider democratic reforms for the kingdom, the soon-to-be king gave a warm but half-baked reply: “If anyone feels wrongly treated, he has only himself to blame for not telling me. What higher democracy can there be?” (Weston, 2008, p. 183) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak would frequently deflect questions from western reporters on human rights, suggesting there were more important human rights issues than political ones, such as food prices and affordable housing (and even that he still performed quite badly).
The 2000s gave a clue to the seeds of the karama paradigm amidst the rising challenges to the collapsing social contract. Up until then, the academic literature displayed scant use of karama, or confused it with honor, in regard to individual dignity except for a modest set of writings on Palestinians under occupation. In Arab public discourse, it still largely remained in circulation for national motifs, which included, ironically, the neo-Nasserist Al-Karama Party set up in Cairo in 1997. The word soon mushroomed as an organizational naming device to signal the welfare of individual beings as primacy: Al-Karama for Human Rights, set up in Switzerland by Algerian and Qatari human rights activists in 2004; Karama for Women’s Rights, established in Cairo in 2009; and the Karama Human Rights Film Festival, an annual 6-day film festival held in Amman, Jordan, since 2010.
Satellite TV and growing internet access rewired the transnational Arab public sphere which reconceptualized karama along the terrain of regional politics (Sakr, 2007, p. 3). The events of the first decade of the century were instrumental in this rewiring process that was sparked off with the Israeli murder of Mohamed al-Durrah in Gaza and the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000), Iraq war (2003), Israeli assault on Lebanon (2006), and Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (2008-2009). The powerful effects of satellite TV were on display through massive demonstrations in Arab cities in the early 2000s over the actions of the warring actors, Israel and the United States, in Palestine and Iraq, as satellite TV, particularly al-Jazeera, “almost single-handedly united these disparate protests into a single coherent narrative of regional rage” (Lynch, 2012, p. 18). Additionally, the insights into each other’s anti-government struggles in distant cities nurtured a “decade-long, media-narrative of change . . . [and] why Arabs immediately recognized each national protest as part of their own struggle” (Lynch, 2012, p. 49). Meanwhile, the idea of karama was no longer an abstract projected onto nations and imagined communities but now applied to lifting harm off individuals with names and biographies.
The late economist Galal Amin made a piercing observation about the function of karama in Egypt’s economic trajectory:
It’s true that the pre-1952 poor were in an abject state and in some senses much worse off than the poor of today. But there are many kinds of poverty and deprivation, and the torment they give rise to is also of various types. Could it be that being deprived of enough food is sometimes less painful than, say, the inability to pay for private lessons for one’s children?” (Amin, 2011, p. 68)
The pre-1952 poor can also include, relatively, the 1950s and 1960s poor in an otherwise pertinent question that reflects a nuanced understanding that GDP, employment statistics, increased literacy, among others, do not account holistically for the intimate status of dignity, or the lack of.
2011 Rupture: Tearing Down Old Social Contracts
A woman in Egypt recently voiced, “You can go to the private clinic and lose all your money, or go to the public clinic and lose your life” (Devarajan, 2015). The preservation of dignity should be at the heart of a vibrant social contract which obliges sovereign governments to provide the three Ps: protection that maintains human security and preserves life from criminal, political, and external threats; provision of basic services, that may include social services, sound infrastructure, and utilities; and participation, a democratic plurality that opens the space for citizens to engage with the political processes on different levels (Loewe, 2020, p. 6). Our woman in Egypt could barely find meaningful refuge in any of these three categories, and her grievance and dilemma can be heard across the Arab world. Her story is the end-point of millions living in Arab countries who feel alienated from the state, and are a relative and significant departure from the early lived experiences of their parents and grandparents in which the authoritarian bargain of the 1950s and 1960s provided, at the very least, provision of substantial basic services, albeit with limited protection, and almost no participation.
Unlike the elite-led liberation struggles and mass rallies at the twilight of the colonial era that built social contract narratives and legitimacy on the back of military iconography and dead nationalists, the struggles leading up to the Arab Spring birthed a pantheon of citizen martyrs focused on the loss of individual dignity following their brutal deaths: Palestine’s al-Durah (2000), Egypt’s Khaled Said (2010), Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi (2010), and Syria’s Hamza Ali al-Khateeb (2011), among many galvanizing icons then and in subsequent years. In Tunisia, the constriction and hollowing out of the public space left the “moralization of bodily behavior” as an “essential practice whereby individuals could recover some sense of dignity” (Marzouki, 2011, p. 154). When Bouazizi set his body ablaze on December 17, 2010, the messaging was clearly understood by Arab publics, that this was the absolute tragic conclusion to the long story of indignity. As Fukuyama (2012) noted in an editorial:
The basic issue was one of dignity, or the lack thereof, the feeling of worth or self-esteem that all of us seek. But dignity is not felt unless it is recognized by other people; it is an inherently social and, indeed, political phenomenon. The Tunisian police were treating Bouazizi as a nonperson, someone not worthy of the basic courtesy of a reply or explanation when the government took away his modest means of livelihood. (Fukuyama, 2012, para. 2).
The slogans from Morocco to Bahrain radiated similar themes: bread, freedom, social justice, and dignity. Of course, they were not in unison. Sometimes employment was added to the mix. Yet dignity alone could suffice to embrace them all. The rise of religious currents in the public sphere in preceding years would see karama’s origins in the Quran transmit to secular and civil realms. One of many verses that sets a sort of baseline for human dignity reads, “And We bestowed dignity on the children of Adam and provided them with rides on the land and in the sea, and provided them with a variety of good things and made them much superior to many of those whom We have created” (The Noble Quran, 17:70, p. 34). Shorn of religious, cultural, and tribal affiliation, it is not difficult to see dignity’s leap to a universal humanism. Even Moroccan Islamists would assert that dignity is “the bridge between democracy and the Islamic tradition,” meaning that “human dignity is only possible in a democratic order” (Ahmad, 2019, p. 61). A once-apolitical term reborn in the political milieu:
This appeal to dignity posits an agency, maps an unfolding morality, and reclaims the term ‘Arab’ from years and generations of abuse. As a non-political term entering the political domain, ‘dignity’ has a catalytic power, an inaugural audacity, announcing the self-conscious start of a world-historic event that was about to discover a world of its own making: announced by the Arab Spring. (Dabashi, 2012, p. 127).
The protests in 2011 built up on Arendt’s view that being human is to be free in the public space, where speech and acts are witnessed and merit a response, therefore affirming dignity and accentuating present-day political existence (Arendt, 1998). This was accompanied with public freedom in which individuals enter a space to disclose a unique biography through words and deeds in the presence of a plurality of actors. All acknowledging each other’s equality and distinction in the pursuit of animating and securing the political public in order to begin something new, invoking novelty that can potentially change the course of events (Arendt, 1973). It is the attainment of affirming individual dignity through collective realization of public freedom (Arendt, 1973) all geared toward more than just the will to co-exist, but also the desire for citizens to acknowledge their own and others’ dignity and the ingredients of a new social contract by speaking out in public, and be witnessed and heard by others.
New Social Contracts
Since 2011, the words “social contract” have been in widespread, if not over, use. In fact, a search through news outlets and social media feeds show the wording “we need a new social contract,” or to that effect, to be a frequent appeal. That is understandable. State failure in various degrees has gripped Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, all beset by conflicts that will not be resolved until the relevant parties, both stakeholders and spoilers, have agreed on or started to work on the basics of a social contract. Most of the other MENA countries have pushed along various undesirable trajectories, with some key distinctions, many overlaps, and considerable core elements inherited from the old political and economic configurations since independence.
The participatory social contract has produced arguably one candidate, Tunisia. As late as 2013, it was never clear if Tunisia would slide back into authoritarianism, but enough years have passed to suggest that a liberal social contract has developed that involves more citizens in the political sphere, and businesses and trade unions in economic policy (Loewe, 2020, p. 11). This does not necessarily translate into citizen trust in its institutions. In Tunis in 2018, I had spoken with a modest cross-section of society that included middle class activists, students, artists, tram conductors, shop keepers, among others. Many expressed indifferences to the positive changes and saw corruption, stagnation, and unemployment as entrenched, with a growing number dreaming of emigration. One activist cautioned me not to mention Bouazizi’s name because many Tunisians viewed him as the cause of their present difficulties. However, the country is still impressive to create a new constitutional order that accommodates secular and religious forces while providing the citizenry with an accessible public space that covers a wide spectrum of discussions from economic grievances to identity questions (Cammack et al., 2017, p. 11). The country took dignity to the heart of its post-revolutionary project with the Truth and Dignity Commission that examined human rights violations and corruption going back as far as 1955, 62,000 submissions were made and 11,000 people gave oral testimonies (Aboueldahab, 2017, p. 61). Yet Tunisia faces internal challenges such as a relatively repressive police apparatus, sluggish bureaucracy, and the interest-driven rentier elites. This is further compounded by the country’s external threats that comes with being in a turbulent neighborhood, from terrorism to ideological movements that can torpedo gains made by Tunisian politics.
On the other end of the scale, Egypt’s social contract has mutated into what Rutherford (2018) argued is a “protection pact” (p. 185). This sees a coalition of elites, despite their entrenched differences, unite to confront shared threats that may arise from political and revolutionary movements or vocal public discontent. This is a marked departure from Mubarak’s “provision pact,” which was grounded in an “extensive patronage network” that bought the loyalty of elites through the distribution of benefits such as state contracts and subsidized raw materials (Rutherford, 2018, p. 185-186). This required a complex party machinery to manage the provisional pact. In the new era of the protection pact, no party or messy provision pact is needed as the securitized logic is simpler: the executive, military, interior ministry, judiciary, and business tycoons, will not tolerate public protests or any harm to their interests. This perception means elites see the danger to their privileges as endemic and politically unmanageable in which dissent is treated as one of an amorphous nature that allows for little distinction and discrimination between levels of threats. Accordingly, this leads to the expansion of the state’s security apparatus (Rutherford, 2018, pp. 186-187). The problem for the regime is that the protection pact is not consolidated as the primary threat that was brandished, namely political Islam, failed to convince some elites to offer their full backing. It naturally goes that the karama paradigm is crushed under the weight of the political class that sees only cities, bridges, and towers, but no people. It thrives on representations of Egyptians as a living phantom. A homogenous citizenry that blur into one another.
The Beirut blast of August 4, 2020 accelerated what was already an eroded social contract. Lebanon has been a laboratory in the making and unmaking of dignity through its colorful civil society currents up against a broken state. The explosion was assessed to have the “weight of a civil war that wasn’t fought,” a sort of “Lebanon’s Chernobyl” with the hope that it will be “Lebanon’s new chance to attempt a new socio-political contract” (Parasiliti, 2020, para. 5 ). Using the popular metaphor of the phoenix, Lebanese writers painted a grim picture, such as, “We have been constantly told since the civil war that Lebanon is a phoenix rising from the ashes, but in reality, we have just soared above the flames that are still there. And sometimes that means you get burnt” (East, 2020, para. 8). Novelist Araboghlian (2020) also pointed to a despondent picture albeit with an element of hope:
The Lebanon I know can only be reconstructed in dreams and memories. The Lebanon I know no longer wants to be reconstructed because it is unable to. The phoenix can only rise from the ashes so many times.
And in those ashes, there is another Lebanon:
The Lebanon I know stands in line to donate blood, less than half an hour after the shambles.
The Lebanon I know selflessly helps the wounded.
The Lebanon I know creates donation links and shares tweets and Instagram stories and Facebook posts, asking the diaspora – and the world – for assistance.
(para. 12-15)
Yet a basic reconstruction of the social contract or for another Lebanon to emerge over the political quagmire will be difficult not only because institutions are unable to reform, but also because change is immensely difficult given the entrenched regional powers, sectarian militias, business monopolies, and compromised elites that repeatedly turn Lebanon into a playground for dystopian proxy conflicts and dumping ground for economic human waste.
The security pact has increasingly dominated the GCC countries comprising of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in which, as Emirati columnist Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi (2016) noted, the new social contract might be “taxation in exchange for ensuring the security of citizens in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood” (para. 8). This is a partial marked departure from the predictable rentier model over the decades: provide economic benefits in exchange for acquiescence from citizens. Even when their populations become increasingly disgruntled and demand some form of political participation, then bribe them a bit more with the country’s wealth (Al-Kuwari, 2019, p. 45). Yet with declining oil prices, the “no taxation without representation” position will not be given leverage. However, these security pacts are difficult to accept in the long term for they not only refute meaningful participation, they are deepening the repressive apparatus with political arrests on a continual increase. One form of legitimation has been to resume work or rouse the national identity that has been practically stillborn since the time of independence as cohesion relied primarily on wealth distribution and welfare as a facilitator while keeping the peace through a tribal confederation. This could pose a serious threat given the lack of experience with managing identity politics. After all, flirting with nationalist tropes would surface tribal grievances that may have long been underestimated. Diversification away from hydrocarbon has been the central discussion, and with Saudi Arabia driving this matter, a Carnegie report raises an interesting question:
Will the Saudi Vision 2030 lead to genuine institution building that promotes accountability, justice, and transparency – including for members of a royal family often regarded as being above the state? Or will it follow the standard playbook, whereby a few showcase projects are developed whose economic benefits are captured by royal family members or used as favors for well-connected political elites? (Cammack et al., 2017, p. 78)
This report came out a year before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s excesses became apparent through the extrajudicial arrests and imprisoning of elites at the Ritz Carlton, murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and political arrests of activists all in the midst of the long, bloody war in Yemen. The kingdom has proclaimed a new era by breaking with the old contract and now asserting that “citizens must contribute to the good of the country, as opposed to simply receiving benefits as their forebears did” (Alhussein, 2019, para. 13). This was expected when the country eventually had to look “beyond oil,” however, the peril arises because of a very familiar regional script in which the kingdom “terminates the social contract system while narrowing the space for critiquing domestic policies and providing no new political freedoms” (Alhussein, 2019, para. 15).
Jordan and Morocco arguably come under the umbrella of pseudo-reconstructed social contracts. The regimes have staved off revolutions by offering reforms but at the cost of great frustration to citizens due to the modest pace of reforms as well as the lackluster commitment level and vagueness toward the roadmap by the government (Loewe, 2020, p. 5). This was shown with the 2011 political reforms in Morocco that quickly revealed limits in absorbing widespread discontent (Haddad, 2019). At times, it is not simply a matter of bad faith on the part of the state but the desire to salvage the welfare aspects of the old social contract are restrained by “budgetary constraints imposed by international financial institutions” (Loewe et al, 2020, p. 12). Jordan has seen popular demonstrations, in part, against tax increases which reflects a frustration with the little improvement in public services. The pseudo-reconstructed social contract betrays good intentions and falls into a toxic circular logic because of key underlying problems such as, in Jordan’s case, tribes filling in the role of primary political actors instead of political parties, with elections used as means to access privileges which only reinforces “rentierism, patronage and clientelism” (Ajlouni, 2018, para. 11).
Algeria and Sudan are plausibly caught between “transition” and a politically stillborn situation that hampers the crystallization of the type of evolving social contracts, not aided by the fact that the overthrow of the country’s dictators and the disruption of the political order was only recent. What can be said with certainty is that Algeria’s Hirak (Arabic for movement) successfully unsettled the “post-civil war social contract” that was built on the tacit agreement of stability (ending the horrific terrorist attacks of the 1990s) in exchange for a “depoliticised representative process” (Boubekeur, 2020, para. 35). No longer is the polarizing binary of Islamists versus military a compelling narrative for the latter to maintain. Hirak has been effective in building a parallel narrative and legitimacy outside the institutional and ideological structures of power while also undermining the regime’s ability to rebuild through formal channels. In effect, Hirak cornered the system that now “lacks the tools to reinvent itself after Bouteflika or negotiate a new social contract with the people” (Boubekeur, 2020, para. 3). In Sudan’s case, the old social contract was the implicit classic bargain: “acceptance of autocracy in exchange for economic stability” (Hassan & Kodouda, 2019, para. 34) that came undone in 2018 and 2019. Similar in some respects to Algeria, the Transitional Military Council (TMC) sets the tone for Sudan’s transition but with foreboding elements: reviving parts of the old regime including a resurgent security apparatus, an unwillingness for the TMC to step down, and the TMC’s well-equipped capacity to cling to power which it can base on a pretext such as worsening economic conditions not fit to be resolved by a civilian government (Hassan & Kodouda, 2019, para. 5).
It is not so simple to pinpoint the role of karama in the evolving social contracts; however, perhaps as a harbinger, it is quite telling that the Arab state in seeking to re-appropriate karama would use it as Libyan General Hafter did by launching Operation Karama, a military campaign in 2014 under the guise of a counterterrorism operation with Egyptian and UAE backing (Al-Kuwari, 2019, p. 190). Like many Arabic terms circulating to legitimize and delegitimize the interplay of different forces in state-society relations since 2011, karama treaded into a conceptual battlefield where it is seized to instill life or deprive life from narratives and counter-narratives. An often-quoted Antonio Gramsci line has served in one sense as the metaphysical axiom of the years following the 2011 Arab spring: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 275-276). The question is rarely asked, where is the citizen in all of this state “dying” and “birthing”? What future is there for any karama paradigm?
Rania vs. the Cold Monster
Let us attempt a thought exercise in the Arendtian tradition to understand what the politicized individual in the Arab world is up against. Indeed every city and country will have its peculiarities, but overlaps abound. For example, a survey of protest signs across the MENA region and over the past decade reveals striking similar messaging. One can easily swap the signs and banners (minus giveaway details such as political allegiances and country names) between Algiers and Baghdad and they would be instantly relatable by demonstrators in both cities. Interestingly, the breakout of every demonstration in Arab countries tend to reveal a guiding theme of a shared transnational struggle that are exhibited through flags, signs, and solidarity chants by protest organizers. The similarities and intersections of years of reports and stories build up a meaningful aggregate of what the protestor faces in spheres of Arab civil disobedience.
Let us consider a hypothetical underemployed university graduate and 23-year-old woman protestor named Rania. She takes the bus to the main square of her city somewhere in the Arab world where protestors have camped, and holds up a sign that reads “We want our dignity! We want a new social contract!” If Rania’s hope and message, along, of course, with the collective body voicing this demand, was able to achieve the desired change, a sense of individual dignity and being part of a new vibrant social contract (how that is measured is not the point here), then we need to take stock of the obstacles that stand in the way of Rania.
The Social Landscape
Rania comes from the “middle-class poor” (Bayat 2013, p. 34) meaning that despite her university education and worldly outlook, she harbors middle class aspirations such as moving out of home and travel to places she’s knowledgeable of but her diminishing income (or no income) incapacitates her from fulfilling middle class expectations. Like millions in her situation, she struggles to narrow the gap between lifestyle and taste with her education and status, which results in an “acute awareness of what is available and of their inability to acquire it gives them a constant feeling of exclusion” (Bayat 2013, p. 247). This leads to what Barrington Moore described as “moral outrage” and what Asef Bayat deems this category as “likely to be revolutionaries” (Bayat 2013, p. 247).
Rania is already a threat as she entered a lethal equation that holds “when the streets and public spaces became a place of insurrection and politics,” the regimes strike back “violently, humiliating women and beating or killing people indiscriminately” (Harrold, 2018, p. 104). Even without protests, she has to contend with the usual “informal policing of public space by men” that include glances, verbal harassment, groping, sexual harassment and assault (Harrold, 2018, p. 99). This takes place in a climate of demographic and gendered pressures with governments, rather than addressing population growth and unemployment, responding by treating the youth as a security threat. In Rania’s case, as a young activist woman, she is seen as both a security and moral threat.
Rania’s employment chances and sense of belonging are worsened by the decision of many fellow citizens opting for emigration that foments a chronic brain drain and leaves gaping holes in the socio-economy. She still refuses to be part of the trend that sees the Arab region as “one of the most active in exporting highly qualified human capital equipped with university degrees.” Not only is human capital a major Arab world export, but it is “possibly equal to oil and gas in value” (Ḥanafī & Arvanitis, 2016, p. 151). Rania is aware of this on the everyday level, for she has been to more farewell parties than she can count. With most of her friends abroad, she seeks protest as a new liminal space to reproduce new friendships sorely missing in her life through living and sharing the protest event that crystalizes in “collective acts that endorse a shared meaning” (Khosrokhavar, 2016, p. 7). Her mingling with different protestors of diverse classes and faiths gives her a dose of elation of what a pluralist future could look like. “No, I will not emigrate,” Rania tells herself again in the midst of euphoria and in the hope that some miraculous change will unfold by the protestor’s actions. Yet she is realistic to tread carefully because polarization along sectarian and ethnic lines run deep, and she knows it is a weapon her government uses to mobilize and scapegoat key constituencies. For now, she has to constantly fend off the occasional conservative passerby’s who are less interested in her political message than her doing something “unbecoming” of a young woman. She feels her years of activism are bearing little fruit. There is a futility to it aggravated by the myriad of problems in the social contract.
The Political Landscape
Rania gets tired and sits down with some friends she made that day. She takes out her phone to read the news updates on her country’s political class from an independent news service that is blocked in her country, so she uses a VPN service. She sees a side-story on a new oil field discovered and sighs, as she knows it will be the same corrupt sycophants who will pocket the riches from this. Rentierism is slowly killing her people. She recognizes a plain-clothed officer walking menacingly by. She is triggered by a memory of her friend who was kidnapped by state security two years earlier, his whereabouts still unknown, and a journalist friend murdered the previous month, possibly by a militia or a police officer, she is not too sure. The terror of uncertainty is an all too familiar feeling she has become accustomed with. Rania is keenly looking forward to joining up with her new friends as they head to a popular café and its nearby art spaces that act as a makeshift refuge for her sanity. However, she decides to stay a little while longer knowing she can only drive home the message by making her presence felt in the square where local, regional, and global media news outlets are sporadically stationed. Suddenly, she receives a barrage of hate tweets and emails from regime trolls on her phone. Rania takes consolation in that she does not have many followers on social media.
The Geopolitical Landscape
Rania opens her news app again and is daunted by the world out of her control. She closes the app and reflects on the collapsing regional order, internal and interstate conflicts – Rania lives in a new “Middle East [that] has rarely seen such a confluence of wars and interventions” (Lynch, 2016, p. 4). This is not to mention the environment causing water shortages and hotter summers. She believes her country has a chance of improving but then remembers that one irresponsible Gulf country, or is it two or three of them? Which keeps interfering in her country’s political system, jittery-ridden monarchies always wanting to project “an aura of confidence that belied their profound feelings of insecurity” to her nation’s detriment (Lynch, 2016, p. 9). She is grateful that a civil war has not broken out like in her neighboring country, but wonders if she is now forced to rely on protection from her sect. She asks herself, “Is it not the whole point of this protest to avoid a relapse into old power arrangements?”
Rania understandably overthinks the world around her, everything seems to devolve into an existential question. She sees what has gripped the Arab political circuit: a zero sum game of winner takes all logic, failure to reach the lowest common denominator, factionalism instead of pluralism, exclusion at the expense of tolerance, and the timeless binary reaffirmed in the public mind: despotism or chaos. Something clicks in Rania, messages of support from across the region remind her she is protesting similar problems as other activists in North Africa and the Middle East. She is inspired by a demonstration taking place in another Arab country. She flips her sign, and writes in Arabic a message of support and tweets it to the people rising up against tyranny in a place she has never visited. Suddenly, she receives a volume of traffic from that country, new followers, new engagements; a small new world has opened up in her life. She is reminded that there is something bigger than a social contract, something bigger than the initial reasons she protested for. Her memory warms her soul as she feels echoes of 2011 when her late father took the teenage Rania to her first demonstration and she became part of an unfolding regional narrative. Karama is a language that crosses borders, it is global in scope, and it is a story yet to be told.
Beyond the Social Contract
The coffeehouses in the Arab world not only act as barometers of subtle changes that can easily be overlooked, they can also reveal the nuanced positioning of karama. For example, it would have been rare under Mubarak’s rule not to find a portrait of the president hung in Egypt’s coffeehouses. You put up a picture of Mubarak because that is what you did previously with leaders like Presidents Sadat and Nasser and King Farouk and Fouad. You did not think about it; you just hung it up. It was not necessarily and directly enforced; you just did that to reduce questions or harassment from passing security officials and protect your business from closure. Yet one is hard pressed to find a portrait of el-Sisi in these same social spaces today. Why in the most repressive time in Egypt’s modern history are there barely any portraits of its ruler? Perhaps there was a taken for granted authoritarianism that preceded the decades that are no longer easily enforced? Is the security sector not wishing to overextend its hand in political iconography in public spaces, thus limiting it to elections and referendums on the streets and shop windows? Are coffee shop owners asserting their dignity in quiet ways? Something changed in, and since, 2011.
One of the problems in academia is that our frames of references and right terminology are lacking. The social contract is important, but it might be a limitation as well. As Loewe, Zintl, and Houdret (2020) stated:
Most writings though are rather theoretical and normative in that they consider the social contract as something that is good or even necessary to overcome the natural state of anarchy, and to establish property rights and security or distributive justice. In addition, they implicitly or even explicitly (McCandless, 2018) see the nation state as default scope of any given social contract. Only few authors…conceptualize supra-national agreements, like the European Union (Rhodes & Mény, 2016, p. 2).
The authors highlight crucial and overlooked points. The social contract is but one means. Supra-national agreements are barely ever considered based on a few flawed assumptions. The thinking goes, if most national Arab social contracts are in disarray, then how does one even consider a wider venture? This presumes the nation state, as the authors note, as the “default scope.” It does not take into consideration that citizen-led initiatives that operate in a parallel polis let alone the journey of political ideas that commence at the periphery before they move (even if they take years and decades) to the center. With a sense of destroying “everything,” rebuilding is the natural pathway. Yet any idea of meaningful cross-border bonds smacks of aging Nasserist hacks and pan-Arabist papers collecting dust in a Damascus library. The lesson of 2011 can be forgotten in the subsequent chain of catastrophes, while the protests were focused on national grievances and local contexts, they were wired into a shared Arab public sphere that was electrified by “regional demonstration effects” (Lynch, 2012, p. 390). There are many ideas that can go into building the kinetic karama and the supra-national narrative: the role of Arab exiles in places like Berlin and elsewhere (Ali, 2019), political value systems, pluralism discourses, schools of thought, ideational movements, egalitarian philosophies, among many others. I wish to contribute one key idea integral to the karama paradigm: physical mobility.
In an Arab world with porous borders, a news headline might have read following the Beirut blast of August 2020: “A mammoth bus convoy of volunteers from Cairo, Damascus, Amman and Baghdad headed to devastated Beirut with stockpiles of food and medicine.” This would not be unusual when given the chance; for example, Egyptian activists crossed into Libya with food and medicine to help Benghazi in the early days of the Libyan revolution. Yet in the world of hyper-securitized Arab-Arab borders, the reality is that a Yemeni will be refused a travel visa by the Egyptian consulate in Sana, a Libyan will be held for extended questioning upon arrival in Cairo airport only to be sent back on the next available flight based on flimsy suspicions, an Algerian will live a long life without crossing the border even once into Morocco, a Moroccan woman on a legitimate work visa will be interned in Kuwait airport for days based on stereotypes. The impediments, real and imagined, for travel within the Arab world are so vast that they are enough to dissuade one from travelling. Opportunities of exchange, marriage, trade, education, are slowed down, if not comes to a grinding halt. To take a road trip from Madrid to Prague can be found in today’s travel brochures, to take a road trip from Alexandria to Tangiers can only be gleaned in medieval texts.
It is one of the peculiarities of our time in which an EU national has a much higher possibility of visiting almost all Arab countries if they so wish than a national of an Arab country could do, hindered by passport rankings, visa regimes, and postcolonial insecurities. It is not unusual for Arab activists and cultural workers to make their first contact with other Arab peers at a conference or workshop in Europe, not in another Arab country. One Egyptian journalist who is in the process of applying for her German citizenship told me the first place she will travel upon her receiving her German passport will be Morocco. In a bizarre sense, the road from Cairo to Casablanca is through the EU.
In September 2020, three years after the train incident, a similar event took place in a video that went viral. A conscript on the Mansoura-to-Cairo train who was unable to pay for a ticket was humiliated by the ticket inspectors, so an elderly woman intervened to pay for his ticket. She was hailed a hero on national media, while the inspectors were reprimanded (Ahram Online, 2020). The incident was hyped up for populist measures which led to honors bestowed on the conscript, and a bill allowing officers to ride the train for free if they are in uniform or if they show their ID. This divided social media with many activists claiming the incident was a charade given the “train lady” has been seen prominently in pro-regime videos and the passenger filming was a member of the pro-regime Future of the Nation Party. This was contrasted on social media to the previous year in which two street vendors jumped out of a train after the conductor threatened to report them for not having a ticket. One of them died and was dubbed the “ticket martyr.” As one Twitter account noted: “Neither of the men had tickets; the civilian was killed and the conscript was honored” (Al-Monitor, 2020, para. 9). This meant that the civilian public had to bear the increased costs of train fares and endure glaring inequalities induced by the protection pact that masquerades as a social contract. The conscript of 2017 at the start of this chapter had been vindicated.
Mobility in its holistic sense of movement – district to district, town to city, city to city, country to country; planes, trains, buses, and cars; and access to tickets, passports, and visas – is just one of many factors that point back to the karama paradigm. The narrative needs to focus on what the present and the future of the Arab bargains entail and to raise questions about the myriad, imaginative, and empirical ways that we improve upon a dire situation. It is my hope that researchers, thinkers, and activists can expand on the karama paradigm, and actively think with it, for it, and even against it. They should also be offered the space to make their intellectual contribution to an as-yet unspoken project in the making. Numerous creative minds are needed if knowledge production with consequence is to materialize. The Arab Spring barely produced, let alone was led by, its Václav Havels and Nelson Mandelas. There were no political tracts or essays that stood the test of time that could have laid out a foundation or process. Yet what 2011 and the years since have taught us is that karama is more than a fundamental rallying cry and if Arab countries fail at a shared political affinity on the transnational state level, then their citizens do better at cross-border affinity on the social, cultural, and grassroots levels.
Conclusion
Kinetic karama keeps the “drive toward life” from being thwarted and mitigates the “drive toward destruction” for it is composed of life affirming and reflective qualities in the negotiation of the daily internal clash between one’s acts and values. Citizens are thrown onto the pursuit of destructiveness when the future severs them from the attainment of promise, forgiveness, and responsibility. The conditions that make the suppression of life possible, make its destruction inevitable. The interlocking battles between the state and the citizen can end up inducing the latter to pursue strategies that make “freedom from” damagingly an end in itself. Kinetic karama, rightfully an end in itself, asks the citizen to reclaim the capacities for speech, deeds, choice, and responsibility, and build something new: “freedom to.”
Most Arab regimes will continue to deepen their repression in one-sided social contracts that redefine dignity on their terms. A new bridge is dignified; a citizen is not. The tug and pull of dignity generates a sea sickness on the long journey for the millions of Ranias engaged in the struggle to keep dignity intact while continuing to nourish its political and humanizing qualities. However, the regimes come up against national idiosyncrasies of refusal and resistance across borders underpinned by shared language, history, trade, cultural ties, and social justice. The karama paradigm born in 2011 enables hegemonic imaginaries to be decolonized and reconstructed in an ongoing process of taming, if not reforming, the cold monster and animating a “freedom to” philosophy.
The karama paradigm is larger than the national limitations that is entailed by the normative social contract. The constant brewing of the political imagination, legitimizing narratives, and currents in the Arab world should enable a supra-national social contract to be worked on, even if it means commencing, at the very least, on the intellectual margins. Mobility is one of many dimensions of kinetic karama that can be fleshed out, but much more remains. This is not to engage in wishful thinking; indeed, we will not anytime soon see Arab borders de-securitizing, transnational mobility agreements in North Africa signed, and referendums on supra-national social contracts set in motion. The task is to draw out struggling realities that support this aim from the political fog and give it a name, shape, and form to understand and engage with it better. So, in favorable times, it becomes part of the mainstream political lexicon that can shape visions, practices, and policies.
For some time to come, Nietzsche’s cold monster will remain over the Arab world and engage in linguistic confusion and the scrambling of good and evil codes. It will continue to be the coercive and artificial reality that turns people into populations, organic life into mechanized life, and diversity into homogenization. Life is devitalized into the undead, the “slow suicide.” Yet unlike, for example, human rights, which operates by abstract universal agreements and the rules of the state, even if it languishes in opposition or prison; karama is intimate enough for ownership and mobilization yet amorphous enough to frustrate the state for it sits outside the established fixtures and court rulings. It is not that a viable social contract is the end result, for it will always be negotiated every day, but the engagement with the 2011 imperishable gift of karama will illuminate the road to Tangiers or Alexandria.
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