Civil society as domestication: Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings beyond liberal transitology.

AuthorPlaetzer, Niklas
PositionAndrew Wellington Cordier Essay

Recent debates on societal transitions to democracy have focused their attention on the notion of "civil society," putting great hope in its democratizing effects. This essay reexamines the notion's utility in the context of the post-2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. It argues that at least in its conceptualization along the lines of the "transition paradigm," the civil society framework is unable to capture the complex catalysts of the non-teleological, open-ended uprisings in North Africa. Not only does it largely ignore the importance of socioeconomic forces as well as the non-institutionalized, spontaneous forms of organization present in these democratization processes; the analytical failure of the civil society framework also takes up a transformative power in and of itself structuring the empirical realities that it claims to describe. The concept of civil society therefore fails to accurately represent the dynamics at play in Tunisia and Egypt, and has negatively shaped them with respect to the outcomes of revolutionary contestation. "Civil society" has integrated an open and contingent arena into the closed structures of reproduced sovereign statehood. Rather than unleashing democratic energies in Tunisia and Egypt, it has sometimes even reinforced the very power structures it allegedly set out to challenge. Borrowing from the work of Hannah Arendt on revolution and Giorgio Agamben on the notion of "destituent power," this essay argues for a conceptual opening in our analytical framework that corresponds to the radical contingency that lies at the heart of any revolutionary process.

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The Arab Spring uprisings have shaken North Africa and the Middle East since 2011 and spurred a political transformation that has drawn widespread international attention. (1) A region previously considered to be forever stuck in a culture of predetermined "Arab exceptionalism," untouched by the third wave of democratization, was suddenly taking the front stage in international debates on democracy. (2) Following a well-developed liberal tradition of scholarship on transitions to democracy, the Arab uprisings have been framed using theories previously applied outside the region. In this vein of thought, Western commentators have frequently stressed the role of civil society in the 2011 "democratic transitions" of countries from Tunisia to Yemen. The mantra of Western analyses of these uprisings has been that democracy in the Middle East is dependent upon a strong civil society as a precondition to democratization. Diverse international stakeholders, including American researchers Larry Diamond and Augustus Richard Norton, then-secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Egyptian social media entrepreneur Wael Ghonim, and the Ennahda intellectual Rashid al-Ghannoushi have all praised civil society for its role in democratization across the Arab world. (3)

To what extent does the widespread laudation for civil society really capture the dynamics of democratization in the region? This essay will use the cases of Tunisia and Egypt to argue for a critical reexamination of the concept of civil society, which, under closer scrutiny, is revealed to be an imposingly normative term and an analytical tool of only limited value. In analyzing the framework of "civil society" as it is applied to the multifaceted catalysts of the Arab Spring uprisings, the essay demonstrates that civil society, at least as it is traditionally conceptualized in contemporary social sciences, has not significantly contributed to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and, at times, even posed an obstacle to grassroots emancipatory struggles in the two countries. (4) Moreover, the discursive lens of civil society has taken up a transformative power in and of itself, negatively shaping the outcomes of revolutionary contestations. In his lecture on the concept of "destituent power," Giorgio Agamben argues, "A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent and constituted power." (5) In the post-2011 democratization processes, civil society has been integrated into this dialectic of a post-revolutionary reproduction of sovereignty. (6) In order to avoid such attempts at domesticating open practices within the pre-determined frame of a liberal democratic state, the essay concludes with a consideration of the concept of "destituent power" as a way to escape the theoretical and political pitfalls that civil society mantras have produced in Tunisia and Egypt. It points to a conceptual opening in our analytical framework, which corresponds to the contingency at the heart of any revolutionary process.

CIVIL SOCIETY AND DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS IN THE ARAB WORLD

Theories of transitions to democracy have commonly claimed that civil society plays a central role in democratization processes. According to O'Donnell and Schmitter, a transition is

The interval between one political regime and another. [...] Transitions are delimited, on one end, by the launching of the process of dissolution of an authoritarian regime, and on the other, by the installation of some form of democracy, the return to some form of authoritarian rule, or the emergence of a revolutionary alternative. (7) Based on this definition, the two authors have theorized the "resurrection of civil society," which, they claim, follows an initial opening due to a shift in a regime's elite configuration, triggering a wider trend of democratization. (8) Similarly, Linz and Stepan argue that "at all stages of the democratization process [...] a lively and independent civil society is invaluable." (9) Putnam seems to agree when he asserts that "social capital makes us [...] better able to govern a just and stable democracy." (10)

Putnam's view that theories of civil society and democratization have "properly focused attention on the need to foster a vibrant civic life in soils traditionally inhospitable to self-government," which he would consider to include former authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Middle East, is also reflected in Western foreign aid policy and NGO practices in these regions. (11) From this point of view, civil society is distinguished from "political society," comprising parties and political organizations directed towards the acquisition or influencing of state power, and "economic society," including organizations of production and distribution. (12) Consequently, Cohen and Arato argue that "civil society refers to the structures of socialization, association, and organized forms of communication of the lifeworld to the extent that these are institutionalized or are in the process of being institutionalized." (13)

This rigid conceptualization of civil society has been rightly exposed to criticism in the context of the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings. First, the concept has risen to prominence in the wake of Eastern European and Latin American "third wave" democratic transitions, and its prescriptive...

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