Tunisia’s Re-Configurations and Transitional Justice in Process: How Planned Processes of Social and Political Change Interplay with Unplanned Political Dynamics

This chapter seeks to explain the developments of the Tunisian transitional justice process. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s ideas about social processes, it argues that dynamics of transitional justice processes can neither be understood solely in light of international norms and the “justice industry” that both shape institutionalized transitional justice projects, nor simply by examining context and the political preferences of domestic actors. Rather, these shifts are shaped by the interplay of planned processes with unplanned political and social dynamics; with a political context in flux, power shifts, and sometimes competing planned efforts in other realms. Empirically grounded in “process-concurrent” field research in post- “Arab Spring” Tunisia, the contribution shows that a technocratic/institutionalized transitional justice project can develop dynamics that are somewhat, but not entirely, independent of power shifts. However, the above interplays may lead to frictional encounters that trigger feedback loops, new processes, and new structures.

The Year 1979 as a Turning Point in Syrian Theatre: From Politicization to Critical Humanism

This chapter investigates a crucial turning point in the writing of Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous (1941–1997) in the late 1970s. This internationally acclaimed author belonged to a generation of Arab intellectuals and artists whose political and artistic identities were strongly shaped by the question of Palestine. After the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the resulting Egypt-Israel peace treaty, signed in 1979, Wannous attempted suicide and stopped writing plays for more than ten years. This chapter shows how the plays he published after this self-imposed silence moved away from a didactic, political theater and towards psychological studies focusing on individuals as well as minority and gender issues. This chapter asks whether the significant aesthetic and conceptual turn in Wannous’s work from the early 1990s onwards might go beyond the concerns of a specific individual artist. To what extent does it mark a generational shift in regard to the meaning and connotations of political art?

Introduction

This essay collection is the outcome of interdisciplinary research into political, societal, and cultural transformation processes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg, Germany. It builds on many years of collaboration between two research networks at the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies: the research network “Re-Configurations: History, Remembrance and Transformation Processes in the Middle East and North Africa” (2013–19), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the Leibniz-Prize research group “Figures of Thought | Turning Points: Cultural Practices and Social Change in the Arab World” (2013–20), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Both research projects’ central interest lay in the political, social, and cultural transformation that has become especially visible since 2010–11; we conceptualize this transformation here using the term “re-configurations.” At the core of the inquiry are interpretations of visions of past and future, power relations and both political and symbolic representations.

Family Memories and the Transmission of the Independence Struggle in South Yemen

In 2007, a protest movement emerged in South Yemen called the Southern Movement. At the beginning, it was a loose amalgamation of people, most of them former army personnel and state employees of the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) who had been forced out of their jobs after the southern faction lost the war in 1994. Because of the state security forces’ brutality against protesters, more and more people joined the demonstrations, and the claims began to evolve into concrete political demands, such as the restored independence of the territory that once formed the PDRY, which in 1990 unified with the Arab Republic of Yemen to form the Republic of Yemen, as a separate state. By appropriating hidden forms of resistance, such as the intentionally and unintentionally intergenerational transmission of a counternarrative, South Yemenis have strengthened the calls for independence in recent years.

Algeria: Between Transformation and Re-Configuration

This chapter analyzes the re-configurations of the Algerian political system. It explains the (re)establishment of power alliances and traces power shifts through oil price fluctuations on the global market, laying out the concomitant instability of systems of co-option based on the distribution of rent. In times of power crises, the state class is prepared to make concessions, such as economic and political liberalizations. Since February 2019, however, an unprecedented mass social mobilization has been underway. The Hirak movement disrupted the order within the state class and forced President Bouteflika to step down, but the regime, under military leadership, tried to reconfigure the political system once again by eliminating old clans and striking new alliances. This is the story of a political system’s re-configurations that seek to sustain the old order by building new alliances.

1968 and the “Long 1960s”: A Transregional Perspective

The year 1968 has a special meaning in some parts of the world, but other regions do not attach as much importance to it. While the view from Europe tends to assert the existence of a “global 1968,” the timeline may look quite different from another vantage point. This chapter addresses “1968 and beyond” or the “long 1960s,” as the period is often referred to, as a time of global transformations, but with particular local manifestations in terms of ideological underpinnings and legitimations for (violent) action. Israel’s defeat of Arab armies and Indonesia’s tragic events of the 1960s paved the way for a gradual strengthening of various Islamic missionary and activist movements that spread across both regions and gained huge mobilizing momentum subsequently. This period had vast repercussions for decades to come (e.g. in terms of “Islamization” in many countries around the globe).

Spatializing Memory and Justice in Transformation Processes

This chapter asks what processes of dealing with the past have been set in motion and how they relate to the search for justice and the quest for remembrance on a more global scale. In the aftermath of the “Arab Spring,” the affected countries have been going through transitions of various forms that are significantly re-configuring the MENA region. In this context, a number of new civil society actors, political elites, and international norm entrepreneurs are engaging with the lengthy histories of repression in the respective countries as well as with the violence that occurred during the Arab Spring in order to reckon with the legacy of human rights abuses (Sriram, Transitional justice in the middle East and North Africa, Hurst, London, 2017). These transitions to justice are not without obstacles and challenges, though. The objective of her chapter is therefore not to tell the stories of various transitional justice and memory projects in post-Arab Spring countries, but to situate such practices in time and space.

National Memory in the Making: Gendered Re-Configurations of Martyrdom in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

Zusammenfassung Treating the category of “martyr” as socially constructed and contested along gendered and political lines, this chapter examines how heroes and martyrs have been produced and deployed in post-revolutionary Tunisia. It begins by examining governmental attempts, launched soon after the revolution, to monopolize and institutionally define who could benefit from official recognition as a martyr. It then unpacks the differences in definitions of “martyrdom” between official institutions and families of the deceased, arguing that “martyr” is a moral category, the boundaries of which are often drawn in terms of differing masculinities. The chapter goes on to demonstrate how the category of “martyrs of the nation” has progressively overshadowed the category of “martyrs of the revolution” in official memorial practices, as the commemoration of the revolution has progressively focused on its uniformed victims, leaving out the civilian ones.