Month: May 2019

A Second Spring? The Fragile Hope for Democratic Transition in Sudan and Algeria

The recent toppling of authoritarians in Algeria and Sudan have the potential to breathe new life into the hope of democracy for North Africa, years after the “Arab Spring.” Yet even as the Sudanese and Algerian people have appeared to have learned important lessons from the events of 2011, fundamental obstacles still stand in the way of democratic transition that echo the failures of the Arab Spring.  

By 2019, the eighth anniversary of the Tunisian Revolution, the hopes of the Arab Spring appeared all by extinguished. Within the span of a few years, popular movements that carried the potential to bring about dignity, accountability, and democracy for the people of the Middle East and North Africa were overwhelmed by renewed government repression and the new conflicts of the “Arab Winter.” Then on 2 April, Algeria’s Algeria’s 20-year president, Bouteflika, stepped down after mass protests over his planned 5th consecutive term in office. Nine days later, Sudan’s 30-year dictator, al-Bashir, was removed by the Sudanese military following months of citizen mobilization. Within weeks, journalists and pundits were already describing these twin revolutions as a “second Arab Spring.”

It’s not a coincidence that two nations, which largely avoided demonstrations in 2011, are now witnessing the toppling of some of the region’s most powerful strongmen. On the surface, the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings appear almost as a delayed second act to the 2011 uprisings, and even have followed a pattern similar to the cases of Tunisia and Egypt: the formation of peaceful and sustained popular mobilization, whose aims were made reality once popular pressure caused military and government structures to eventually turn on the regime. On closer inspection, however, the protesters who brought down Bouteflika and al-Bashir have learned important lessons from the Arab Spring—namely, that democratic transition does not stop with the removal of a single figure and the need for commitment to continue to put pressure on the state even through the transition period.

In Algeria, protesters have already set their sights beyond the immediate fall of Bouteflika, with peaceful protesters calling for the removal of the prime minister and interim president, figures which remain representative of the power structures of the Bouteflika regime. By turning out every Friday to insist on transparency and the inclusion of civil society in the transition period, including free and fair elections under reformed rules, Algerians have signaled that challenging  le pouvoir—or “the power”—goes beyond the removal of Bouteflika and instead requires a radical restructuring of state institutions and the electoral process.

Sudan faces perhaps more difficult hurdles—with the difference being the military’s forcible removal of al-Bashir and its significant control over the post-Bashir transition. In a situation that resembles the post-Mubarak military transition of Egypt in 2011, the Sudanese military and security forces have recently inflicted violence against protesters that have mobilized against the military junta, in the process jeopardizing the breakdown of military-protester negotiations. Despite this, protesters have maintained peaceful methods, and, like in Algeria, have continued to protest and call for a civilian-led transition, with a message that democratic aims would not be settled by the merely the election of another authoritarian figure with military support.

Neither outcome is guaranteed to end in democracy. If anything, the events of the Arab Spring show just how ingrained military and government power structures are in the region—and just how delicate democratic transition can be even after a given leader has fallen. In Egypt, a military coup in 2013 has resulted in a government just as repressive and violent as the Mubarak era; in Bahrain, a violent Saudi-led intervention resulted in the crackdown of political dissidents; and in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, conflicts whose origins are derived from 2011 continue to be waged with varying levels of intensity. The shadows of the Arab Spring’s failures loom large over Algeria and Sudan, both of which experienced their own horrific civil wars not too long ago, and whose current power brokers will be loathe to give up control to civilian administration. In this environment, the use of violence to maintain power is all too possible a reality under the transitional, military-led regimes.

So too do Algeria and Sudan face a different international community than existed in 2011, with the foreign policy emphasis on security over democracy and human rights—which already largely guided Western policy in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and Egypt during the Arab Spring—even more pronounced than it was eight years ago. Without external pressure to respect a civilian transition, military leaders in Sudan and Algeria might feel emboldened to violently crack down on protesters, knowing well how little pushback they will receive from the likes of President Trump or Italian strongman, Salvini.  

That is not to say that the Algerian and Sudanese revolutions are doomed to fail; in fact, the protesters who brought down Bouteflika and al-Bashir have already made great strides beyond what was accomplished by many countries during the Arab Spring, and have remained peaceful despite instances of military violence. These steps don’t guarantee a peaceful transition, but they send an important message that democratic, civilian government is the end goal of the revolution, and that citizens will not easily settle for the mere replacement of another autocratic figure.

No matter their outcome, the April revolutions reveal that the desire for rights, dignity, and freedom is still very much alive across the Middle East and North Africa—and always has been. Sudan and Algeria show that even under the most long-standing and repressive regimes, change is in fact possible, through the actions of the Sudanese and Algerian people themselves who dare to struggle for a better future. While the events of April may not yet point to a “Second Spring,” they do suggest that the Arab Winter, regardless of how long it lasts, will one day thaw.

Photo Credit: M.Saleh, CC BY-SA .40

Slow Violence and Disaster Capitalism: Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria

In September 2017, the category five Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, a small Caribbean island just east of the Dominican Republic and a territory—or, as many recognize, a colony —of the United States. The colonial relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico has left the island in an incredibly vulnerable position, which has been compounded by forced privatization and general government corruption.

When Hurricane Maria left the island in a complete state of shock, it opened the doors for further attacks on Puerto Rican sovereignty. It also served as a wake-up call for the island’s residents, many of whom were no longer able to turn a blind eye to either the impending and catastrophic privatization efforts or the total and devastating effects of climate change. The case of Puerto Rico—both its relationship to the U.S, as well as in the aftermath of Maria—serves as an important example of the ways that slow violence can render a population vulnerable to more overt forms of violence after a natural disaster.

Puerto Rico has already been subjected to imposed debt, as well as tax breaks for the hyper-rich, and after Hurricane Maria it is clear that the U.S. is capitalizing on the shock of the devastation.

In his book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon posits that slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Not only does climate change disproportionately impact “the poor”—most often brown and black poor communities, and very frequently in places far away from white Western societies—in a visceral way now, it also impacts their ability to thrive in the future. Therefore, slow violence should be understood as exacerbating existing hardships and limiting opportunities that have not yet occurred. For people who have had no say in policies that accelerated natural disasters, exposing the role of slow violence also exposes the ways that their vulnerability is made in the not so distant politics of U.S. capitalism.

In the case of Puerto Rico, this can be seen in the compounding effects of debt and austerity measures pre-Maria, and the complete lack of urgency devoted post-Maria—the combined effects of which caused more deaths than the hurricane itself and caused many Puerto Ricans to flee the island entirely. Puerto Rico has already been subjected to imposed debt, as well as tax breaks for the hyper-rich, and after Hurricane Maria it is clear that the U.S. is capitalizing on the shock of the devastation.

Naomi Klein calls this the “shock doctrine,” describing the phenomenon of disasters, natural or man-made, being exploited for profit. In the aftermath of disasters, the public is often immobilized in a state of “shock” and the private sector exploits this moment of paralysis to monopolize discussions around rebuilding. This quickly turns into a pretext for implementing harsh neoliberal policies in favor of steep profits—or “disaster capitalism.” In the case of Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria provided exactly the shock disaster capitalists needed to finally push through the privatization and austerity measures they had been working on for years.

That, as Klein argues, is the deadly combination: “not just a storm, but a storm supercharged by climate change slamming headlong into a society deliberately weakened by a decade of unrelenting austerity layered on top of centuries of colonial extraction, with a relief effort overseen by a government that makes no effort to disguise its white supremacy.”

Thus, it is important to recognize what is happening in Puerto Rico today for what it is: disaster capitalism at its finest.

Centuries of colonialism and environmental degradation, coupled with the island’s forced economic dependence by the U.S., created perfect conditions for a slow violence that kept Puerto Ricans disadvantaged enough to remain vulnerable to any sort of natural disaster

The emphasis on disaster capitalism and its agents is crucial because it allows us to identify perpetrators of the violence to which Puerto Rico has been subjected—namely, the U.S. government and its private sector. Centuries of colonialism and environmental degradation, coupled with the island’s forced economic dependence by the U.S., created perfect conditions for a slow violence that kept Puerto Ricans disadvantaged enough to remain vulnerable to any sort of natural disaster that might come its way—a reality that has become more threatening as time goes on. Therefore, seen as a climax of Nixon’s slow violence, Hurricane Maria was a convenient opportunity for the U.S. government to force through a program of privatization measures at a time when Puerto Rico was more vulnerable than usual, opening the door for fossil fuel companies, and many others, to take advantage of the newly minted tax haven.

Nixon argues that because of the intersection of different forms of power and oppression within structural and slow violence—especially for those who fall into his category of “the poor”—communities “can seldom afford to be single-issue activists” (Nixon 2011). This is exactly the spirit of Puerto Ricans organizing in the wake of hurricane Maria. The groups that were resisting privatization and austerity before the hurricane are now using the this as an opportunity to tackle the root causes that allowed Maria to go from a devastating weather problem to a disastrous systemic problem—from the poor-quality electric system, to the colonial nature of governance, to the potentially illegal debt imposed by the U.S.

Puerto Ricans have begun to organize and ask hard questions about what they want Puerto Rico to look like in the future, relying on community ties and organizations to help sustain relief efforts as well as build a plan for the future. The various organizations that existed before the hurricane have come together to create JunteGente (People Together), and have begun drafting a people’s platform in order to represent their cause.

Before Hurricane Maria, it seemed as though the shock doctrine was nearly impossible to resist effectively, but it seems as though Puerto Rico may be able to break this cycle.

How can we ensure that slow violence captures public attention in the same way that other types of violence do? Perhaps we should start by looking to Puerto Rico. The island’s inhabitants have treated Hurricane Maria as an opportunity to fundamentally transform society into a Puerto Rico that works for Puerto Ricans. As promising as this may seem, it does not answer the question of how to turn people’s attention to slow violence before an event such as Hurricane Maria happens.

One starting place would be to pay attention to grassroots organizing such as what is happening on the ground in Puerto Rico, and use this work to exploit the shock on these activists’ own terms. Rather than allow disaster capitalists to win, activists are desperately fighting to manipulate this unique moment of shock and transformation in order to create something we have never seen before. Theirs is a unique situation, currently suspended outside of the parameters of slow violence because the detrimental effects have been so glaringly exposed. However, as they continue fighting for sovereignty over their land and to tackle the root causes of the current crisis, this endeavor must be amplified and supported much more widely.

A lack of attention to the issue, or worse, the U.S. winning this tug of war for control of the island, would allow Puerto Rico to slide back into the haze of slow violence until the next disaster strikes.

Photo Credit: Sgt. Jose Ahiram Diaz-Ramos, U.S Department of Defense