Leadership change in authoritarian regimes can be trying episodes for incumbent governments and incoming leaders. Scholars have noted the “uncertainty,” “vulnerability,” and “crisis of legitimacy” that often follow from non-democratic leadership transitions, particularly those replacing long-term incumbents. The event creates an imperative for governments to manage the transition, and it simultaneously presents an opportunity for opponents to direct claims and grievances toward a new target. In this way, leadership change marks the advent of a new relationship between ruler and ruled. This paper addresses the ways in which leaders attempt to manage this key event through the strategic use of rhetoric, symbols, and event framing. Moreover, it examines how these efforts are challenged or accepted by political opposition and activists. Through an investigation of the succession from King Hussein of Jordan to his son Abdullah II (1999-present), I answer the question: How do public representations of government authority, leadership, and the leader himself serve as a medium for political contention during the succession period? Moreover, I link this competition in the cultural field to ongoing turbulence in the government-opposition relationship in the Jordanian monarchy. The theory is developed and supported through original interviews and content analysis of primary Arabic sources conducted during 17 months of fieldwork in Jordan (at time of conference). It specifically centers on initiatives championed by King Abdullah II in his first years as monarch including Jordan First; We Are All Jordan; The Amman Message; the National Agenda: 2007-2017, and other social and political efforts following the change in leadership. These political initiatives are highly symbolic in content and mean to “define a new social accord between Jordanians… and reformulate the state-individual relationship” (Jordan Embassy). I find that succession is an event filled with socio-political meaning prompting competing interpretations of government authority, national identity, and political priorities. In the Jordanian context, these interpretations are traceable through the government-opposition relationship during recent political crises. Finally, the paper asserts the value of focusing on the political role of cultural production during succession periods, particularly one that appreciates the use of symbolic and rhetorical strategies for political ends.

What explains sudden and sweeping mobilization of protest in the Arab world? Emphasizing rationality, mainstream social movement theory holds that people participate in revolutionary protest when structural and strategic conditions lead them to expect it to yield greater rewards than costs. Yet this leaves us to wonder why people will ever risk life or limb to engage in dissent, why they are ready to do so at some times more than others, or why they are sometimes surprised by their own will to sacrifice. I explore these questions in a paper on the Syrian uprising, based on original ethnographic fieldwork and interviews that I conducted with more than 60 Syrian refugees in Jordan in September-October 2012 (and plan to reinforce with another round of fieldwork in summer, 2013). I critique the conceptualization of participation in high-risk protest as a choice, and instead make the case that it be understood as a process of personal transformation. Transformation directs attention to change in the actor making decisions, and not simply change in the inputs that produce one decision or another. It encourages us to trace participation to an inner debate about what it means to live a life of honor and moral commitment, a struggle to muster the courage to act, and a discovery of new aspects of the self. Most academic explanations of the Arab uprisings examine “objective” variables, such as transnational diffusion of revolutionary innovations, socio-economic trends, a demographic youth bulge, or developments in regime institutions, opposition organization, or technology. I complement that focus with analysis of the subjective processes involved in the choice to partake in high-risk dissent. I therefore engage with the Conference’s thematic emphasis on social action by situating it in analysis of the affective dimensions of politics. For decades, Arab authoritarian regimes maintained power not only because they brought citizens to comply in behavior, but also because they cultivated feelings that encouraged submission. Elites took mass societal acquiescence for granted and most citizens regarded mass protest as unimaginable. In the course of 2011, the affects that cemented those assumptions, and likewise the rules of the political game constructed upon them, were unsettled. This change is not irreversible and the new rules of politics may prove no less friendly to democracy. Nonetheless, transformation in citizens’ personal experience of and relationship to politics is one of the most profound markers of the Arab revolts.

Sexual violence against women has become endemic at Egyptian political protests, including mob attacks on women who are stripped and penetrated by men’s fingers. I explore two aspects of how this violence affects women’s rights activism. The first is how activists’ understanding of who commits these assaults affects the likelihood of the emergence of new women’s rights groups distinct from general pro-democracy activism. In interviews in Cairo in 2012 some women’s rights activists told me that fellow “revolutionaries” were responsible for at least some of the assaults, while others blame them on “thugs” or Mubarak supporters. The sensitivity of this issue was clear in a December 2012 TV interview with Ola Shahba, who addressed her assault by protesters sympathetic to President Mohammed Morsi by saying “I would not have imagined that I would experience sexual harassment at the hands of a group belonging to political Islam.” Threatened with additional violence at the anti-Morsi protest, Shahba said “I don’t want to die at the hands of people with whom I demonstrated once upon a time.” I argue that if more women come to believe that “co-revolutionaries” commit many assaults, they will create specifically feminist anti-assault groups separate from the current pro-democracy protest organizations, just as in the 1980s women in Egyptian leftist political parties despaired of the parties’ sexism and left to form feminist NGOs (Ali 2000). The second issue is how women’s rights groups respond to male anti-assault activism. Some men join mixed-gender groups such as Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment (OpAntiSH), created in November 2012 to stop assaults in progress during protests. Other men form “cordons” around protests to keep assaulters from reaching protesters. Some women’s rights activists discourage this as communicating that women need to be “protected” in public space, as demonstrated by OpAntiSH’s refusal to coordinate with a cordon-based group– Tahrir Bodyguard – in the large February 6, 2013 protest against assault. Do the men in anti-assault groups which do not use cordons understand assault, and women’s role in the public square, differently than groups like Tahrir Bodyguard which seek to “protect” women? My paper draws upon interviews I conducted in June 2012, interviews I will conduct there in June 2013, discussions of the issue on Egyptian TV talk shows, including interviews with men and women involved in anti-assault work and women who experienced assault, and the statements of anti-assault groups and other feminist NGOs.

Much attention has been paid to the array of institutional mechanisms and political maneuvers Arab regimes employed to perpetuate power and modernize authoritarianism. While these pursuits shed light on formal state politics, they leave unexplored potentially consequential dynamics of contestation within society. Grasping these dynamics in their full complexity necessitates an investigation of less formal spaces and dispersed cultural practices that evolved outside formal politics and institutional contexts. Taking Tunisia as a case study, this paper contributes to our understanding of key dynamics that contributed to the Arab Spring by placing the recent developments within a broader cultural context marked by an apprehension toward a lived reality that has become impoverished in the absence of an engaging and meaningful form of citizenship. What is of particular interest are the ways in which the Arab authoritarian context favored the emergence of a “culture of contestation” that proved to be consequential over time. Locating contestatory dynamics at the intersection of the real and virtual world, this paper maps out cultural articulations of a changing state-society relationship. Focusing on the manifestation of a growing rift between authoritarian regimes characterized by exclusionary politics and an aspiring young population, it argues that the revolutionary momentum bespeaks an urge to revitalize the notion of citizenship. The claim for a reinvigorated form of citizenship is enmeshed with an awareness of and a public engagement with debates about individual and societal rights. Particularly important in nurturing this contentious spirit and contestatory culture are information and communication technologies. While initially providing a shielded free space of interaction, the Internet gradually evolved into an alternative arena of engagement among a seemingly depoliticized young generation that is capable of crystalizing dynamic sites of contestation and networks of activism. The focus on the political sociology of Internet use can yield a better understanding of how young people in a networked society develop an active civil culture that enables them to renegotiate the congealed and delimited notion of citizenship in the absence of political freedoms. Significantly, what the case at hand reveals is that the desire among a segment of the population to renegotiate their relationship to the state helped reclaim the political sphere the regime sought to monopolize and manipulate. The attempt to reposition oneself from subjects to citizens not only helped redefine the terms of political action but also led to the reinvention of the category of the political.