When former Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced his bid for a fifth mandate in 2019, a wave of political satire abounded on Algerian social media, from twitter to YouTube. Dissent first began through satirical cultural production. Social media has therefore allowed Algerian activists to produce a counternarrative that opposes the state-controlled media and evades censorship. Although the 2019 Hirak movement in Algeria, also known as the Revolution of Smiles, primarily mobilised activism on the streets during protests, online activism mapped new paths of engagement for the Algerian diaspora and became a useful way of monitoring and documenting the revolution. This paper explores the Hirak-related cultural production and artistic resistance through social media in Algeria. Focusing on political satire and online activism, the paper argues that the Online Hirak movement, which was happening in tandem with the protests, was a turning point in Algeria’s satirical cultural production. Not only has this online activism -through humour and creative satire- managed to evade censorship, but it has also functioned as a way of redefining “Algerianness”. The cultural aspirations of the revolution aimed at envisaging a national identity that opposes the one which was previously contorted by the dominant narratives of the War of liberation and the Black Decade. In order to explain this, the paper focuses on the Hirak’s strategic use of creative satire, pride in pluralism, and the adamant refusal of descent into violence. In addition to studying the slogans and banners that were used during the Hirak marches, the paper maps a typology of creative satire on Algerian social media. This paper therefore focuses on the cultural ambitions of the Algerian Hirak and the aspirations of reconfiguring the national identity through activism. The paper concludes by demonstrating the differences between the cultural production during the Black Decade and the Hirak to clearly designate the latter as a second chance of redeeming the Algerian national identity and liberating collective memory.

The question that motivates this research originates in contrasts between the Egyptian experience in 2011 and the mini uprising in Jordan in 2012. I ask why the movement in Egypt was sustained for 18 days until Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted after 30 years in power, while the 2012 mini-uprising in Jordan lasted only 4 days and accomplished little, if anything. While scholarship on Jordan focuses on monarchic legitimacy, the changing spatial geography of Jordan, and the Palestinian/Transjordanian internal divide to explain the lack of sustained mass mobilizations (Goldstone 2011a; Schwedler 2013), I will show how differences in state co-optation policies and class capacities mattered the most. Between 2009-2015, I conducted 131 semi-structured in-depth interviews in Egypt and 55 in Jordan with labor and political activists. In addition, using al-Masry al-Youm (Egypt) and al-Dostour (Jordan) newspapers, I created an event catalogue for the eighteen days of the Egyptian uprising, and the four days mini uprising in Jordan, which includes the first systematic account of sectoral workplace protests. Finally, I compared changes in state/capital/labor relations since the more drastic turn to neoliberal capitalism in early 2000s in both Jordan and Egypt. I show that in Egypt, in addition to the organizational capacities of political movements, protests among labor groups from growing crucial sectors in the economy, gave steam to the mobilizations, and put pressure on political and economic elites. In addition, the decline in state corporatism in Egypt, pushed state employees to protest against the regime until Mubarak left. I show that unlike those in Egypt, Jordanian corporatist arrangements were not completely dismantled, and the regime was able to utilize these arrangements to undermine protesters. For example, state employees in Jordan still enjoy significant state benefits, and though, like their Egyptian counterparts, they initially took part in protests, they quickly retreated and refused the call for overthrowing the regime. As for class capacities, workers in crucial economic sectors were completely removed from the democracy movement in Jordan. In spite of the initial wide participation, Jordanian mobilizations lacked labor groups with leverage to continually fill the squares, give steam to the mobilizations, and put pressure on economic and political elites. By conducting an analysis of how neoliberal capitalism impacts the capacities of agents to mobilize, I contribute to the scholarly work on movements in the Middle East and emphasize the often-neglected role of labor in mass movements.

Within a broader project that explores the politics of “dignity” in Tunisia’s post-uprising context, this paper focuses on Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC)—a human rights mechanism where a locally elected body investigates the human rights violations of the fallen regime and recommends redress for its victims—to analyze the role of monetary reparations in restoring recognition to over 62,000 political victims of the former regime. The Tunisian 2013 transitional justice law recognizes an individual, a political group, or a region as a victim category: a neighborhood, a town, or a city can therefore submit a claim for reparation. I explore the heated public controversy that ensued pitting TDC’s reparations model as a narrow mode of politics that benefits a minority of citizens against the 2011 uprisings’ demand for redistributive justice for all. I analyze this tension between reparative justice and redistributive justice through the case of the “Martyrs and Injured of the Revolution”: the demonstrators who were killed or wounded by police fire during the 2011 uprising. In the context of growing critiques that truth commissions only recommend narrow reforms without addressing the underlying, structural causes of these political violations on the one hand, and debates about the role of reparation as a political demand in realizing social justice, this paper asks: What was the Tunisian TDC’s approach to structural causes of political violations? What is the role of recognition in the ultimate goal of restoring justice to victims of political violence? I conclude with reflections on the relation between recognition, reparation, and redistributive justice in the context of Tunisia’s transitional justice process.

This article explores why the LGBTQ+ community in Sudan has not organized into a social and political movement, even after the 2019 revolution in the country which provided a window of opportunity to demand liberal political goals like freedom, dignity and rights. The article claims that it is a ‘pre-movement’ for social and political change where the first and necessary step is to create circles of social acceptance and empowerment within the community itself, before it can engage in identity politics and mobilize as a collective group. The work of the pre-movement should not be underestimated as apolitical as it is an informed strategy that aims to empower LGBTQ+ persons to embrace their sexual and gender identity, disclose experiences of discrimination and homophobia and ultimately empower them to speak out and demand respect and rights. The pre-movement work therefore signals an important arena of LGBTQ+ intentionality and of projects of empowerment and identity.