Mediterranean geographies of protest

In December 2011, most of the contributors to this special issue took part in one of the first interdisciplinary discussions in the UK to reflect on the Arab uprisings in parallel with the ongoing protests in Europe. City/State/Resistance: Spaces of Protest in the Middle East and Mediterranean ¹ was a workshop for geographers, political scientists, historians, journalists and policy practitioners to interpret the uprisings from a triple perspective: first, the transnational links between protests on both sides of the Mediterranean; second, the role of urban space in shaping protest and security responses; third, the implications of the protests for territoriality and citizenship. The workshop podcast ² quickly gained international visibility and became part of resources on the Arab uprisings in digital libraries including those of the University of Georgetown and the American University of Beirut, impacting on expertise and knowledge exchange on this still very much developing topic. Resulting directly from the workshop, this collection explores the 2011 uprisings in their transnationality and their urbanity. It populates the virtual geographies of the ‘Revolution 2.0’ (Ghonim, 2012) and its use of social media for organising protest, with material contexts and bodily presences. Most importantly, the collection connects the recent and still developing debate on the uprisings with established discussions on the problematic relationship between “EU”rope’ (Bialasiewicz, 2011: 1) and the wider Mediterranean region.

From the Association Agreements of the early 1960s, through the Barcelona Agreement of 2005, to the declaration of a Union for the Mediterranean in 2007, the Mediterranean has been a key space for the EU to project its security, economic and cultural agendas across a range of different actors and scales (Jones, 2011a). However, the uprisings affecting the European Neighbourhood Policy members in the Arab world, and the continuing protests in southern Europe are, today more than ever, disturbing the fragile coherence of ‘EU’rope’s Mediterranean geopolitical vision (Bialasiewicz, 2011: 299).

In the early days of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and while protests began in Libya and Bahrain, various mainstream media employed metaphors of contagion and domino effect to make sense of the unrest infecting the Arab world (Fregonese, 2011). Based on classic domino theories – indicating political change spreading from one epicentre across contiguous states – these claims have often been dismissed from within the Middle East, as a Western, especially Anglophone attempt to make sense of events on which contextual differences are lost (Hurriyet, 2011).

More than one year on, the domino metaphor has subsided. We know that there is no unique Arab political pivot from where the contagion has spread (Filiu, 2011); post-revolutionary Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have maintained their post-colonial borders. There has been no pan-Arab territorial change, as the domino theory would have suggested. There are, instead, myriad heterogeneous, transnational, leaderless public spheres (Filiu, 2011) that are shaping the revolutions and remaking the political geographies of the Mediterranean.

These transnational spheres go ‘beyond the domino’ (Fregonese, 2011) because they blur its linear routes, its rules of contiguity. They also trespass accepted politico-cultural boundaries, continue to shift the “shadow line” of alterity and (sub)alterity’ (Giaccaria and Minca, 2011) between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, and question the status of those ‘geo-cultural fracturing[s]’ (Jones, 2011a: 42) between ‘EU’rope and the southern Mediterranean that Europe feels entitled to ameliorate.

Complicating the domino from multiple viewpoints, therefore, makes it possible to see the uprisings not as a sequence of states falling one after the other, but, rather, as largely unexplored networks and hybrid threads of protest and state response spanning across the Mediterranean, and beyond.

The transnationality of the uprising manifested itself in resistance practices. Slogans such as ‘Ash-shab yurid isqat al nizam – the people want the fall of the regime’ have been chanted, echoed and adapted ³ to different moments and settings of the 2011 uprisings across Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Israel, as discussed in the papers. Another chant from the Egyptian Arab Spring ‘‘aysh, hurriya, adala al ijtimaiyya! – bread, freedom, social justice!’ is evidently paralleled by demands of demonstrators in the dire financial straits of Europe. In the UK, anti-cuts protesters vowed to transform Trafalgar Square into Tahrir (Taylor, 2011). Cross-references, solidarities and commonalities go beyond the domino, trespassing the line between the south and north of the Mediterranean, showing complexities that need to be understood.

If protest is transnational, so is repression. The protesters’ demands have frequently been met by the ubiquitously heavy hand of the state. In 2011 we have seen a clear ‘grammar of urban operations’ (Hills, 2004) by armies and police that is by no means the sole prerogative of Arab regimes, but has entangled Western cities such as London, Athens and various US cities in vivid cycles of violence. Tactics and technologies are shared between states. The industrial military networks of the uprising include European sales of crowd control weapons and other military equipment to Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Algeria (Amnesty International, 2011), and sales of arms from Italy to Libya, through Italy-based companies such as Selex Sistemi Integrati, AgustaWestland and Oto Melara (Sarzanini 2011; Rogers, 2011). The close-knit nature of these networks becomes striking when we consider John Yates, former Assistant Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, now advising the Bahraini government about reforming its police force in the light of the excessive use of force during the protests. – Yates called the challenge ‘not dissimilar to those the UK itself faced only a couple of decades ago’ (Jones, 2011b). In various instances, transnational networks of state repression have involved mergers and hybrids between regular state actors (police, army) and non-state unofficial groups (armed thugs, militias and gangs). The baltagiya (thugs) acted alongside the Egyptian police in the streets of Cairo; irregular vigilantes – ‘suspicious hood-wearing thugs’ as they were called by Alexis Tsipras, leader of the Greek Syriza party (Smith, 2011) – convened with Greek police in the back streets of Athens city centre; the Libyan army recruited mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa; the Syrian army unofficially includes militias such as the Shabiha among its ranks; the UAE and Saudi armies intervened in Bahrain in March 2011 to repress the protests. These instances raise fundamental questions about changes in the nature of domestic security in the region and its shift towards hybridised forms of sovereignty (Fregonese, 2012).

Alongside questions of transnational change, the collection explores the role of urban space in shaping protest.

While the events of 11 September 2001 impacted on urban and political geography in the past decade, the uprisings show how cities constitute physical and symbolic terrains for socio-political change. Cities have been protagonists throughout the 2011 uprisings: we have repeatedly seen occupied squares on our TV screens and used trending Twitter hashtags such as #Cairo or #Athens, and many of us have also descended on the streets during demonstrations in those cities. Selecting gathering points, tracing demonstration routes and choosing occupation sites, the demonstrators use specific urban geographies to confront existing socio-spatial expressions of power – emblematically, public spaces such as Tahrir, descending from European colonial planning and until recently representing incumbent regimes.

Scholars have discussed whether there is an inherently urban nature in the uprisings (Verdeil, 2011). It has been discussed that the message of the protesters is the occupation of space, rather than in manifestos or programmes (Kimmelman, 2011). Some argue that, through occupation of space, protesters perform equality rather than speaking about it in manifestos, and in so doing they confront the very socio-spatial arrangements of state legality, policing and exclusionary practices (Douzinas, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2012). These exclusions in the Arab world have taken the form of corruption, misuse of Western funds and alienation of the urban (especially middle-class) population from those same development plans showcased by the ruling elites to the west. Recasting equality then is done by reshaping the urban fabric – by challenging existing urban governmentality or by tackling the capitalist accumulation embodied by soaring housing prices, building speculation and alienation of urban resources (Harvey, 2012). Re-establishing a different right to the city is becoming the main characteristic of resistance, both in the global north and in the global south.

Protest is urban, and so is the state response to it. One emblematic act was the Bahraini government’s order to demolish Loulou (Pearl) Roundabout in Manama, where protesters had gathered over several days in March 2011. Another compelling example is the Egyptian post-revolutionary Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) erecting ‘temporary’ fences and concrete walls in central Cairo’s streets around Tahrir square to create buffer zones between the sites of state power located around Tahrir and the protesters, essentially breaking down everyday urban life into a series of controllable zones into which it is difficult for ordinary residents to trespass. Less overt but equally effective urban security measures have also been employed to respond to protests in European cities, such as the closure of Paternoster Square during the Occupy protest, or the practice of fencing off Spanish squares. It remains to be seen whether these emergency measures are set to become permanent tools of urban security, changing the use of public space in Arab as well as European cities.

Intersecting the two themes of transnationality and urbanity, the papers sit at the core of these debates. Relying on first-hand experiences and research, they attempt to make sense of the urban and transnational aspects of protest, including access and equality, and the logics of occupation and encampment, complicating accepted understandings and practices of the state, the nation and the city, in order to glimpse possibilities for new political forms across the Mediterranean.

Lynn Staeheli and Caroline Nagel start this series by asking the controversial question ‘whose awakening is it?’ and by drawing our attention to the multiplicity of agents and scales (including time) shaping what should not be intended as a monolithic uprising. They take as an example Western civic engagement programmes in the Middle East, showing that, for some time, these programmes have been shaping youth activism – particularly in Lebanon – based on specific geopolitical interests. Their agendas, however, have been appropriated by the 2011 protesters in unpredictable ways, thanks also to the tools and skills provided by those same programmes, thus placing a veil of indeterminacy over the outcomes of the protest.

Agitating the waters even further, Andrea Teti and Andrea Mura dislocate some accepted distinctions between liberal Western/European democracies and ‘pseudo-liberalizing Middle Eastern authoritarian systems’ (Teti and Mura, 2012: 120). Their critical reading of quantitative socio-political indicators explores Egyptian and Italian political-economic trends, including press freedom. They thus reveal convergences, rather than clear distances, and disclose a number of transnational traits in the ongoing socio-political change across the Mediterranean.

The transnationality of protest is by no means limited to regional programmes, Web 2.0 or quantitative indicators. It is populated with real people, their bodies (as we have witnessed all too often) and spaces, including the material infrastructures of the Mediterranean economy. Alongside emblematic public spaces of protest such as Tahrir or Puerta del Sol, Jeremy Anderson explores other geographies of protest spanning coastal cities from the Mediterranean to the Gulf: those of dockers’ and port workers’ unions. These have been influenced by the 2011 uprising, but have been actively reshaping the politics of labour in ports across the region, including in Bahrain, Jordan and Morocco, since at least 2007, thus emphasising the larger temporal trajectory in which the uprisings need to be analysed.

Such larger temporal perspective is considered by Costas Douzinas, whose paper analyses how different practices of resistance – riot, occupation and hunger strike – are challenging unequal socio-spatial orders and invasive capitalist disciplining of subjects/consumers. Douzinas considers urban protests along the last decade, tracing a series of striking geographical, chronological and political connections and continuities between occupations in Spain and Greece, Tahrir Square, and eventually the global Occupy movement. Often dismissed as apolitical masses or even as blindly violent mobs by state-centred political scientists, these multitudes of bodies occupying public spaces (as underlined in Adam Ramadan’s paper on Cairo) might well be instead the expression of Europe’s possible political futures.

Venturing further into the urban cores of the 2011 protests, it becomes clear how, far from being inert backgrounds to unfolding events, cities and protest shape each other. As a journalist despatched to Cairo in January 2011, Lorenzo Trombetta shows, in his testimony of Cairo’s protests in early 2011, the constant adaptation of protesters and state authorities to each other. The negotiation between state and resistance, explains Trombetta, happened not only in the city but through it, using its form, buildings, artefacts and even sounds – including streets, bridges, buildings, cobbles and noise – to mobilise, confront and respond to each other. The paper links to the author’s videos supporting the narration.

In 2011, from Rothschild Boulevard to Tahrir, from Saint Paul’s in London to ‘Occupy buffer zone’ in Nicosia’s no man’s land, tents and encampments have been the omnipresent choreography of the protests and the people on its frontlines. Adam Ramadan’s paper points to the everyday space of the urban camp as the centre of geopolitical orderings across the Mediterranean and beyond. Recently theorised as an instrument of sovereign power and biopolitical control, the camp returns to the city in 2011 as an optimistic, potentially liberatory public space of transformative political action beyond the state.

The very presence of certain spaces and the practices that they host complements the message of the protest, as highlighted by Yair Wallach. His paper analyses the choice of Rothschild Boulevard by activists as the platform for Israel’s 2011 Summer protests. This cosmopolitan, leisure-oriented street – and not emblematic national sites – was the place of choice for proposing new forms of social justice, beyond the abstract ideals of the Israeli nation and its exclusionary logics, and against the aggressive neo-liberal takeover of the city – with Rothschild Boulevard’s soaring housing prices on the frontline.

Linking back to Lynn Staeheli and Caroline Nagel’s initial piece, and back on the European shore, a sense of indeterminacy about the outcome of the protests pervades Carlos Taibo’s closing paper. Considering the case of the Spanish Indignados, he argues that this predominantly urban movement has a heterogeneous composition. What is increasingly apparent, however, is a shift from civic ideals centred around political parties and ideals of state citizenship, to radical anti-capitalist attempts to resist and go beyond the state capitalist system altogether, tackling directly the vital ties of the labour world with capitalism.

If 2011 has seen the inception and establishment of practices of protest and resistance in cities all around the Mediterranean, 2012 sees the continuity and spreading of these practices (and responses) to cities worldwide. Many have asked whether the revolution is dead, or whether the fruits of 2011 will take years to ripen. This is a sensible question. The deepening financial crisis in Europe has triggered mass grief at the disappearance of the welfare state (Shehadi, 2012); Egypt’s political future is uncertain, even under its first freely elected president, while civil war rages in Syria and is sending shockwaves into Lebanon. Whether this is the end or the beginning of the revolution, we can certainly say that the 2011 uprisings have raised fundamental questions about the future of the Mediterranean. These questions are informed by concerns that certainly acquire contextual nuances, but that are also shared across the region. The commonality of slogans, the demonstrations of solidarity and the statements of mutual inspiration between different movements in different locations go beyond the ‘domino’ of Arab national populations deposing dictators. They instead signal a more complex network of common demands for systemic changes in the relationship between the state and populations – from authoritarianism, to democracy, to the relationship with neo-liberalism and international financial restructuring (Teti and Gervasio, 2011) – both in Europe and, as we have seen, in the Arab world and Israel.

Throughout the Mediterranean, state repression of protest has involved alliances between regular state actors and non-state unofficial groups. More research is needed into these hybrid formations of sovereignty (Fregonese, 2012) and security and their future role in Mediterranean cities. The public experience of cities affected by these dynamics is changing, and further research is needed to analyse and compare the spatial dynamics at the root of protest, repression, segregation, access, appropriation, policing and financial speculation.

These papers explore a small part of these developing dynamics, and together account for the possibility of new Mediterranean geopolitical visions that agitate the waters around accepted hierarchies, distinctions and distances.