Elections

The Pitfalls of Democratic Elections in Palestine

In the post-colonial era, struggles for democracy have increasingly been seen and presented as necessary to fulfill the aborted promises of national liberation. Particularly since the end of the Cold War, electoral democracy has come to be viewed as the most effective mechanism to confront the usurpation of states, resources, and indeed independence by autocrats and narrow, self-selected elites. In a world where dictatorships of both the individual and party variety have generally approached governance as the challenge of subordinating institutions to their will, excluding the citizen from a meaningful role in decision-making, and keeping foreign sponsors satisfied in ...

A (Neocolonial) Musical Introduction to Lebanese Political Actors, complete with Wikipedia Hyperlinks

Lebanon has been in the news a lot lately. From union strikes to legal advocacy to intermittent Sunni-Shiite violence to daily Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees currently living in Lebanon to the election crisis to the resignation of Prime Minister Miqati, Lebanon has been boiling for (at least) over two years. While the most interesting political developments have been the work of activist, civil society, and union groups in Lebanon, it is important to offer a primer of the “establishment” political actors in Lebanon, particularly as Lebanon will soon be holding Parliamentary elections. The men below are sure to ...

A Betrayed Revolution?: On the Tunisian Uprising and the Democratic Transition

On the evening of 14 January 2011, a single man was shouting on Bourguiba Avenue, "Ben Ali hrab!" (Ben Ali has fled), celebrating the stunning victory of a revolution. In this cry, the admiration for the people, love for freedom, and sorrow for the dead was heard. He was alone in the dark, on an avenue that an angry mob invaded a few hours earlier. He was a lawyer, one of the many lawyers who supported the revolt with all their strength. On 8 February 2013, more than two years later, a crowd invaded another site in the capital. This time it was the main cemetery and it was a sad and enraged crowd, which came to accompany another revolutionary lawyer, Chokri ...

Highly Unorthodox: The Week Lebanon Went Secular (And Ended Up More Sectarian Than Ever…)

When some future historian writes a chronicle of twenty-first-century Lebanon, she will likely devote a bemused footnote to the odd events of February 2013, when the country’s leaders saw fit to tear down a pillar of the confessional regime one week, only to erect another one a week later. On 11 February, the Justice Ministry ruled that the recent civil marriage of Khouloud Sukkarieh and Nidal Darwish was legal, thereby establishing a momentous precedent that will likely have serious repercussions on the hold of religious authorities over personal status issues in Lebanon. As I suggested in a piece for Jadaliyya last month: The ...

Popularly Elected Apartheid

The Meaning of Yair Lapid

The 2013 Israeli elections produced a dramatic nothing. Yair Lapid, television anchor, writer of clichés, son of loudmouth celebrity and one-time politician Tommy Lapid, and famed for his hairstyle, entered the political scene to form a party of handpicked personalities which won nineteen seats in the Knesset, and became the second largest party in Israel. Lapid is now the kingmaker, positioned to determine the shape of the coalition that will form Binyamin Netanyahu’s next government. What does Yair Lapid represent? Early analysis of voting precincts reveals Lapid voters come from both affluent and middle-class urban, predominantly Ashkenazi neighborhoods, linking ...

Egypt’s Constitutional Referendum Results

Based on numbers reported by Egyptian media outlets, below is a summary of the constitutional referendum vote results broken down by governorate. What do these numbers tell us? In two stages of voting, average turnout across governorates was 30%, with Egyptians abroad participation being the most notable outlier with a 41% turnout rate. The only three governorates where the majority of voters elected to reject the draft constitution are Cairo, Gharbiyya, and Menofia.   What do these numbers not tell us? Given that the vast majority of eligible voters (68% or 33,855,564) did not participate in the referendum, we can neither conclude that the ...

Arabian Peninsula Media Roundup (December 18)

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.] Regional and International Relations From Manama to Gaza: Solidarity Between Bahrain and Palestine Yazan al-Saadi writes on a solidarity trip to Gaza paid by Bahraini medical officials in defiance of the alliance between the Bahraini government and Israel, on Al-Akhbar English. Reports and Opinions UAE ‘is a centre ...

Inhale Reality, Exhale the Truth

Scattered are the lunatics, like rats, scurrying across the floor in panic when the lights are turned on. For forty years they have assumed that the cultural world of the United States is to their advantage. Hatred of the outsider and of women distinguished their social view. Theirs is the rhetoric of freedom and liberty papering over, lightly, a politics of suffocation. The main word was No: no to this, no to that, no to a woman’s right to dignity, no to the unfurling of the full personality of the outsider; no to the social wage: public transport, public schools, public health care, public welfare, and of course no to getting high. This election revealed that ...

From Gebran Bassil To Con Edison: Ten Lessons New Yorkers Can Learn From Beirutis About The Dark

This week, Hurricane Sandy devastated large swaths of New York City's electrical grid, and almost a million city dwellers were left without power and/or water. With electricity gone and much of the city's infrastructure damaged, no internet or phone service was available. South of Thirty-fourth Street on the East and West sides, most stores were closed, and those that were open quickly ran out of supplies. People used their flashlights to scan the shelves of these stores, to walk up and down pitch black building staircases, and to maneuver their way around city streets and their own apartments. Batteries and candles became hot commodities. Many panicked, and ...

"Community is Based on Justice"

At seven o'clock in the morning, I was already up, so excited was I by the idea of voting for the first time in my life. The joy felt at finally being a citizen was one shared by all Tunisians a year ago, on 23 October 2011. After the fall of the Ben Ali dictatorship, our hopes for Tunisia, as citizens, were great. We wanted a new constitution in which the principles of the Rule of Law, human rights and above all, the demands of the Tunisian Revolution, which began on 17 December, 2010, for "Work, Freedom and Dignity" were inscribed in the very foundations of our new republic. Those elected committed themselves to a year-long mandate, with the exception of ...