A Decade of Arab Upheaval: Neither Exuberance Nor Cynicism

Collage of Arab Uprisings. Image by HonorTheKing via Wikimedia Commons. Collage of Arab Uprisings. Image by HonorTheKing via Wikimedia Commons.

A Decade of Arab Upheaval: Neither Exuberance Nor Cynicism

By : Paul Aarts and Mouin Rabbani

[This article is part of the Arab Studies Institute's Ten Years On Project.]

It has been suggested that once the COVID-19 pandemic is brought under control, mass demonstrations are likely to again erupt across the Arab world. Widespread protests during 2018-2019 in Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, and Sudan have already been embraced as Arab Spring 2.0. As recently argued by Kim Ghattas, “the class of 2019” has learned the appropriate lessons from the failures of “the class of 2011” and is consequently in a better position to meet the challenges of transformative change.

Others remain mired in the decade of despair that displaced the initial euphoria of 2011. For Steven A. Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations, the COVID-19 pandemic and attendant global recession formed the final straw, clearing the deck for pessimism of the most cynical variety:

The region has become a dystopia marked by violence, resurgent authoritarianism, economic dislocation, and regional conflict, with no clear way out … For the first time, it is entirely reasonable to feel hopeless about the Middle East. (Emphasis added)

While Cook leaves little to the imagination, the validity of his cataclysmic assessment is a different matter. It is, for example, irrefutable that the Arab uprisings of the beginning of the last decade represent an unprecedented moment of political consciousness in action. In multiple locations as well as dimensions, the yoke of submission was cast off with an impact that persists to this day. Yet by the same token Ghattas’s confidence seems at best premature. There is for example little evidence, including from Algeria and Sudan, that opposition forces have developed the organizational infrastructure required to not only oust an unpopular head of state, but also decisively defeat the ancien regime and remake the state in their image.

Problematic Propositions


History rarely progresses in linear fashion, and more commonly unfolds as a sequence of cycles and coincidences. It therefore remains important to join Walter Benjamin in searching for traces of the past in the present. Insofar as the upheavals of the past decade indeed constitute revolutions, these exist primarily in the minds of those who took to the streets, and have had a much weaker presence at the political-institutional level.

In this sense the uprisings of 2010-2011, revolutionary or not, represent only the beginning of a lengthy process of upheaval. Their outcome, it can’t be emphasized enough, remains uncertain.[1] Snapshot assessments, so common throughout the past ten years, have been repeatedly and rather predictably overtaken by events. This only strengthens the case for more rigorous analysis that prioritizes longer-term perspectives.

The proposition that dictatorship is an unsustainable form of government and will over the long run necessarily make way for democracy is problematic and naive in equal measure.

The proposition that dictatorship is an unsustainable form of government and will over the long run necessarily make way for democracy is problematic and naive in equal measure. Studies that proceed from this premise not only indulge in excessive quantities of wishful thinking, but also over-emphasize concepts like “civil society”, which are often poorly defined and presented as panaceas.[2] The more civil society, so the argument goes, the greater the prospects for real democratic change. In effect, optimism willing a democratic future stands in for analysis of complex realities.

No less problematic are approaches that fail to recognize the disparity between the content of protests and their underlying causes. While there was no shortage of slogans demanding “bread”, the emphasis of these protests, and even more so in subsequent electoral programs, was very much on “freedom” and “democracy”, and thus predominantly political in nature. Yet it was and remains the bleak economic reality that deserves primary focus. This was, after all, the main albeit not sole driver of the Arab revolts. It is noteworthy that even in the context of consistently deteriorating economic conditions since 2011, which have been only amplified by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic dimensions of Arab upheaval have received insufficient consideration.[3]

The Past as Prologue


The explanation for this mismatch can be located in the past. As described by economists Dani Rodrik and Sharun Mukand, the transition to democracy in the West resulted from processes of industrialization where the main social conflict was between labor and capital.[4] Yet most developing countries, including the Arab world, followed a different trajectory. In these societies the primary conflict was a political one, in which the objective of mass mobilization was the decolonisation and national liberation of an entire society from foreign domination. In such contexts nationalist ideologies often downplayed or suppressed social contradictions, and more often than not achieved greater currency than class-based ones and triumphed at their expense.

The spirit of the times restricted the political space available to movements that prioritized class-based politics, while those that sought to fuse nationalist with transformative socio-economic agendas faced relentless opposition from within and without. Where those in the former category, like the communist parties of Iraq and Sudan, did achieve prominence they were often successfully eliminated by their nationalist rivals. Those of the latter type, most notably Egypt under Nasser, ultimately succumbed to the combination of organized hostility and their internal contradictions, and were subsequently domesticated under more pliable leadership. Additionally, continued foreign intervention, primarily by Western powers and their regional client states, made the unlikely virtually impossible. Related to this, the persistence of Israeli colonization and the Arab-Israeli conflict further obstructed the transition to the possibilities of independence, while regional polarization within the Arab world and Middle East furnished additional constraints. A further and more recent phenomenon, and one also increasingly prominent in the West, is the infiltration of culture wars and identity politics into national politics, and the commensurate displacement of socio-economic agendas. Collectively, these historical dynamics served to make the emergence of liberal democracy less likely.

The consequences of this history remain with us to this day. Mass politics in the Middle East is far less infused with explicitly class-based agendas than might otherwise be expected, though there are of course important exceptions such as labour protests in Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain. As noted by Egyptian analyst Maged Mandour, “Aside from slogans of political change, human rights, and the need to combat corruption, there has been very little social content [in the Arab uprisings]."[5] The open or tacit embrace of neoliberalism by many opposition leaders and intellectuals, including on the left, and no less importantly their general failure to confront it with compelling alternatives, is a longstanding phenomenon in the West that has also afflicted the Arab world. The resultant inability to persuasively articulate the socio-economic interests of their constituents further contextualizes Mandour’s insightful observations on the nature and limitations of the Egyptian uprising.

The above has implications for assessing contributions to the debate that advocate for genuine citizenship (muwatana) and a civil state (dawla madaniyya) governed by the rule of law. While admittedly laudable, such agendas display insufficient consideration of the structural causes of the fragility and organizational weakness of opposition movements. Narratives that reserve a special role for Arab youth are similarly flawed and seem to represent idealism at the expense of reality. Since when do youth form a unified social force or political movement rather than a diffuse sociological category?

That democratization is a more complex process than often conceived is apparent from recent studies that examine the difficult nature of transitions from dictatorship.[6] The initial period following such change is often accompanied by increased instability and insecurity, at both the personal level (unrest, violence) and the economic one (unemployment). Research indicates that citizens often respond to such developments with less rather than more faith in democracy – the so-called "autocratic paradox".

A focus on states where dictators have been replaced by a genuine form of democratic governance, such as Tunisia, confirms this phenomenon. Specifically, it appears that support for democracy is more dependent upon an improvement in socio-economic conditions than an expansion of political and civil rights. While Tunisia continues to conduct free elections and has its secret police largely under control, living conditions have deteriorated sharply during the past decade. Income levels have decreased by a fifth, unemployment rates have grown exponentially, and many young Tunisians aspire to leave the country.[7] Where economic anxiety is accompanied by personal insecurity on account of growing unrest and political instability, it is hardly surprising that people become nostalgic for the era before the country was consumed by upheaval – let alone a global pandemic.[8]

Economic Challenges


The pandemic’s political consequences were entirely predictable. Without exception, governments have expanded their powers of surveillance and control, and intensified their application.[9] The list of measures is a long one indeed: lockdowns, states of emergency, curfews, arrests, and greater restrictions placed upon the freedom of expression. In states where protests were taking place, like Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon, the authorities availed themselves of the opportunity to cite public health considerations in order to enforce a prohibition on public assemblies. Public spaces that had been occupied by demonstrators, such as parks and squares, were forcefully repossessed by the government and its security forces. Houses of worship were placed under even greater state supervision.

The economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been devastating and only intensified the trends described above. In October 2020, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region would that year decrease by an average of 4.1 percent – a further 1.3 percent lower than the dismal forecast it had provided only six months earlier.[10] The tourism sector and migrant worker remittances have been hit particularly hard.

More recently, the IMF has assessed that “the path to recovery in 2021 is expected to be long and divergent”. There is, in other words, little prospect of short-term recovery. To the extent one does take place, it is likely to have an L-shape (stagnant growth marked by persistent unemployment), a series of W’s (a double dip recession), or a K-shape (a recovery that privileges the wealthy).

Interestingly, the IMF indicated that in its initial phases the MENA recession was disproportionately driven by declining oil revenues, with “oil-exporting countries ... hit hardest by a double-whammy of the pandemic and the resulting sharp decline in oil demand and prices”.[11] Although energy prices have largely recovered and there are few signs that upheaval is knocking on the Gulf Cooperation Council’s door, significant further pressure on its members’ social spending capacities, particularly if combined with far-reaching austerity measures, may yet demonstrate that the much-touted “monarchical exception” has little to do with hereditary forms of government. Rather than being an exception to any rule of political change, the Bahraini experience was largely driven by the same dynamics observed elsewhere in the region.

In a region where sixty percent of the population is younger than twenty-five, and youth unemployment is higher than in any other region on the planet, economic retrenchment will result in growing poverty, particularly but not solely in the informal sector. It also bears recollection that the MENA region, which accounts for only six per cent of the global population, generates and hosts the largest number of refugees and internally displaced persons in the world.

The economic challenges confronting the Arab world are thus colossal, especially with respect to employment generation, and this observation also applies to relatively wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia. Oddly, the more educated are more likely to be unemployed.

According to a recent UNICEF report, the region’s economies will need to create about 2.6 million new jobs per year.[12] Egypt, for example, must generate 3.5 million jobs in the coming five years, or 700,000 per annum.[13] This is simply not going to happen.

"What the People Want"


What does this mean for the future of the Arab World, and opportunities for further democratization? Taking into account forecasts regarding the impacts of automatization and digitalization, which suggest a world with fewer rather than more jobs, the Arab world, already reeling before the pandemic, now finds itself in an exceptionally difficult position. The generation of jobs so vital to ensuring economic security is highly unlikely to materialize.

The political consequences may well be cataclysmic. If these jobs are not created, their absence will create an army of the permanently unemployed. Incumbent regimes cannot experience this as anything other than a direct and potentially mortal threat. Yet in the context of the distorted forms of mass politics discussed above, the status quo can prevail for far longer than many hope or expect. Resilient dictatorship and repression is thus the most likely state of affairs, precluding even superficial forms of electoral democracy.

Does this vindicate Cook’s gloomy observation that the situation is “hopeless”? In the short and medium terms things are indeed likely to get worse. Neither Arab governments nor their citizens can exercise meaningful control over pandemics or global recessions. Nor will the maintenance of prevailing economic policies turn the tide. One should also not expect course corrections that come at the expense of vested interests.

There is additionally a dearth of proposals emanating from civil society to rupture the stalemate. Where ideas are being developed to bridge the gap between political and socio-economic rights, these tend to be presented in a piecemeal fashion. It is under current circumstances admittedly an almost impossible task to propose realistic alternatives, yet it remains essential to do so. As argued previously, the first priority is the creation of jobs, jobs, and more jobs. This is “what the people want”. It is a definition of democracy that emphasises economic security, rather than restricting itself to its political dimensions and procedural aspects such as elections and political freedoms – objectives that are by no means unimportant, but insufficient.

Have the Arab uprisings failed? To pose this question a mere decade after the first revolts, while others are ongoing, invites superficial judgments.

If we look at broadly similar processes elsewhere the consolidation of democracy can take in excess of a century. How long did democratization take – and how many setbacks has it encountered – in France, Germany, India, South Africa, the United States, and other countries?[14]

In other words, if the process of societal emancipation proves arduous in the Middle East and North Africa, this hardly makes it exceptional. There are bumps on the road elsewhere, with democratization often taking one step forward before retreating by two.

It is ironic that even the “success story”, Tunisia, resolved an important challenge but unfortunately not the one that was the engine of its upheaval. Instead of much-desired economic improvements, Tunisians obtained a constitutional government. Others achieved even less or ended up in a vortex of bloody conflict.

Whether, when, and in what form the Arab world will achieve democratic governance is of course unpredictable, though we should account for more obstacles than exist elsewhere. This has nothing to do with Islam or other cultural factors, and everything with historical dynamics and geopolitical realities that have militated against the successful development of class-based popular movements that were elsewhere germane to the consolidation of democracy.

The uprisings of ten years ago and their “sequels” in 2018-2019 had and continue to have real and substantive meaning, and it would therefore be simplistic to conclude that they have failed. A realistic assessment of the decade past and those yet to come needs to shun both wishful optimism and dystopian cynicism.

[An earlier version of this article was published by Paul Aarts in Fanack.com]




[1] See for example Barbara Geddes, “What Do We Know About Democratization After 20 Years?”, Annual Review of Political Science, June 1999; Eva Bellin, “A Modest Transformation: Political Change in the Arab World After the ‘Arab Spring’”, in Clement Henry & Jang Ji-Hyang (eds.),The Arab Spring: Will It Lead to Democratic Transitions? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 33-48. 


[2] The Lebanese social anthropologist and former government minister Charbel Nahas, among others, references “vague terms such as civil society”, and emphasizes the indispensability of “well-organised political parties”, “De explosie biedt ook kans op hervorming”, NRC Handelsblad, 18 August 2020 (Dutch).


[3] There are exceptions that do try to bridge the gap between politics and economics. See for example the work of Andrea Teti and his colleagues in the Arab Transformations Project. See also various studies by Arab NGOs and think tanks, such as Economic Research ForumNawaatObservatoire Tunisien de l’EconomieArab NGO Network for Development, and Alternative Policy Solutions, as well as several contributions to Middle East Report and studies by Mark R. Beissinger, Amaney Jamal and Kevin Mazur.


[4] See also Dani Rodrik, “The Perils of Premature Deindustrialisation”, Project Syndicate, 11 October 2013. For a more general discussion and theoretical treatment of this issue consult Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development & Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).


[5] See also the following contributions by Maged Mandour: “The poverty of protest”, Open Democracy, 5 December 2019; "On the absence of Arab intellectuals", Open Democracy, 23 September 2015; "On the absence of Arab intellectuals: counter-revolution and the state", Open Democracy, 11 August 2016; "Where are the workers?", Open Democracy, 11 April 2016; "Whose revolution?", Open Democracy, 21 September 2016; "'The people want’, but what do they want?", Open Democracy, 25 August 2015; "The capitalist roots of Egyptian authoritarianism: demystifying the state", Open Democracy, 11 August 2020.


[6] Pietro Marzo & Francesco Cavatorta, “The Demise of the Arab Strongman? Authoritarianism and the Future of the Middle East”, in Shahram Akbarzadeh (ed.), Handbook of International Relations of the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 265-278; Melani Cammett, Ishac Diwan & Irina Vartanova, “Insecurity and Political Values in the Arab world”, Democratization 27:5 (2020), pp. 699-716; Ammar Shamaileh, “Never Out of Now: Preference Falsification, Social Capital and the Arab Spring”, International Interactions 45: 6 (2019), pp. 949-975; M. Tahir Kilavuz & Nathanael Gratias Sumaktoyo, “Hopes and Disppointments: Regime Change and Support for Democracy After the Arab Spring”, Democratization 27:5 (2020), pp. 854-873.


[7] See “In Tunisia, The Cradle of the Arab Spring, Protesters want Jobs”, The Economist, 13 August 2020; Alessandra Bajec, “Tunisia: In Tataouine Socio-Economic Marginalization Is a Time Bomb”, Arab Reform Initiative, 24 July 2020; Ishac Diwan,”Tunisia’s Upcoming Challenge: Fixing the Economy Before It’s Too Late”, Arab Reform Initiative, 23 September 2020; Daniel Brumberg & Maryam Ben Salem, “Tunisia’s Endless Transition?”, Journal of Democracy 31:2 (2020), pp. 110-124.


[8] "Democracy's growing pains. In Tunisia, cradle of the Arab Spring, protesters want jobs. Nostalgia for the old dictatorship is growing", The Economist, 13 August 2020.


[9] “The COVID-19 Pandemic in the Middle East and North Africa”, POMEPS Studies 39 (April 2020); Amr Hamzawy & Nathan Brown, “How Much Will the Pandemic Change Egyptian Governance and for How Long?”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 23 July 2020; Thomas Carothers & David Wong, “Authoritarian Weaknesses and the Pandemic”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 11 August 2020; Francis Fukuyama,”The Pandemic and Political Order”, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2020; Afsoun Afsahi et al., “Democracy in a Global Emergency: Five Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic”, Democratic Theory 7:2 (2020), pp. v-xix; Layla Saleh & Larbi Sadiki, “The Arab World Between A Formidable Virus and A Repressive State”, Open Democracy, 6 April 2020.


[10] International Monetary Fund, Regional Economic Outlook: Middle East and Central Asia (October 2020), p. 1-2.


[11] Ibid., p. 2.


[12] "By 2030, the countries in MENA face a 27 percent increase in the labour force (15-64 years) compared to 2015, and hence 39 million new entrants into the labour market, assuming the labour force participation rate for both men and women follows the trend projected by the International Labour Organization (ILO)". See UNICEF, MENA Generation 2030. Investing in children and youth today to secure a prosperous region tomorrow (April 2019), p. 59.


[13] Ishac Diwan, Nadim Houry & Yezid Sayigh, “Egypt After the Coronavirus: Back to Square One”, Arab Reform Initiative, 26 August 2020. See also Diana Saadi, “IMF: MENA Needs to Create Jobs for 27 Million Youth Joining the Labour Force”, The National News, 4 August 2018. For a more general analysis of structurally high unemployment rates see Steffen Hertog, “Segmented Market Economies in the Arab world: The Political economy of Insider-Outsider Divisions”, Socio-Economic Review, 13 April 2020.


[14] On the cases of France, Germany, and Italy, see Sheri Berman, "The Promise of the Arab Spring: In Political Development, No Gain Without Pain", Foreign Affairs, January/February 2013.

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]