By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 26th, 2011 
This week Hannah Arendt’s notion of “past and future” has been revealed at DC. We have addressed a variety of different issues, trying to orient our future action, by thinking about our experiences. We have looked at the headlines, but also looked elsewhere and thought about different experiences to support the imagination.
I was particularly happy to receive Sergio Tavolaro’s post on President Obama’s visit to Brazil. Following cable news logic, it was a big mistake for the President to go to Brazil, given the pressing problems at home, centered on the impending budget crisis and the great debate about jobs and the deficit, and the military engagement in Libya and the growing uncertainties in North Africa and the Middle East. Yet beyond news sensation, there are important ongoing developments in the Americas, with very significant changes and challenges. Paying attention to Latin America, not only connected to drug and immigration issues, is a necessity especially when there are problems elsewhere.
Brazil is an emerging global power. Brazil and the United States have a long, sad history, marked by domination and political repression. As Brazil has emerged politically and economically, it often has defined its independence against the United States. Obama’s trip worked to change this. The highlight: the historic appreciation of the first African American President of the United States meeting the first woman President of Brazil. Tavolaro reports that there is a fascination with a shared progressive heritage, working against racism and sexism. And he notes that Obama embodied the declaration of equal partnership between nations: the President of the United States visited Brazil before he had an audience with the Brazilian leader in Washington, reversing the usual order. Using a sad past, the Brazilian population could and did imagine a hopeful future with the great American superpower to the north. This is important news for them and for us.
Karl Marx famously said “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Gary Alan Fine shows how sometimes it works the other . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Between Past and Future
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 23rd, 2011 
There are serious arguments for and against military intervention in Libya. Michael Walzer, who is often wise about such things, makes a strong case against. Yet, on balance I am convinced by Conor Foley’s minimalist position for intervention, presented at Crooked Timber. Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s decision to defend his power by any means necessary led Foley to conclude: “I think that the situation in Libya immediately prior to the intervention passed the threshold test … the UN is fulfilling its responsibility to protect the lives of civilians in this case.” Of course, there are many other situations where such intervention on these grounds should be called for, perhaps too many, but in Libya it became possible and has been immediately successful in the stated goal of reducing civilian deaths.
But there is also a greater hope that as their lives are being defended, Libyans will contribute to the democratic transformation of 2011. If Qaddafi would be defeated, a new democratic force may emerge, what Benoit Challand calls, “the counter-power of civil society.” My heart hopes it will be so. My head suggests extreme caution. Looking closely at the way the big political issues are enacted in everyday interactions, what I call “the politics of small things,” suggests why the caution is called for, but also where there may be hopeful signs.
There is a dilemma. For a successful democratic transition, the Libyans must develop a capacity to say more than no or yes to the dictator, as I put it while speculating about the Egyptians and when studying the Central Europeans. Yet, war generally doesn’t provide the time or place for this to happen. Opposition to the perceived evil source requires resolute action, disciplined unity of purpose. Democratic life is based upon diverse opinions and judgments and civil contestation. War generally does not support such civility and diversity. Significantly, Qaddafi’s regime worked against this throughout its history.
In politics the means are the ends. . . .
Read more: Libya and the Mission Creep I Hope For
By Benoit Challand, March 3rd, 2011 
The great changes in the Middle East didn’t come from the usual sources. Religion was not nearly as important as many expected. Class was far from the center of the action, as youth stole the show. And internationally backed civil society was not nearly as important as Western donors would hope. In fact, Western aid may have been more of the problem than the solution.
Religion
The Islamic movement, in particular in Egypt, is in a state of relative weakness, very much connected to economic change. When Egypt embarked on structural adjustment programs and started privatizing its state-owned enterprises in the late 1970s, the economic reform was a façade, masking the enrichment of a handful of high-ranking officials who were the only ones who could do business. In the process, state and welfare services were dismantled, and the regime encouraged non-governmental charities. In this context, the Ikhwan (the Arabic name for Muslim Brotherhood) was able to build many private mosques and new charitable organizations, leading to significant social support. Yet, in the 1990s, when the Ikhwan started running for elections (culminating with the 20% of the seats in 2005), it paid the price of this political engagement by having no choice but to let people close to the government gradually take control over their charities. The movement became complexly connected to the regime and began to lose its credibility, increasingly so when it refused to boycott the 2005 elections and, more recently, because it took on positions that were viewed negatively by the viewpoints of the lower classes. One example is the Ikhwan’s condemnation of the strikes of Muhalla al-Kubra in the textile sector in 6 April 2008. Similar anti-union positions from Islamists are documented in Gaza and Yemen, creating a rift between the working class and the Islamists. Interestingly, in his 2005 book the sociologist Patrick Haenni, calls this new strand of Muslim businessmen ‘the promoters of Islam of the Market.’
As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood has become both politically and socially a much more fragile actor than it was in the past. Only the lack of alternative opposition and . . .
Read more: 2011: Youth, not Religion / Spontaneity, not Aid
By Benoit Challand, March 2nd, 2011 
Benoit Challand, the author of Palestinian Civil Society: Foreign Donors and the Power to Promote and Exclude (2009), is currently Visiting Associate Professor at the New School for Social Research. He is affiliated with the University of Bologna where he has been teaching Middle Eastern politics since 2008. He has been Research Fellow at the Graduate Institute at the Center on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva, working on its Religions & Politics project. -Jeff
We are witnessing the emergence of the counter-power of civil society in the wave of revolts in the Middle East and North Africa. It is embedded in nationalist revolts in which youth and trade unions have played and very well may continue to play important roles. I choose the phrase ‘counter-power of civil society’ to describe the ongoing developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya, and also the little covered protests in the Palestinian territories, because I believe that there is more to civil society than its organized form. There is more to civil society than NGOs and the developmental approach which imagines that the key to progress is when donors, the UN or rich countries, give aid to boost non-state actors, in particular NGOs, in the “developing south.” In fact, overlooking this, leads to a complete misunderstanding of present transformations.
In western social theory, civil society is described by Hegel and Tocqueville (among others) as opposition to the State, or as an intermediary layer of associations between family and the State. This has been the counter – power in the Middle East and North Africa. Thus, when we read in this Sunday’s New York Times that “Libya has no civil society,” it is not only a conceptual error. It makes it impossible to understand what is happening in the region. It’s one thing to say that Libya does not have a national chapter of Human Rights Watch, or a cohort of service-providing NGOs. It is quite another matter to say that Libyan or Tunisian people cannot organize themselves on their own to cover their needs and express . . .
Read more: The Counter-Power of Civil Society in the Middle East
By Daniel Dayan, February 28th, 2011
 
Saturday night the United Nations Security Council unanimously imposed sanctions on Libya and called for an international war crimes investigation of the regime behavior. This marks the end of a long period of international tolerance of Libyan excesses. In this post, mostly written before this change in the international posture, Daniel Dayan reflects on the international community and particularly France as enablers of a process that proceeded even as the regime was collapsing. Jeff
Muammar el-Qaddafi stands accused of crimes against humanity. Countless governments and nongovernmental organizations implicate him in the slaughter of his own citizens. His former Justice Minister holds him personally responsible for orchestrating the 1988 crash of Pan Am Flight 103 on Lockerbie. And thus I was amazed to see that the French media have not brought up Libya’s important and continual responsibilities as a member of the highest United Nations human rights body, the UN Human Rights Council.
The UN human rights watchdog has its own troubled history. Before the current Council replaced the Human Rights Commission (UNCHR) in 2006, Libya was one of the countries to stain the reputation of the Geneva based Commission. In January 2003, the UNCHR elected the Libyan ambassador Najat Al-Hajjaji its president. As the Associated Press reported, this happened “despite concern from some countries about the regime’s poor record on civil liberties and its alleged role in sponsoring terrorism. In a secret ballot, thirty three countries voted for the Libyan diplomat, just three opposed her and seventeen abstained.”
If this was not astonishing enough, the widely denounced behavior of the UN human rights watch dog did not improve over time. The newly reformed Council selected Libya to join the other forty six countries responsible for promoting and protecting human rights around the globe. In May 2010, through a secret ballot, Libya received one hundred and fifty five votes from the one hundred ninety two members of the UN General Assembly.
It was only this past Friday, one year . . .
Read more: Qaddafi and Human Rights
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