Defeat as a Form of Reflexivity : Democracy Activists and the Failed Arab Spring in Jordan
2022
Online
Elektronische Ressource
How is a pro-democracy movement affected when it finds that a majority of the people do not want democratic reform? This was the question that several Jordanian democracy activists asked themselves after they failed to bring about large demonstrations during the 2011 Arab Spring, and especially after counter-demonstrations violently dissolved their relatively small protests. This experience in defeat gave birth to activism with a new view on the state, the opposition and the democratic debate. Jordan’s political landscape changed, but an intellectual aspect of the defeat is as significant as the political aspect. Reinhart Koselleck has characterised the historiography of victors as short-term. The defeated, on the other hand, are “forced to draw new and difficult lessons from history”, which, Koselleck argues, seems to “yield insights of longer validity”. In other words, can a failed democratic transition teach us more about democracy than a successful one? This article argues that the defeat of democracy activists during the Arab Spring offers a vantage point from which to rethink liberal ideas about democracy and openness. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amidst the Jordanian protest movements, this article starts from the most ambitious demonstration during Jordan’s Arab Spring: the sit-in at a roundabout in central Amman, Jordan’s capital, on March 24, 2011, arranged by the Youth of March 24, an umbrella organisation representing the major ideologies in the opposition, including nationalists and Leftists as well as Islamists. The sit-in never turned into the great uprising its initiators had hoped for and was violently attacked by a much larger group of counter-demonstrators until the riot police finally dissolved it. The article explores two ways in which political activists responded to this defeat. One way was to hope for a great uprising in the future, but an uprising which would lack any precise political demands. The Jordanian people were not genu
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Defeat as a Form of Reflexivity : Democracy Activists and the Failed Arab Spring in Jordan
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Veröffentlichung: | 2022 |
Medientyp: | Elektronische Ressource |
DOI: | 10.56698.chcp.842 |
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