Why predict a riot?

Naomi Hossain

Like millions of Indonesians, I watched the protests against the fuel subsidy cut as it was debated in Parliament last week. They were at it (debating, not protesting) into the wee hours; in the end, the protests were big and ugly enough for the opposition and coalition partners to hold the ruling party to ransom. They fudged it, agreeing that if the global fuel price goes up a lot, they will act. Result? Unruly politics – 1; responsible fiscal policy – 0.

Technocrats and policy types all agree the fuel subsidy is A Bad Thing. It cost US$18bn last year- more than half of spending on education (US$£32bn). The Iran situation will increase global fuel prices. 60-70% of the fuel subsidy benefits the richest 40% of Indonesians. But because fuel subsidies are so economically irrational, technocrats and policy types fail to analyse the political responses and easily discount the protests. Pure party politics, they say; protestors are cheaply hired; an easy populist win for parties against the cut; there weren’t many protestors really etc.

On the other side, protestors, spokespersons and even the occasional real person were heard arguing that no, increasing fuel prices by 33% will be bad for ordinary people. For one thing, the price of food in this island nation depends directly on fuel and sharp rises in the basic costs of living are toughest for people on low incomes. On cue, food prices shot up in anticipation.

To an outsider, there is a mesmerising balletic quality to the repertoire of fuel price protests. There seem to be clearly defined moves, honed over the decades. Some responses are no doubt learned from when the mighty Suharto lost power after the 1998 fuel price rise protests. There were protests in 2002, 2005, and 2008 against fuel subsidy cuts. The ritualistic quality helps the policy wonks dismiss this as ‘mere politics’; the spectacle seems not entirely real. The policewomen doing their cute dance to calm the crowds in Surabaya illustrates how domesticated– how subversively ruly (as Alex Shankland says) these protests are. Even then, there is an edge of danger: to contain Tuesday’s protests took 14,000 police and 8,000 army.

I doubt that fuel price protests are just the shadow-puppetry of elite politics. Fuel price rises unite the concerns of the poorest with that far more politically important and better organised class – the numerous nearly-poor, the group recently described by Martin Ravallion as ‘bunched up just above the poverty line’. This group is not the target of the sophisticated proxy-means tested social protection schemes so beloved of the international technocracy. But the nearly-poor have excellent reasons to be annoyed that their protection against inflation is being removed, as industrial workers in Bekasi (itself the site of protests earlier this year) told us during the price spike last year.

So here it seems is the recipe for a successful bout of unruly politics:

• A history of having worked
• Some familiar routines and rituals (Charles Tilly’s ‘repertoire’)
• A popular, broad-based concern to protect basic rights
• Actors willing to politicise the issue to their own advantage
• Authorities sensitive about unpopularity (general elections in 2014).

Clearly the technocrats need a much sharper political analysis if they are ever going to make this reform work. Conclusion? Political analysis – 1; technical correctness – 0.

Naomi Hossain is a Research Fellow in the IDS Power, Participation and Social Change Team.

Spring uprisings calling spring academics: #bring books out to the streets!

Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere

Born the 15^th of May 2011 until forced eviction from the symbolic Plaza del Sol on August 18^th for Pope Ratzinger’s visit to Madrid, the Spanish Revolution is now back in the streets. The 15-M Indignados Movement spark was lit this time in a secondary school, the Instituto Lluís Vives, seated just beside the Town hall of Valencia, the third most populated city in Spain.

Facing months of delay in payments by the regional government, the school management could not face heating costs any longer. Lluís Vives students then decided to go out to demonstrate against public education cuts seven days ago. With the school strategically located in the city and students blocking a central street, police acted rapidly. They charged against 12 to 16-year-old students and detained some of them.

Technologies, mass-media and a feeling of being part of a bigger, global ‘spring’ served to ignite action. First, against gratuitous police aggressions: footage from TV cameras and mobiles demonstrated, once again, how violence is systematically applied by the police corps against the simple right of demonstrating in a so-called democratic society such as Spain – including an illegal and premeditated lack of identification by police officers (with velcro covering their uniform numbers), as part of a normalised police culture sidestepping further legal responsibilities for their violent acts.

Second, action against the education cuts that many public schools have suffered. Students brought their own blankets, toilet paper and parents helped with the school clean-up on Saturdays, something uncommon in the Spanish context. Meanwhile, the regional government has spent millions on gigantic tourist and propaganda projects that only benefit the few, not to mention the many cases of unveiled corruption.

With books about law and rights held in the air, a mass of secondary and university students, teachers and students’ families joined the march two days ago. Solidarity demonstrations have taken place in cities such as Barcelona and Madrid singing #WeAreNotAfraid, #ValenciaEscuchaMadridEstáEnTuLucha [Valencia, listen Madrid is in your fights], #Here,here,hereThereIsAlsoRobbery [when passing by the Bank of Spain]. Students have created the trending topic #ValencianSpring for communicating and organising in humble honour to their Arab predecessors and linked it to the existing #SpanishRevolution.

In Senegal, at the beginning of this month, citizens in the Mouvements 23Juin and Y‘n a marre [That’s enough] demonstrated and sang rap (and died) against the constitutional change enacted by President Wade to pave the way for his possible third electoral mandate. So did Senegalese immigrants in Paris in solidarity. And so the list goes on: Egypt, Greece, Syria, UK – a climate of international links, resistance and possibility.

As Mariz Tadros urges us to think in the latest IDS Bulletin, what can this tell us as development academics? What can we offer and take from these uprisings?

A first idea is to offer our present concepts on participation, power and change towards the understanding of these events. To try to grasp how a school director becomes unruly by taking her bit of power and saying ‘you police do not enter my school’; or how the public declaration by State Police chief in Valencia two days ago that ‘we were fighting against the enemy’ when referring to 16-year old students, was popularly re-appropriated by demonstrators in various cities of Spain with the creative slogan #MeTooIAmTheEnemy; or for governmental messages of ‘they are just 200’ to be met with counter-narrative posters saying ‘and they said we were few’. And so the list goes on. For each power over, there is a power with, a power to, a power within resisting and suggesting new perspectives.

Second, by updating concepts such as citizenship in the light of present events: how is it interplaying with our roles as consumers, as bank users, as family members? In contexts where repeated demonstrations may contradictorily become just part of the system (when is a demonstration unruly? when is it co-opted?), giving little or no effect, where participatory democracy simply does not apply, where representative democracy is a prison, where citizenship slips, and where the only thing people feel able to exercise activism as citizens over is the boycott of products, to move money into ethical banks, to change life-styles (with the hope perhaps that by impacting on the makers of real-politik – banks and multinationals – they might impact on their accomplice politicians). How is citizenship shaped, felt and reclaimed under these circumstances?

Third, we can engage with the new concepts presently living and breathing in the streets. One example could be that of glocal (‘think global, act local’), already present in the anti-globalisation movements and back again with the Spring uprisings. Demonstrators in these movements are used to see the global picture and then act locally, wherever they are. They sometimes unite too, as a colleague once said: ‘to make a global struggle of the many local ones’.

When I move from these activist spaces to the academic ones, I often feel a disconnection. I feel that we, as academics, can learn and be inspired much more by the way anti-globalisation and spring activists see things in the streets. In at least three manners: 1) in that all local spaces must be studied under equal circumstances: development discourse has long forgotten that there are local places here, in Europe (to the extent that in my local university in Valencia we would not be funded local development projects in ‘here’ because development funding was for local projects in ‘there’); 2) in that our local places are interconnected to other locals, in both positive or negative ways; and 3) in that the concept of global needs to be un-reified, un-packed. An activist friend used to tell me these global forces are ‘too big’, too difficult to fight against. They may. But this also means going to the roots of inequality. Academics can help here, as each global power has a local place, embodied somewhere (a country’s president bank account in a tax haven, a share-holder or G-20 conference, a small enterprise office taking decisions somewhere). Structured, academic analysis is needed to find those globalised locals, to make the global possible, both as power over analysis and as a space for resistance and action.

This video entitled ‘Three stories and a glass of milk’ [in Spanish, 3m] by the Catalan NGO Opcions is an analytical example of glocal interconnections in the international soya-production system. Tecojoja (Paraguay) and Cantabria (Spain) are the local producing places in the suffering end: Tecojoja sees thousands of farmers evicted from their lands for landowners to cultivate transgenic soya, and thus feed the industrial European livestocks; on the other side, Cantabria sees how in the past 12 years, 73% of non-industrial, cattle-farming family businesses have had to close down in face of industrial competition. The third and last local space analysed in the video (the localised, un-packed global space) is the harbour of Barcelona (Spain), the main entrance of transgenic soya to Europe. There, consumers and environmental activists demonstrate against meat made out of poverty and transgenic soya.

Glocal analysis can help both activists in their reflection of actions and development academics to get more politicised and go to the real roots of poverty and inequality. Many other concepts wait for our analysis in the streets. As for each library book on the shelf, ten newer versions are awaiting outside!

Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere is a PhD candidate working on the theme of popular education and social change within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

Digital activism in post-revolution Egypt: How relevant is online dissidence in the marathon for democracy?

Hani Morsi

The metaphorical use of the word ‘marathon’ in the title is intended to contrast the situation in Egypt during the January 25^th 2011 uprising with the present state of affairs in the country. To continue the metaphor, revolutions are akin to sprints; they utilize the powerful energy of sudden mass mobilizations to amplify popular dissidence and drive for (what can appear to be) immediate change. However, the problem with sprints is that they are not meant for running very far. The energy in popular uprisings cannot be sustained on the long haul, and social change that is both desirable and lasting is a matter of long-term endurance against intransigent and anti-democratic forces. The Egyptian revolution is far from finished, and the drive for true democracy will take a lot longer than the 18 days it took to topple Mubarak’s regime.  Considering the key role new communications technologies played in the Egyptian revolution, it is important to question how sustainable this role is in the drawn-out struggle for true democratic reform.

The Egyptian uprising did not happen in a sociopolitical vacuum where the only driving force is what could be instantly observed in a shallow analysis: the fundamental desire for revolt against oppression, which is a universal human imperative. For such a revolt to result in a sustainable drive for change, it needs to be preceded by and rooted in a rich social dialogue. It also needs to be channeled into challenging the status quo through focused activism. In a society where active political participation was stifled in the conventional spaces where power is contested and challenged (what I call here ‘real’space), a vibrant social discourse on change was transplanted in ‘virtual space’ by politically active and tech-savvy Egyptian youth (a demographic minority in Egypt). The ‘boots on the ground’ manifestation of such virtual form of activism came to being on January 25^th 2011 in Tahrir Square. Creating a false dichotomy between social interactions in virtual space and popular confrontational action in real space hinders our understanding of the dynamic between both. It could be argued that the only new thing about ‘digital social media’ is the ‘digital’ part. The means for fueling the popular drive for social justice have not changed much historically. Conversely, the forms these means take that have changed.

The comparison in the first paragraph between revolutionary and post-revolutionary contexts frames the analysis of the role of digital activism in an enduring drive for genuine democratic reform. I use the term ‘digital activism’ as opposed to ‘social media’ because the later is not necessarily descriptive of the use of digital social networks for activism. Social networks existed long before the internet. Political activism aided by digital social networks is what is we are concerned with herein. Digital social media is a term that describes a set of different yet related tools that, in the context of grassroots political activism, have disparate sub-roles in subverting political coercion. These roles alternated between helping reanimate a grassroots-level debate on change, to popular mobilization and organization for taking the fight from the networks to the streets.   During the early days of the revolution, one of the most important roles of digital social networks was acting as a distributed truth engine (an analogical term to distributed systems in computing, where multiple machines communicate with each other over a network to achieve a common goal), providing real-time information validated and confirmed by individuals at the epicenter of events, in effect providing a robust alternative to the propaganda presented by the largely state-controlled media. Once this umbilical cord of reliable news was severed (when Egypt went offline on orders from Mubarak’s government on January 27^th 2011,), the streets were flooded with even more people seeking out the truth and bolstering the revolutionaries’ stance in Tahrir Square.

Presently, all indicators evince that if any kind of change came about in the year since Mubarak was ousted, it is arguably a relapse. There is outrageous military persecution of dissent, freedom of expression and association is heavily stifled, until last week emergency laws remained in place and the use of disproportionate violence and torture against activists and protesters continue by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). Amidst all of this, online social networks still provide the spaces where the now-sentient discourse on democracy is revitalized, and activism is channeled from the virtual to the real. This is far from claiming that this is still a medium where the regime is out of its element. The SCAF frequently arrests and intimidates activists with loud online voices. Even Mubarak’s regime Gestapo, the now defunct State Security, used European digital infiltration technology that was used against bloggers and online activists. What is important to keep in mind, however, is that such coercive countermeasures have a diminishing effect in a post-revolutionary society. The real-time and distributed characteristics of digital social network technologies make complete control of information activism impossible. Scare tactics only add fuel to the revolutionary fire as news of  the violations are transmitted through the networks with unprecedented rapidness.

It would be naive, even condescending, to reduce the Arab Spring uprisings to the face value of the technological tools that catalyzed them. By the same token, it would be equally unwise to downplay the true role of digital activism tools in all stages of the popular quest for change. It is important to think of technologically-driven political dissidence as taking place on a continuum of activism that traverses through real and virtual spaces of power contestation. The digital in ‘digital activism’ necessitates both going beyond the boundaries of conventional paradigms of conceptualizing political unruliness, and a more thorough understanding of the different forms of emerging digital communication technologies and how they influence social interactions that lead to cultivating indigenous discourses on change.

Hani Morsi is a PhD candidate within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

The Egyptian revolution and the parable of the man who occupies your house

Mariz Tadros

There is a popular parable (or do I say allegory?) used by some disenfranchised Egyptians to describe the situation they are currently experiencing.  Here it goes: you are living in a house that is your own, a man barges in and occupies one of its rooms. You feel incensed and you pray to God that he will leave and focus your efforts to address this injustice. But then he brings his dog to live in the house – and you have to deal with him howling all night. So you forget about the man who has occupied your house and all you wish is that you would be able to get rid of his dog, that’s all you hope for. Then a donkey is brought into the house, and it is dirty and the stench is unbearable. And you forget about the man and the dog and you focus on the donkey – if only you could get rid of the donkey, that would be your one and only wish in life. But you end up with a state of mind in which you have forgotten about the man who originally occupied the house because the situation has gotten so much worse.

From the dawn of history, popular allegories and parables have been used by the people to articulate what political scientists theorize and render meaning to in highly complex terms. But the fact of the matter is that as many Egyptians tell us – the truth is bare and simple.  This is how the narrative goes, as described astutely by one Egyptian:

The Egyptian people willed to rebel against the status quo – they reclaimed their house, but then through a camouflaged military coup, the man (Supreme Council for Armed Forces) stepped in and occupied the house. People went down to the street and insisted they did not go out and get killed and maimed so that we can have a change of president – what they want is a change of regime – an end to the military hold on power. But then as you struggled to bring about the end of a military regime, the Muslim Brothers were brought in and you were in a situation where you said: forget about the military, let us focus on making sure that the Brothers do not push for a hegemonic hold on the country in the name of religion. Then came the Salafis, the radical Islamists, backed by external powers, who presented a greater danger to national identity, citizenship and social cohesion. You found yourself in a situation whereby you said: forget about the Brothers, let us focus on blocking the Salafis from turning Egypt back several centuries.

Some readers might be offended by this allegory, insisting that it epitomizes the worst forms of Islamophobia. But the fact of the matter is, that what is being discussed is a military regime in alliance with political movements who claim their legitimacy from religion, but who at the end of the day are neither the representatives nor custodians of religion, as much as they like to claim they are. And whether we like it or not, we need to go beyond political correctness and listen to what is being said on the Egyptian street – even if it is not by the majority who can claim their legitimacy from the ballot boxes (parliamentary elections). True,  the Brothers have built a strong constituency over the course of nearly forty years of work through the mosques and the welfare services. But it is also true that there is much to say about the processes and integrity of the elections. Despite all the media hype, we know that the higher authorities turned a blind eye to the abuse of religion by Islamists to win a constituency and demonize the others. We also know that in the Western media’s keenness to celebrate the “Arab spring”, there was a de-emphasis on the way in which the conditions of choice facing citizens did not allow for a fair and impartial consideration for who is the best candidate. The Brothers may have gotten a substantial vote anyway because of their constituency, but would it have secured them the clear majority they have in parliament today?

Looking retrospectively, many activists and revolutionaries are wondering whether they should have done more to prevent the man from entering the house in the first place. Did they as revolutionaries not welcome the man’s entry into the house by celebrating: “The people, the army, one hand!?”. Did they not claim victory too quickly when Mubarak was ousted and should they not have continued to protest until the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ( SCAF) pronounced a clear exit plan? Of course at that point, one of the major weaknesses of the revolutionary forces was that they could not agree on a unified transitional government that would yield power. There was diversity without unity – and that opened the door for the man to come into the house. Others argue, even if they had maintained the struggle for a fully civilian government, were they not already undermined by the fact that there was a done deal between SCAF and the Muslim Brothers? Whatever it be, that political moment is lost now. And the struggle will now be on multiple fronts: against the military, against the instrumentalization of religion by political forces who rule in the name of God, in addition to the struggle for bread, freedom and social justice which the Egyptian people went out for in January 2011. All these struggles are intertwined. And we must not fall into the trap of assuming that parliament is the only source of legitimacy. The Egyptian street will continuously reinvent its strategies of resistance, subversion and entitlements’ making. Whether it reflects the majority of the people or a small group, it does not matter. What matters is that we do not lose our sense of the pulse of the street, even if it is a small alley far from the centres of formal political power.

Mariz Tadros is a Research Fellow in the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and has just launched IDS Bulletin 43.1 “The Pulse on Egypt’s Revolt”.

Reflecting back upon the PPSC team’s activities in 2011

Danny Burns

As 2012 begins, I want to take this opportunity to wish you a happy (and stress free) New Year. In this blog I want to talk offer a few flavours of things that members of the team have been working on; others you will see from recent contributions to the blog; more will follow over the next weeks…

An increasing area of interest for development actors at all levels, from grassroots movements to major donors, is how to better understand the complex, shifting and multi-layered social and political environments in which development and change occur. Many organisations are searching for more relevant tools of context analysis. Jethro Pettit and others have been working on new tools for power and political economy analysis. Popular frameworks like the Powercube (developed by John Gaventa) are being adapted and combined with other approaches. Recent learning partnerships on power have included Oxfam, Novib, Hivos, Christian Aid, the Swedish Cooperative Centre, and Trocaire. Work has also been carried out within the UK voluntary and philanthropic sector with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,  Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, and the Carnegie UK Trust, Trust for London. This work has included three, year-long action learning processes with dozens of participants from these foundations and more than 20 of their partner organisations Training modules on power have adapted into Spanish and French and facilitated by IDS staff in universities and workshops in Spain, West Africa and Latin America.

The team’s work around “unruly politics” has been growing steadily through the “Summer of Unruly Reading” group facilitated by Akshay Khanna. We have been building a collective conceptual analysis within the team, and growing a work programme with Hivos and their partners.  We have also been building connections with people in the Occupy movement. Mariz Tadros continues to be closely engaged with the emerging situation in Egypt and other parts of North Africa.

PPSC has been contracted to engage in a number of new programmes this year. These include:

• a three year programme on gender and sexuality funded by SIDA (Sweden)
• a three year programme with SDC (Switzerland) –on  participatory methodologies and developing the resource centre as a hub for materials on participatory methodologies
• a three  year programme with SDC working with the IDS Governance team to support the work of their Decentralisation and Local Governance Network
• an extension of Gates Foundation funding for our Community Led Total Sanitation Hub

The PPSC team played a major role in designing and delivering the Bellagio initiative on the future of international development and philanthropy in pursuit of human well being which comprised a series of global dialogues, commissioned papers and a major international summit. PPSC fellows – Danny Burns (Delhi and Kinna, Kenya), Patta Scott-Villiers (Kinna, Kenya), Alex Shankland (Sao Paulo) and Mariz Tadros (Cairo) – facilitated four of the global dialogues. Georgina Powell Stevens co-ordinated the summit participation of around 200 participants.   In June of this year Alex Shankland and I, will be facilitating another Bellagio conference on Indigenous health with colleagues from KIT (Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam).

Rosemary McGee has recently carried out a major review of accountability and transparency initiatives with John Gaventa. Naomi Hossain continues her longitudinal work with Oxfam and others on food price volatility; Joanna Wheeler, Peter Clarke and I are working on a six country action research programme with VSO and the international volunteering network FORUM on the impact of volunteering on poverty; Joanna Wheeler and Tessa Lewin have been working on a range of participatory video initiatives; Marzia Fontana has been working with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of Lao PDR on a project which has brought Lao-based women’s groups and international organisations into dialogue with each other. Rosalind Eyben has been organising The Big Push Forward – an international initiative that links practitioners and researchers to identify and share strategies and approaches for fair assessment and evaluation. Patta Scott Villiers is leading a programme of action research in Karamoja Northern Uganda funded by Irish Aid. Alex Shankland is opening up new areas of work on the role of emerging powers in reshaping development especially through civil society.

Pathways to Women‘s Empowerment in the Middle East hosted a UN Women organized conference on “Pathways for Women in Democratic Transitions: International Experiences and Lessons Learned” in Cairo. The meeting featured Michele Bachelet and others discussing legal reform, women’s movements and gender-responsive accountability systems. Mariz Tadros was a speaker on the panel “Building Strong Women’s Movements in Democratic Transitions”.

The team has recently published a number of IDS working papers and bulletins and will publish a bulletin on Action Research in International Development this spring.

Finally I want to say a huge thank you and good luck to John Gaventa and Kate Hawkins. John has been an inspiration to the PPSC team for more than a decade. He has joined the Coady Institute in Canada as their new Director. Kate Hawkins our sexuality programme convenor who has initiated and developed a great deal of exciting work within the team will be leaving IDS (but will continue to work with us as a free lancer). I would also like to welcome to the team  Research Fellow Jerker Edstrom and Jas Vaghadia who will be working on our gender, masculinities and sexuality programmes. Welcome also to Naomi Vernon who is joining our CLTS team.

As I say, just a few flavours of the many different things that are happening. If you want to find out more, follow the links, or contact us directly.

Danny Burns is the Team Leader for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and will be publishing IDS Bulletin 43.3 ”Action Research in Development” in May 2012

Participation team online: blogging highlights from 2011

Stephen Wood

As we move into 2012, I thought it would be interesting to reflect upon some of the blog highlights that were written by colleagues in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) since we launched last year:

• Aid conditionality dominated the headlines again in the latter part of last year when the British Government made an explicit link between aid and Southern countries’ treatment of LGBT human rights. Research Fellow akshay khanna tackled the political fallout of this announcement head-on in a blog post “Aid conditionality and the limits of a politics of sexuality”, when he challenged the usefulness of an LGBT politics that fails to account for the complexity and variety of sexualities outside of dominant western models and how countries such as India and Brazil are leading the way in developing much more nuanced politics of sexuality.
• With much internationally attention being paid to efforts to increase economic growth, Research Fellow Rosalind Eyben’s blog post, “Care work should be at the heart of a people-centred economy”, was a timely reminder that discussion is still desperately needed around the vast amount of unpaid work existing outside the market economy, that underpins and sustains human wellbeing and yet is unaccounted for by most development organisations. Those taking on these care responsibilities, mostly women, are usually those with least voice and ability to influence policy change that might account for this within societies across the globe.
• Finally, as the struggle for democratic representation continues across the Middle East, the reports by Research Fellow Mariz Tadros from Cairo on the unruly politics being conducted by Egyptians protesting in Tahrir Square against military rule have been an eye-opening insight into the hopes, fears and challenges experienced by those fighting for change. Her blog post “From unruly politics to ballot boxes: rethinking the terms of democratic engagement in Egypt” was a particularly thought-provoking contribution.

As always, these recommendations only scratch the surface of the rich discussion and debates we have been conducting on our blog. If you haven’t done so already, I really would encourage you to sign up via email to receive each of our blog posts as they are published and engage our authors in dialogue by commenting upon their work.  As we are building up our audience, if you can recommend us to anyone who might be interested in engaging with our work, we’d be appreciative. We have some really exciting material due in the coming weeks and months that you don’t want to miss.

Stephen Wood is the Team Administrative Co-ordinator for the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS and is also a member of the IDS Sexuality and Development Programme. He can be found on Twitter at: StephenWood_UK