On December 17th 2010, Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, killing himself in protest and inspiring millions across the Arab world to action. This week, Jessica Northey from Coventry University came to explain the rationale behind these and other protest movements.
What motivates people to action?
We began by looking at Social Movement Theory (SMT), though if there is one thing I’ve learned in this module, it’s that broad conceptual frameworks for ordering the dynamics of development politics rarely always work. For over a century, it has been the perceived wisdom that “no one can say where revolutions will occur, and much less when” (Ellwood, 1905: 59), but that hasn’t stopped SMT academics from trying, nor ‘The Economist’.
Patronisingly entitled ‘The Shoe-Thrower’s Index’, this graph attempted to translate various factors into tangible predictions for which country would fall next during the turbulent Arab Spring. Both the name and the methodology are indicative of western perspectives on the uprisings. Retrospectively, it had varying success, but such indices and SMTs attempt to reduce a very complex set of highly sensitive factors, from many different contexts, into one neat framework. It just isn’t possible.
How do movements impact upon political life?
As I learned from the reading this week, the Arab Spring was completely different to most revolts before it, with no connections to class, nationalism, or, as both Bayat (2013) and Roy (2013) are clear in pointing out, Islamism. Associations with political Islam were merely circumstantial, or somewhat ‘Orientalist’ perceptions of the western media and academics like Fradkin (2013). As Bayat has argued, people had deep grievances concerning political life and participation, and were protesting on the basis of reform not revolt.
A Pashtun Spring?
Many of these same features can be found in 2018’s Pashtun Protection Movement, which saw thousands of Pashtuns of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan (FATA) rising up against state aggression.
FATA has since become absorbed into the neighbouring province, finally providing Pashtuns with codified Human Rights and political participation (Wazir, 2018; Atkins, 2018), and so this a remarkable demonstration of the impact social movements can have upon development politics.
References
Atkins, H. (2018). Pakistan’s ‘Pashtun Spring’ faces off against a colonial-era law. The London School of Economics and Political Science [blog]. Available at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2018/05/25/pakistans-pashtun-spring-faces-off-against-a-colonial-era-law/ [Accessed: 13th January 2019]
Bayat, A. (2013). The Arab Spring and Its Surprises. Development and Change, 44(2):587-601.
Ellwood, C. A. (1905) A Psychological Theory of Revolutions. American Journal of Sociology, 11(1): 49-59.
Fradkin, H. (2013). Arab Democracy or Islamist Revolution? Journal of Democracy, 24(1): 5-13.
Roy, O. (2013). There will be no Islamist Revolution. Journal of Democracy, 24(1): 14-19.
Wazir, A. (2018) What does the pashtun tahafuz movement want. The Diplomat [online]. Available at: https://thediplomat.com/2018/04/what-does-the-pashtun-tahafuz-movement-want [Accessed 13th January 2019]
Development Policy and Politics 