cg+hr

Africa’s Voices project

Africa’s Voices project

The French Embassy has generously sponsored a cycle of lectures and workshops which bring to Cambridge leading scholars from France to interact and foster research collaborations with experts in Cambridge from across the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Humanities and Social Sciences. In this second year of collaboration, the cycle of talks and workshops will explore the complex theme of identity in 21st-century France and beyond. The lectures, which will be given in English, are open to any member of the University. In this third lecture, co-organised by the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, Francois Burgat, director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) will give a talk on When Authoritarianism fails in the Arab World: understanding the recourse to the Muslim lexicon. For the first time in decades, 'Arab revolutions', ushered in by the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, make it possible to seriously envision a phasing out of the autocratic machinery in the Middle East and North Africa.Whatever the end results of this awakening, the glimpse at a post-authoritarian era has already affected domestic and international political dynamics, if only by anticipation. In the parliamentary arenas, even if it is clear that its roots are to be found deep in the fourteen centuries of Muslim history and the realities or the myths of a long interaction with the West, the explanation of the rise of contemporary Islamism can be circumscribed within a timeline of the last hundred years or so. It is essential, to reach a better understanding, to distinguish two processes and so two levels of analysis: on the one hand, the essentially identity-centered reasons for which a generation of political actors originally choose to "speak Muslim", that is to say, preferentially and at times ostentatiously to have recourse to a lexicon or a vocabulary derived from Muslim culture; on the other hand, the diversified uses that such actors make of this lexicon, in each of the countries where the failure of Authoritarianism offers them new opportunities as well as in the North/South arena, contingent on variables which are simultaneously multiple, banal and profane, and so determine their different political claims and mobilisations. Francois Burgat is a political scientist, director of research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research), and, since 2008, director of the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO - French Institute for the Near East, http://www.ifporient.org), a leading multidisciplinary research institution at the service of knowledge production on the societies of the Near-East with a focus on Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories and Iraq. F.Burgat has carried research in the Maghreb, Near East and Arabic Peninsula for the last 30 years and worked in the University of Constantine in Algeria, at the Cedej in Cairo, and was between 1997 and 2003 the director of the Centre Français d'Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales in Sanaa, Yemen. His publications available in English include Islamism in the Shadow of al-Qaeda, Texas University Press, 2008;Face to face with political islam, Oxford, IB Tauris, 2002; and, with John Esposito (eds.): Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East, London, Hurst, 2002.

Conference Summary After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways? The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.

Conference Summary After witnessing the critical role new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) played in supporting political change in Northern Africa at the beginning of 2011, expectations have grown that in Sub-Saharan Africa authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes may also be challenged by emerging uses of ICTs for political change. However, there have been little signs that long-standing leaders in countries like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, or Uganda may be ousted from power by a popular uprising supported by and coordinated through the use of new technologies. What are the reasons for this apparent absence of impact? How much of the lack of technologically mediated mobilizations for greater rights and political freedoms depends simply on the limited diffusion of ICTs such as the Internet? How much depends instead on the particular nature of politics on the African continent (where the most significant protests to date have been channelled by partisan and divisive politics rather than being the expression of an empowered civil society)? And, in the absence of revolutionary outcomes, are ICTs affecting and possibly transforming the nature of political mobilization and participation in more subtle ways? The workshop will address these questions by providing a platform for scholars studying the role of ICTs in political transformations to engage with the arguments put forward by researchers investigating governance processes in Africa. It will focus not only on the newest technologies, but explore the unique ways in which new and old means of communication are being and could be combined in Sub-Saharan Africa to enable citizens to express voice and affect political processes. Participants will examine, for example, whether and how the increasing availability of mobile phones is promoting innovative ways of influencing government policies and of claiming rights, but also how these innovations fit in longer term patterns of use of communication to affect governance. The overarching aim is to explore whether, as has been the case for applications such as mobile banking, the most significant uses of ICTs for participatory politics in Africa may emerge from a unique combination of global influences and local needs, rather than from the application of tools and uses that have been proved successful in external contexts. This inter-disciplinary workshop complements the Cambridge Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR)’s current research project on how innovations in ICTs can transform governance processes in Africa.