CAMRI | Looking Back, Looking Forward. Conversation with Authors of The Arab Uprisings: A decade of struggle

Looking Back, Looking Forward. Conversation with Authors of The Arab Uprisings: A decade of struggle

A Project by Miriyam Aouragh, published by Transnational Institute

The final webinar of the long running project The Arab uprisings: A decade of struggles took place on 7th December. The event brought together the authors of the projects highly commended Arab uprisings dossier published by the Transnational Institute.

Since 2010, the Arab region has witnessed waves of inspiring uprisings and popular resistance against authoritarianism and dispossession. Social movements, workers, youths and marginalised sections of society rose up to demand bread, freedom and justice. These various people’s movements find themselves pitted against entrenched authoritarian and counter-revolutionary forces bent on suppressing them. Nevertheless, the insurgent hope is still alive as what is taking place right now in Sudan with people insisting to continue their revolution is just a testimony of this ongoing hunger for justice and liberation. All of these momentous events between 2010 and 2021 have opened new horizons for people to express their discontent and demand radical change and reforms, forcing almost every government in the region to concede on issues – both political and economic. In this webinar, we will hear from some outstanding scholars and activists from the region who have written brilliant essays for our recently published dossier on the Arab Uprisings.

Panellists:

Ghassen Ben Khalifa: Journalist and a revolutionary socialist from Tunisia. He is the editing coordinator of the media outlet inhiyez.com.
uzan Alneel: Sudanese writer and activist. She is co-founder of the Innovation, Science and Technology Think-tank for People-Centered Development (ISTiNAD).
li Amouzai: activist and researcher from Morocco. He is a member of the Almounadil-a current (a revolutionary socialist labour organisation).
Rafeef Ziadah: Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy in the Department of International Development, King’s College London
Fourate Chahal El Rekaby: a Lebanese artist and graphic designer. She made all the illustration’s for the dossier alongside an art collage.

Other webinars in this series included Counterrevolution and Revolutionary discontent: Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain and The Arab uprisings a decade on: Egypt and Tunisia, both of which are available on this site, or through YouTube.

About Miriyam Aouragh

Dr. Miriyam Aouragh is a Reader at CAMRI. She has studied the implications of the internet as it was first introduced (“Web 1.0”) in Palestine (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2000-2008) to understand in particular the significance of techno-social evolutions by analysing how a new technology coincided with the outbreak of a mass uprising (Second Intifada 2000-2005). She then focused on the political role of new internet developments, such as blogging and social networking (“Web 2.0”) for grassroots activism in Lebanon and Palestine (Postdoc, Oxford Internet Institute, 2009-2011). After earning a Leverhulme Early Career (UoW, 2013-2016) funding Miriyam set-up a critical research project in which she relates theory with online analysis through a focus on the complex revolutionary dynamics in the Arab world. In these new techno-social relations, marked by revolution and counter-revolution, she researched and wrote about the paradoxical context of online-revolution and cyber-imperialism. During fieldwork in Palestine, Jordan Lebanon and Morocco, she combined participant observation and interviews with media analyses and throughout her academic projects and collaborations in general, she relates online studies and observations with ethnographic (offline) methodologies, and theoretical focus on critical race, political-economy and infrastructures. Miriyam theorizes how the contradictions of capitalism shape the modes and meanings of resistance in the era of revolution and digital transformations. Her work is published in several books and journals (see Publications) including her own monograph Palestine Online (IB Tauris 2011), forthcoming book on Cyber Imperialism (2021) and monograph about the (r)evolutionary dynamics of protest in Morocco (2022). Miriyam teaching about internet, (global) media, (Middle East/race) politics and anthropology. She welcomes and supervises PhD students.