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• W2954618212 abstract "There have been cyclical calls for interdisciplinarity between Middle East studies andinternational relations, as well as, in general, between the social sciences and Arabicand Islamic studies in response to ever new challenges and crises in the region. Theso-called Arab Spring has probably inaugurated a new such cycle. This chapterresponds to the need for a renewed interdisciplinary focus on Middle East societies andpolities by addressing the complex relation between old and new media, the publicsphere, and the political culture of socio-political actors in the Middle East. It alsopoints out some implications of the transnational dimension of the relation betweenpolitics and publicness.The recent success of pro-democracy movements in the Arab world is just the lateststage of a much longer and deeper wave. In particular, it brings the state (not necessarily a clone of the European, Westphalian state, but in the form of a postcolonial‘developmental’ state; see Ayubi 1995) more forcefully back into the comparative picture,to the extent the Arab Spring has evidenced that underneath authoritarian structures(both at the level of governance and of social relations) public spheres have existed andclaimed social and political relevance for several decades now (Salvatore 2011).The events associated with the Arab Spring have been, therefore, a big surprise onlyfor those observers who did not pay sufficient attention to public sphere dynamics overthe years. Yet it should also be mentioned that others made the inverted mistake ofpretending to discover that the new media, and particularly the social media, represented a technological panacea allegedly brought from the West to the Middle East,and singled them out not only against the rest of the mediascape, but also againstsociety and politics at large, ignoring that their role in the uprisings was important, yetcircumscribed to specific dimensions of the mobilization endeavours. No doubt, therefore, the Arab Spring has had the merit of pushing forward the boundaries of lazythinking about politics in the Middle East. It has prompted various interrogations notonly concerning the role of new media in the revolutionary events, but also with regardto the factors that allow for public spheres to unfold their transformative potential, upto the point of becoming incubators of revolutionary arenas.The presuppositions, at the level of political culture, for the formations of the citizensparticipating in the public sphere do not need to be perfectly aligned with those distilled out by Habermas in his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989[1962]), which was based on the comparison (through a secondary analysis) of thehistorical trajectories of the emergence of public spheres in England, Scotland, Franceand Germany. The approach I have been adopting in previous studies (Salvatore 2007,2011), and which can be also applied to the Arab Spring, is at the same time consistentwith this main tradition of social-scientific enquiry, yet sufficiently critical of its shortcomings, which are also due to an inevitably Eurocentric perspective of the theory(Salvatore 2012). The socio-cultural embeddedness of the public sphere (and, in thespecific case of modern Arab societies, the pioneering role played by Muslim reformersin its emergence) is either ignored or wilfully bracketed out (for an exception, see Eder2006). In this context, the diffusely Western, normative expectation according to whicha prerequisite of a democratic public sphere is a democratic political culture would beno more than a neo-colonial tautology. Its collateral, though perhaps unintended,damage has been to provide justification to a time-honoured, Western Realpolitik consisting in supporting docile dictators, pending a ‘democratic maturation’ of non-Western peoples. Habermas exposed himself to waves of constructive criticism andenrichment in the last 15 years, not least through scholarly trips to Egypt and Iran.Yet, both empirical research and theory conducted on the topic of the public spherehave moved forward ever since, in spite of whatever integration and revision Habermashimself has been ready to acknowledge or not.The most important legacy of his work should be carefully assessed in view of pre-sent and future challenges and research goals. The Habermasian public sphere fulfils astrategic function within modern and modernizing societies since it mediates betweenthe media or the communication environment at large (down to face-to-face interactionand socialization) and the political arena. Not only has he never maintained that therecan be no public sphere under the shadow of authoritarian government, but he showedthat actually the opposite is true: namely, that the condition for a public sphere toemerge is the necessity to respond to absolutism. Therefore, the continual existence ofan authoritarian government is the condition of possibility for the emergence andthriving of a public sphere. Actually, in the last part of his famous book he decried thedecay of the public sphere in the context of a democratic welfare state (Habermas 1989[1962]: 181-235). He also showed that in spite of the fact that the European revolutionsof 1848 largely failed, the legacy of public sphere cultures and practices survived theevents and became an asset in future struggles.In this spirit, while examining the Arab Spring from the viewpoint of the public sphere,one should both adopt a longer-term perspective and avoid identifying the political effectiveness of the public sphere with short-term democratization gains. The evolution of amodern public sphere in the Middle East goes back at least to the last third of the 19thcentury, if not earlier, as it coincided with the rise of the periodical press (Salvatore 2009).The growth of a public sphere in each and every country of the region and most notablyat a pan-Arab level has created over time a contentious space, whose careful analysis hadheralded (long before the onset of the Arab Spring) a potential to unsettle the variousdiagnoses of the allegedly resilient authoritarian shell of Middle Eastern states." @default.
• W2954618212 created "2019-07-12" @default.
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• W2954618212 date "2014-12-17" @default.
• W2954618212 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W2954618212 title "A Public Sphere Revolution? Social Media versus Authoritarian Regimes" @default.
• W2954618212 doi "https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315763026-46" @default.
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