ABSTRACT
North Africa (interchangeably used with the term ‘Maghrib’) has historically featured as a contributor to Euro-Med cultures and civilisations. Mesopotamia, Egypt and Phoenicia all at one point in time or another mediated processes of infusion, inclusion and diffusion of ‘learning’. The flow was not one-way. The ‘travel’ of ideas left lasting inscriptions on the region’s cultural map. As North Africa enters its ‘democratic’ and ‘revolutionary’moment, it is apposite to address the question of democratic knowledge and trans-democratic exchange. This question is noted by glaring omission in most accounts of the Maghrib since the eruption of the 2011 uprisings. This moment registers continuity as much as rupture. It is a moment opportune for a break, encouraging the unshackling of the region from postcolonial histories of tutelage from without. Yet, at the same time, it renews the ethos of exchange, concomitantly unmaking North Africa as a space of ‘exile’, ‘exception’ and ‘otherness’ and remaking it as a shared space of democratising ferment, as subalterns seek renewal and self-conception through ‘democratic knowledge’. The essays in this special edition of the Journal of North African Studies engage with the poten-
tiality of ‘democratic knowledge’. The notion of a ‘democratic knowledge turn’may not as yet be in full swing. A hint of it, nonetheless, is heralded by the Arab uprisings of 2011. There is no democracy without a cumulatively attained theoretical and practical ‘toolkit’ of democratic knowledge; and for democratic knowledge to appeal to the arduous, long and complex process of engineering democratisation it must have didactic application and/or potentiality. Neither democratisation nor democratic knowledge is a given. Both are knowable within contexts of history, geography, language, culture and power relations, local and global. Both may lend themselves to fierce contestation. Like democratisation, democratic knowledge is bound to be dynamic, as opposite static. ‘Democratic knowledge’ is a term that involves and revolves around processes of reception as well as transfer of learning. A number of lines of inquiry frame the enterprise in this special issue of the highly esteemed interdisciplinary Journal of North African Studies. One investigation raises questions about challenges of knowledgemaking or production and application. In this moment of ‘in-between-ness’, how does the
domination-resistance dialectics unfold? For instance, how does the necessity for a new learning curve projecting a new brand of democratic knowledge challenge Euro-American centres of knowledge-making? One of the leading voices of democratisation, Professor Laurence Whitehead, offers ideas and
lines of investigation that are meant to provoke further thinking about these unsettled questions. Whose democratic knowledge can support emerging processes in the context of the Arab Spring, and what are some of the philosophical questions regarding knowledge production and the decolonisation of studies of democratic transition that call for attention. Larbi Sadiki attempts to address these questions, linking this to the ‘paradigmatic’ crisis of the whole field of transitology. Six case studies covering North African states give initial manifest about democratic knowledge convergence in the entire Maghrib, with special reference to the Maghrib (Joffé) Egypt (Moussa), Libya (Boduszynski), Morocco (El Hachimi) and Tunisia (Cavatorta and Martin). So many years spent as a student of Maghribi polity and society have fuelled Professor George Joffé’s interest in indigenous norms, know-how and experiences, which he explores in his contribution. These have proved to be especially resourceful in being deployed for a variety of purposes, reflecting the ‘Islamic’, such as the demand for ‘bread, freedom and dignity’ during the Arab Spring. Boduszynski explores an important theme concerning the kind of agency mobilised between Arab/ Maghribi and Western actors, as well as within the Maghrib to create new democratic knowledge suited for the transitional moment heralded by the Arab Spring in Libya. How are Salafists and secularists, for instance, coaching themselves into pragmatic and bargain politics? These are two questions that represent the focus of the analyses by Cavatorta and Martin. Moussa zooms onto the polarities of the Egyptian case, showcasing how Islamist actors grappled with the revolution and how the tests and counter-tests reproduced a revolution in reverse with its own lessons for the elusive but continuous search for democracy. The questions are too complex (defying treatment in a quick ‘snapshot’, much less putting to bed) for one special issue of this highly-regarded journal to pretend to address authoritatively. Resistance techniques and revolutionary know-how have opened ample spaces of knowledge
convergence and transfer. New social movements from Morocco to Egypt are grasping each other’s lessons into how to rebuild bottom-up activism and deploy their followers for the travails of rolling back authoritarianism. Amongst states, elections, constitution-making, the quest for transitional justice and coalition-building are all processes that continue to enrich the emergence of democratic identities and moralities. They provide much food for thought about how to frame and reframe the problematic of democratic knowledge at this historical political moment in the Middle East and North Africa. So does the question of Western partners who increasingly look less certain about the ways in which to approach democracy promotion as partial stakeholders and not exclusively in full possession of the full gamut of resources required for democratic transitional know-how. Four years in, with the transitional processes still unfurling and incomplete, new elites, political parties, forces, voices and discourses are learning the democratic rope. Their stories wait to be narrated. This special issue opens up a vista for inquiring anew into one Herculean challenge posed by the Arab Spring, democratic knowledge, goading area studies (in this instance of North Africa) so as to stimulate intellectual discussion, curiosity and excitement about how democracy comes to be ‘knowable’ – not imponderable as in representations of its career in the Arab region thus far. Thus of all the issues that relate to the democratic and revolutionary moment in the Maghrib,
none takes precedence over democratic knowledge as potentially the newest ‘turn’ calling for special attention. The famous phrase in quantum physics that ‘nothing exists until it is measured’ applies, urgently, to the question of democratising the Maghrib. This special issue initiates a kind
of collaborative ‘workshop’, aiming to highlight these questions in a preliminary investigation. The rationale is to showcase the insights of scholars currently working on the Maghrib and/or democratisation (e.g. Laurence Whitehead) and who can, even if tentatively, narrate many a ‘story’ about democratic knowledge, pre and post Arab Spring. They possess access to primary data and evidence that can be marshalled to elaborate in a tentative way some of the stories revolving around democratic knowledge and attendant democratic learning. These stories will contribute initial thinking into an area that is largely noted by absence and silence. For, there are more matters awaiting critical discussion in ‘democratic knowledge’ and ‘democratic learning’, than are hitherto narrated in existing transitology in the context of the Maghrib and the Arab region as a whole.
