History and Political Science

On November 7, 2010 the Tunisian rapper El General (Hamada Ben Amor) uploaded his song “Rais Le Bled” (President, Your Country) onto Facebook.  In a country that forbids politically conscious bands from performing gigs, El General’s lyrics were incendiary: “My President, your country is dead / People eat garbage / Look at what is happening / Misery Everywhere / Nowhere to sleep / I’m speaking for the people who suffer / Ground under feet.”  Considerable attention has been paid to the “Arab Spring” and the Tunisian street vendor Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi (March 29, 1984 –January 4, 2011) whose self-immolation set off a series of protests in late 2010 and early 2011.  However, as Andy Morgan writes, “it took a rapper to light a firecracker and lob it at Tunisia’s youth.”  El General was later arrested by the Tunisian police but released after several days of detention.  His release further catalyzed the uprising in Tunisia and beyond as Al Jazeera and other news stations picked up his facebook released song.  According to Morgan, “El Général’s rap broke the spell of fear and showed his peers that it was possible to rebel and survive.”  As scholars of social change universally agree, political organizing is an essential ingredient for a successful revolution.  However, music may also provide a voice to express the collective rage, discontent, and hope of an oppressed class of people and serve as an antidote to the paralytic of fear.  The role of hip hop (artists, culture and music) in contemporary social movements in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) offers an exciting but under-explored approach to the study of political change.  This chapter will discuss the role hip hop has played in the African Awakenings (Manji and Ekine, 2011) with special focus on its deep rooted politics of speaking truth to power.  As Hip Hop’s story unfolds it will be shown that it is playing a significant and vital role in moving Africa from fear to freedom.

The book, Issues in African Political Economies, is available for purchase on the publisher web site: http://www.cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781611638790/Issues-in-African-Political-Economies
and
on amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Issues-African-Political-Economies-Falola/dp/1611638798/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475767971&sr=1-2&keywords=issues+in+african+political+economies

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1163/15691497-12341429 
This article interprets the globalization of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance through the lens of Manfred B. Steger’s concept of the “global imaginary.” It argues that the globalization of nonviolence and the global imaginary are mutually reinforcing processes. Nonviolent protests are driven by local issues and are, thus, context specific and local but, as in the case of the Arab uprisings, as they spread through the MENA and beyond, the uprisings provided historically linked examples of a growing global consciousness, a “global” we.
Please see the journal web page for full article or email me: http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15691497-12341429.

Popular discourses of democracy and democratization, disseminated
by Western media, framed American perceptions of the uprisings as a
consequence of long-repressed demands for greater enfranchisement,
free and fair elections, and pluralist democracy. Absent from this
narrative was an appropriate comparison and analysis of the disparate US foreign policy stances pertaining to the region, the discursive threads
linking some of them, the evolution of Washington’s rhetoric, and the
practical implications of these for the countries in which uprisings
occurred. Therefore, what is most salient to the current collection of
essays is a critical analysis of the dominant American discourse which has presented the uprisings as a simplistic binary between democracy and authoritarianism.

Exploring Global Populisms (Spring 2019) Co-editors: Amy Skonieczny and Amentahru Wahlrab We are witnessing the growing global appeal of political populisms—particularly in regions that were ardent supporters of globalization. Indeed, populism's rejection of 'globalism' and its worldwide geographical reach are two defining features that make it a truly 'global' phenomenon. While there has been a recent explosion of research in the area of populism, particularly right-wing populism in Europe, this call for papers seeks to address rising populist movements as a reaction to perceived consequences of globalization as a global phenomenon. Moreover, it seeks to address the current and future consequences of a 'populist' future for human rights, democratic institutions, and the global economy. This special issue on Exploring Global Populisms invites papers that address the transnational, cross-border features of populism from multiple dimensions and that engage both theoretically and empirically with a range of questions including but not limited to: 1) How can current and future directions in the study of global populisms help us understand our contentious political climate? 2) What is the significance of capitalism and the state in shaping global populisms in different social and geographical contexts? 3) How are the nationalist and nativist conceptions of identity prevalent in populist discourses challenging democratic practices and institutions? 4) How is populism manifesting in different locales as well as translating across borders? Ultimately, this special issue seeks to engage with and push forward the critical contributions of scholarship on populism in a globalized world. We invite full manuscripts of 6,000-8,000 words that reflect new work on the topics above as well as manuscripts which engage with a groundbreaking article, special edition or recent symposium on the subject of global populism.

Wahlrab explores the understudied question of the function of the global imaginary to facilitate the rise of a global non-violent consciousness. By summarizing the tension in the literature between advocates of the national imaginary and the global imaginary, Wahlrab shows that non-violent social movements imagine themselves to be challenges to national forces and global forces. He also suggests that the national imaginary is not enough to explain the interconnected wave of non-violent protests that erupted in 2010. ‘Imagining Global Non-violent Consciousness’ finds that non-violent political activists from across the globe acknowledge their kindred relationship with each other and endeavor to support the flourishing of local and global social justice.