中产阶级与埃及政局变化

本文认为,2011年埃及变局主要归因于中产阶级的民生问题。萨达特—穆巴拉克的政策以及各种外力导致了埃及社会结构的扭曲,引发中产阶级的政治地位下降、经济能力减弱、生活困难加剧,使中产阶级由社会的引领者变为政权的抗争者,最终颠覆了穆巴拉克政权。本文分析了中产阶级与这一社会变化之间的逻辑关系后强调,2011年埃及变局将有利于中产阶级的重新崛起与社会结构的合理发展。     

Workers' Protest in Egypt: Neo-liberalism and Class Struggle in 21st Century

From 1998 to 2008 some 2 million Egyptian workers participated in 2,623 factory occupations, strikes, demonstrations, or other collective actions. This social movement does not have a national leadership or program and has not been supported by the Egyptian Trade Union Federation. It is propelled by locally generated grievances that have been produced by the acceleration of the neo-liberal transformation of Egypt since 2004. This workers movement has not changed the existing structures of power that constrain Egyptian working people because the informal, local networks that have sustained the movement are, by their nature, unable to organize a national-scale political movement on their own.     

Labor after Neoliberalism: The Birth of the Insecure Class in South Korea

Abstract

This article examines the rise and fall of organized labor in post-democratization, neoliberal Korea and traces the process through which a new labor underclass has been created since the late 1990s. Under the sweeping implementation of neoliberal policies, Korean labor has become increasingly fragmented, stratified, and marginalized both in the market and political arena. In this polarizing process, an ‘insecure class’ was born, consisting of irregular workers and the low-income self-employed. These working people are characterized by precarious labor conditions, bare social protection coverage, and frail organizational–political representation. This study explicates such a drastic restructuration of the Korean working people from the interaction of chaebol-centered economic structure, labor unions' organizational narrowness, and unrepresentative political parties devoid of programmatic competition. The examination of the insecure class in Korea casts light on the significance of class issues in neoliberal political economy and the analytical importance of rethinking social class in contemporary capitalist societies.     

Psychology in the Arab World: Past, Present, and Future

In this article, we present a broad-based view of psychology in the Arab countries. We begin by casting light on the relevant contributions by ancient Arab scholars in the Middle Ages. Given that systematic scientific investigation of this legacy has been minuscule, we argue that in the future, scholars seeking to provide a more balanced and comprehensive history of Arab psychology should reanalyze these works. We point out that in the early decades of the modern twentieth century, Western psychology was introduced in the Arab countries, especially in Egypt—the gateway through which such psychology was introduced and practiced. By the early 1960s, a number of universities had been established in some Arab countries, and Egyptian academicians, including psychologists, were invited to perform teaching, research, and administration tasks. Their legacy was a discipline bearing most of the strengths and weaknesses of Egyptian psychology, although in spite of such commonalties, there exist also some interesting differences characterizing psychology in the various Arab countries. The final section of the article summarizes some key aspects endemic to psychology in the Arab countries.     

论当前中东剧变的国内因素及其国际影响

从2010年12月17日突尼斯失业青年布瓦吉吉自焚开始,一场席卷突尼斯全国的政治变革大潮迅速蔓延至中东几乎所有阿拉伯国家。这一突如其来的变化,预示着更为复杂的政治变革进程已经开始。从目前情况来看,各国表面上貌似群龙无首、组织松散的街头抗议,实质都是围绕着"变革"这一主题展开,大量失业青年成为这一"变革"的主要参与力量,而网络新媒体则扮演了推波助澜的角色。变革、青年和网络是中东各国目前政治剧变的三个关键因素,进一步认清三者的互动关系及其作用和影响,不仅可以更好地了解中东当前的政治发展进程,也对维护我国的国家安全和社会稳定,有着十分重要的现实意义。     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

中东的周期性动荡和战争成因

半个多世纪来，中东地区一直存在周期性的动荡和战争，严重阻碍了该地区正常国际关系的建构，也使阿拉伯民族的凝聚力和同外部力量抗争的能力不断受到挑战。外部力量对该地区的激烈争夺、重要的地理位置和油气资源以及中东国家之间的尖锐矛盾是造成动荡和战争的主要原因。     

The Politics of Investment and Growth in Egypt: Experimenting with a New Approach

‘Improve the investment climate!’ is the dominant advice for governments wishing to achieve substantial increases in productive private investment. However, national‐level investment‐climate approaches have been criticised for not paying adequate attention to context and feasibility. This article experiments with a new approach which focuses on sectors and on relationships between policy‐makers and investors, and shows how their common interest helped to overcome obstacles to investment and growth in Egypt. Such public‐private relationships can be abused but they have provided effective transitional arrangements for enhancing investment and inducing a new growth dynamic.     

The student movement in Turkey: a case study of the relationship between (re)politicization and democratization

One particularly striking aspect of the global waves of social movements is the increasing politicization of youth, including students. Taking this as its starting point, this article discusses what the politicization of youth could mean for democracy and democratization in Turkey. This is important because, especially since 2011, Turkish politics has been dominated by debates concerning authoritarianization. Focusing on the largest student organization in Turkey, the Student Collectives (SC), this article shows that the relationship between politicization and democratization is more complicated than at first sight. Some aspects of the student movement in Turkey suggest it is an important moment of democratization in Turkey while other aspects arouse scepticism. Three crucial indicators of a movement’s democratic potential are whether it attends to deciphering the existing constellation of power relations, reflects on the possibility of installing a counter-hegemony and gives importance to collective identities. However, the SC’s potential democratic contribution is weakened by its conceptualization of democratic struggle in terms of antagonism rather than agonism through ‘moralizing’ politics. Moreover, its reluctance to engage with institutions of representative democracy further complicates the matter. The main contribution of this study is its discussion of various forms of politicization and their possible effects on democratization; and to give some clues to the activists of different social movements that can be helpful in their self-reflection.     

Capitalism as a social movement: the corporate and neoliberal reconstructions of the American political economy in the twentieth century

This paper examines the ways in which social movements based among leading capitalists have remade the US political economy. In the first part we examine the period from the late 1880s through the 1920s, sketching the emergence of a hegemonic movement that accomplished the re-embedding of capitalist social relations during the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism. In the second, we examine the disembedding of capitalist relations during the contemporary neoliberal era. The paper makes three major arguments. First, capitalists not just subaltern groups resort to collective action outside of institutional channels of authority and power. Second, during organic crises the movements of capitalists will join with movements of subaltern groups to create hegemonic projects, whose disparate supporters are articulated by discourses. Third, the concept of ‘social movement’ itself should be understood as a constituent part of a larger social formation and not sealed off from features of capitalism and the state. Indeed, hegemonic social movements have reconstructed the larger landscape that social movement theory normally takes for granted as a background. In applying this approach to the contested topic of neoliberalism, we argue that it was not primarily a class-based coup, a policy, ideology, or culture shift but a discourse that united elements of the left and the right as well as a ‘historic bloc’ with homes in both major parties. During both periods subaltern groups played an important role in the hegemonic movements that created corporate capitalism and later neoliberalism.     

Youth Perspectives on Social Insurance in Egypt: Qualitative Insights on the Gap between Legal and Effective Coverage

A gap between legal and effective coverage rates is a common challenge facing social insurance systems in Low‐ and Middle‐Income Countries. This article draws on an exploratory qualitative study with youth in Egypt to examine how labour market dynamics and worker preferences contribute to this gap. Labour market factors, particularly instability of employment and job mobility, were found to reduce the perceived value of social insurance. Poor understanding of how social insurance works was another contributing factor. However, youth displayed a high level of trust in the public social insurance system and saw pensions as valuable in the abstract. In combination with awareness promotion, eliminating penalties to discontinuous labour force participation could make social insurance more attractive to youth.     

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt,Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face‐to‐face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexander's performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexander's concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.     

Creating Happier Children and More Fulfilled Social Workers: Neoliberalism,Privatization and the Reframing of Leftist Critiques in Britain

To differing degrees, governments in Europe, North America, and Australasia have, over recent years, given particular attention to the reform of services for children and families. However, the aim of this article is to focus on Britain and to examine plans to transform social-work services for children and young people who are “looked after,” that is to say, in public care. It is argued that these plans, focused on the introduction of what are termed social work practices, are best grounded and interpreted within an analytical framework that recognizes the centrality of neoliberalism. Furthermore, social workers and others working in related areas of human services provision should take account of how the plan to install social work practices is being discursively constructed and organized. Important here, it is maintained, is how this strategy seeks to deploy selectively leftist critiques of social work that have emerged over the past two decades.     

当前西亚北非地区局势透视

西亚北非动荡进入第三年后,局势变得更加复杂多变。地区大国埃及的国内局势、温和与极端伊斯兰之间的“跷跷板”效应、美国在中东地区的战略政策,以及棘手的伊朗核问题等都是影响西亚北非地区局势的重要因素。鉴于此,西亚北非在可预见的时期内,依然会是持续动荡的局面。     

埃及新自由主义改革与政治剧变的关系探析

2011年埃及发生政治剧变,导致剧变的主要原因是政治威权与经济发展水平不相适应。新自由主义改革的实施导致埃及社会结构重组,由此产生了一系列改革的负面社会效应,包括民族工业破坏殆尽、经济寡头化、中产阶级破产、贫困率上升、裙带资本主义蔓延等,使得威权主义政权失去合法性,伊斯兰主义运动等反对派获得社会支持和社会动员能力。近年来,埃及政局虽逐渐恢复稳定,但高程度的政治威权与低水平的经济发展之间的矛盾却更加突出,进而使埃及仍存在陷入动荡的隐患。     

Rethinking resistance under authoritarianism: civil society and non-contentious forms of contestation in post-uprisings Egypt

ABSTRACT

In 2018 President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi secured a second presidential term in a constrained political environment exacerbated by his control over the media, prosecution of journalists and activists, and his crackdown on civil society. As a result of such resilient authoritarianism, the optimism that once defined the Egyptian uprisings has turned into cynicism. This article contributes to the literature surrounding civil society and resistance in authoritarian contexts by offering an examination of the interplay between authoritarian tendencies and their resistance in post-uprisings Egypt. I argue that we should view al-Sisi’s regime as representing an authoritarian system that is not absolute, despite its soft and hard repressive methods, but one that still offers limited space for civil society organizations (CSOs) to function. This limited space importantly comprises covert resistance methods which can offer Egyptian CSOs opportunities to resist the state’s legal and extra-legal restrictions. The resistance methods considered in this article need to be understood in Gramscian terms as they encompass the limited means available by which CSOs can negotiate the terrain of hegemonic contestation under the existing authoritarian context. Given al-Sisi’s re-election and the sustained crackdown on Egyptian civil society, the need to analyse such forms of resistance is pertinent.     

Capital has an Internationale and it is going fascist: time for an international of the global popular classes

ABSTRACT

Global capitalism is approaching a general crisis of capitalist rule. It is urgent to renovate a popular revolutionary project and refound the state if we are to combat the onslaught of the neo-fascist right. Amin’s call for a new Internationale is a timely move in that direction, notwithstanding the many challenges of organizing such an Internationale. Developing an umbrella program must engage political and theoretical debate on the nature of the new global capitalism, learn from the failures of Syriza in Greece and the Pink Tide in Latin America, and reconceive the three-way relationship between states, parties, and social movements. The downward mobility and destabilization of working classes in the former First World and the destruction of the old labor aristocracies provides the recruiting grounds for 21st century fascism but also new opportunities for transnational North-South solidarities. A new Internationale must identify and prioritize the class antagonisms within and across countries and regions over core-periphery or Global North-South contradictions.     

Safety as a Fifth Dimension in Supervision: Stories from the Frontline

Child and family practice is recognised as a field of social work that has become increasingly complex. While evidence is growing in relation to effective supervision, there has been little research about the attributes of an effective supervisor, or the components of effective supervision. This paper reports on research undertaken in Victoria, Australia, which explored practitioners’ and supervisors’ experiences of effective supervision in this field. Data collection involved in-depth interviews with experienced supervisors and supervisees in order to explore the concept of effective supervision from participants’ perspectives. The data were systematically interrogated using a thematic inductive process, designed to enhance the voice of participants in the research. The study findings confirmed the complexity and centrality of the supervisory relationship, with the experience of a safe supervisory relationship proving essential. The importance of contemporary knowledge, leadership skills, and an enabling organisational and community context were also highlighted.     

Perceptions of geography students in the USA and Egypt on global issues

The study aimed to compare the perceptions of Egyptian and US students on global issues. The authors developed a survey of global issues and administered it to sample of 321 Geography students in the USA and Egypt. The survey tapped five issues: global citizenship, cultural diversity, global conflicts, nuclear arms race, and global warming. The results showed that there were significant differences in Egyptian and US students’ perception of each of the global issues.