In the wake of the recent Arab revolutions, the European Union (EU) has sought to provide genuine and substantial support to a range of Arab social movements in the region's emerging polities. Yet the EU's recent democracy-promotion efforts represent a puzzle for earlier critical approaches to the relationship between Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which argue for the existence of hegemonic patronage linkages. We argue, however, that the EU's attempts at democracy promotion in the MENA region may be understood through a governmentality framework, despite the limitations of such an approach. Specifically, the EU is actively promoting neoliberal policies in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in order to foster a mode of subjectivity that is conducive to the EU's own norms and interests. What we observe are not just innocent attempts at democracy promotion, but a form of politics and economics that seeks to subject the agency on the 'Arab street' to EU standards. We conclude by going over the radical plurality of the Arab street, and show how it was in fact earlier neoliberal reforms by their former regimes that created the conditions of possibility for the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
In the past decade there have been efforts to understand the war on terror through the writings of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Some analyses reify certain concepts employed by Foucault and Agamben. Others do not accurately represent the actual occurrence of violence at ground level. Without claiming to present a sovereign gaze on the literature and the reading of sovereign violence in places such as Guántanamo, this article argues that there are at least three central elements that philosophers and theorists might want to reconsider in connection with sovereignty, biopower, and subjectivity: that there is a Derridean logic at play between sovereignty and biopower; that there is a connection between sovereignty and subjectivity informed by a “dangerous connection” between power and knowledge; and that sovereignty is informed by a classifying and hierarchizing regime characteristic of a regime of truth. Although Agamben claims to correct Foucault, he betrays important methodological and epistemological elements of Foucault's work. Nevertheless, there are elements in Agamben's work that can shape our understanding of a “biopolitical reading” of our contemporary era.
In this article I scrutinize a particular discursive strategy that attempts to straightjacket the new social movements in the Arab uprisings. Rather than being open to new forms of polities and alternative modes of economic and social organization, an emerging governmental and scholarly discourse calls for a model of development for the Arab world. I argue that this model limits political imagination; and that it is the effect of a late modern logic that seeks to impose a particular form of politics in global political life. In, and through, the language of an archetype, these social movements, and the emerging polities, are being tamed to inherit the tensions and fragilities of a certain form of political and economic globalization.Keywords: globalization, modernization and development, North Africa and the Middle East Several governmental officials in the West, pundits on international networks, and scholars of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have suggested that Turkey could be a model for the transforming polities in the region. 1 Indeed, in order to quell suspicions of an Iranian trajectory, members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have expressed their desire to follow the Turkish model (Yezdani, 2011). Setting aside the applicability of a historically unique experience to different polities, one might ask why there is a persistent attempt to export a model to MENA? In this article I question a particular discursive strategy that seems to straightjacket the 'newly-founded agency' on the Arab street. Rather than being open to new forms of polities and different modes of economic and social organization, this emerging governmental and scholarly discourse on a model seems to limit political imagination. This limiting, as I will argue, is the effect of a late modern logic that seeks to impose a particular form of politics on global political life, and most recently on top of recent Arab social movements. 2 In, and through, the language of a 'model', these new social movements are being tamed to inherit the tensions
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