Bystander Activism after the Arab Uprisings: Expanding Notions of Citizenship?

• In Event: Women's Political Participation in Developing Countries

Abstract

Contemporary work on gender and citizenship have emphasized the need to not only focus on the study of politics from the institutional designation of the state or from the a priori position of subjects but to also on the acts, events and practices through which political subjects are created and interact. This shift in focus is particularly important in accounting for the ways in which gendered and racialized political subjectivities are being disrupted and where new possibilities, new ways of claiming rights and imposing of obligations are taking place. A citizen’s ability to enjoy and exercise social, economic, civil and political rights requires not just access to but the ability to marshal public spheres as spaces of engagement. When citizens are denied spheres of public engagement they are constrained in their daily exercise of those citizenship rights, their mobility is threatened and their participation is curbed. And when they come out to play new or enhanced roles in public roles--as so many citizens did during the Arab uprisings--the various forms of oppression and violence enacted to deny them access and maneuverability in those spaces threatens their physical wellbeing and very humanity.

My research examines a number of organizations in Egypt and Tunisia, who work to combat political and social exclusions and marginalizations around gender, sexuality, class, race and who begun to more consciously in the wake of the Arab uprisings that began in late 2010 to employ a form of “bystander activism,” that is, action undertaken by a person or persons not directly involved as the target or the perpetrator to address interpersonal and/or systemic exclusions and oppressions. Research on bystander citizenship has attempted to answer the question of whether such public actions only transforms public behavior in the moment of confrontation or whether it can contribute to the transformation of underlying beliefs and social norms by puncturing the perception that there is community support for or, at least, social acceptance of, harassment of women, for example. My research works in the other direction, by undertaking a discourse analysis of the self-presentations of these organizations in order to delineate the conceptions of citizenship with which they work and that they aim to perpetuate through their work. In each of these cases I explore there is evidence of a keen understanding that the personal is political—that is, that the fight against interpersonal and systemic racism is fundamentally connected—and that the full achievement of political equality on the part of historically excluded groups (particularly women, youth and minorities) requires not just transformation at the level of the state and not just transformation at the level of the family, but also the disruption of public habits and habitus. I argue that the notions of citizenship that undergird the forms of activism undertaken by these groups is, in many respects, groundbreaking in their approach to claiming, disrupting and transforming public spaces through acts of expression, sharing and exchange and the engagement and implication of bystanders. I further critically engage a growing literature that raises questions about potential problems with bystander activism: such as the encouragement of roaming citizen vigilantes; the further demonization of other groups already marginalized (such as unemployed and/or lower class young men who often populate the scenes of bystander engagement and are already ); and the consequences of “protection discourses” that tend, for example, to give men and patriarchal institutions (including, potentially, the state) greater responsibility for protecting women from sexual harassment.

Author

• Michaelle L. Browers, Wake Forest University