Confronting Authoritarianism vs. Disciplining Democracy: The Recent Protests in Jordan and US Attempts at Democracy Promotion

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Jul 30, 2018 Jordan
Protests in Amman, capital of Jordan, in response to the proposed revision of the income tax law, and resulting price hikes. These pictures show protests happening in Amman's fourth circle, which is among the principle gathering points for protestors as it's located near the Prime Ministry of Jordan. By Ali Saadi via Wikimedia Commons. Protests in Amman, capital of Jordan, in response to the proposed revision of the income tax law, and resulting price hikes. These pictures show protests happening in Amman's fourth circle, which is among the principle gathering points for protestors as it's located near the Prime Ministry of Jordan. By Ali Saadi via Wikimedia Commons.

Confronting Authoritarianism vs. Disciplining Democracy: The Recent Protests in Jordan and US Attempts at Democracy Promotion

By : Benjamin Schuetze

Jordan currently ranks among the highest recipients of US foreign aid worldwide, both in absolute terms and particularly so on a per capita basis. Besides military and economic support, Jordan has over the past years also been the target of a whole plethora of US democracy-promotion interventions. As a result, there are probably only a few Jordanian state institutions that have not in one way or another been the target of external attempts at some form of capacity building and institutional engineering. Those that have include ministries, courts, the parliament, the Independent Electoral Commission, and several political parties.[1] Given the substantial amount of US funding for such projects,[2] and recurrent claims that Jordan has supposedly been undergoing a process of gradual “political liberalization” since 1989,[3] one cannot but wonder what exactly alleged US democracy promoters are actually doing when “promoting democracy” in the country.
Such comparison reveals the extent to which many US-funded programs in the country are about the disciplining of democratic demands and shaping them such that they become compatible with existing authoritarian power structures.

The recent country-wide protests against the income tax draft law and subsidies cuts as well as in favor of more meaningful participation in political and economic decision-making processes provide another opportunity to reflect on US-funded initiatives and their questionable effects on political activism in the country. Comparing US attempts at alleged democracy promotion with the recent protests highlights important differences in both approaches and the key actors. In fact, such comparison reveals the extent to which many US-funded programs in the country are about the disciplining of democratic demands and shaping them such that they become compatible with existing authoritarian power structures. This is an important factor in explaining how the recent protests were led in-part (and at least initially) by what is perhaps the only major established political institutions in the country that have thus far remained immune from external assistance: Jordan’s professional associations.

Promoting Participation


The National Democratic Institute (NDI) is perhaps the most prominent US institution in Jordan vis-à-vis the domain of “democracy promotion.” In 2012-13, NDI’s Jordan Office had a total of fifty-seven full-time employees and, according to one employee, was running on an annual budget of fourteen million US dollars. NDI Jordan’s flagship program is its youth political participation program, which it established in late 2011 seemingly in direct response to the country-wide (and regional) protests of that year. NDI itself considers the program “one of the largest and most successful NDI programs in the Middle East.” At its core are the Ana Usharek and Ana Usharek + (Arabic for “I participate”) initiatives, under which thus far over thirty thousand students have been trained at twenty-eight Jordanian universities. The courses effectively provide participating students with what NDI considers basic information on democracy, human rights, elections, and political parties, as well as with technical assistance in implementing advocacy campaigns.

According to NDI, “Ana Usharek students are able to gain skills for conducting meaningful and respectful debates with their peers, helping them to become active citizens who participate in the political process.”[4] The rather questionable assumption behind NDI’s program is that processes of democratization in Jordan can be encouraged via more education about democracy and via more participation in the existing regime-controlled political processes and institutions. Most of the campaigns supported by the program actually depoliticize questions of democratization and center on very specific issues such as fighting communal violence, establishing a school newspaper, developing a mobile phone application to raise youth awareness on Jordan’s constitution, and so forth.[5] Some campaigns have been organized with the direct support of state institutions, such as the King Abdullah II Fund for Development (KAFD), for which the recently appointed Prime Minister Omar Razzaz worked as chair of the board of trustees between 2012 and 2014. Ultimately, campaigns as such only help the regime in portraying itself as a democratizing force and in shifting blame for authoritarianism onto Jordanians’ supposedly inadequate political culture and recalcitrant nature. Since 2013, KAFD has for instance ironically been running its own democracy empowerment program called Dimuqraṭiy. Jordanian universities are one of the most monitored and controlled public spaces in the country, and have historically been infiltrated by the security services. An interviewed NDI Jordan official, however, refused to see the stifling of speech and participation via—for instance—the many restrictions that go along with Jordanian Armed Forces and Royal Court scholarship programs as in any meaningful way limiting the effect of NDI’s programs. Such an approach stands in contrast to the reality that protestors at the March 2011 sit-in at the Ministry of Interior directly spoke out against such practices. Yet the topic seemed of no major concern to NDI Jordan staff.

Turning Authoritarianism into A Matter of Culture


After Jordan’s 2013 parliamentary elections, one non-Jordanian NDI employee was genuinely annoyed when he explained to me that some of his Jordanian staff had—due to the marginal importance of Jordan’s parliament—decided to boycott the elections: “You know this is the twenty-first century. Do not give me that bullshit . . . Nobody gives you democracy. You have to win it. You have to fight for it . . . Whenever people complain, they just complain because they just want to sit [at] home . . . and watch TV and want democracy to somehow give birth to itself.”[6] Clearly, viewing the boycott as an intentional and politically astute decision vis-à-vis the relevance of electoral procedures and representative institutions in the country did not cross this NDI staffer’s mind. Such disdain is not unique within that milieu.

With stability maintenance as the overarching objective of US foreign policy toward Jordan, US-funded democracy promotion programs in the country are first and foremost about the disciplining of Jordanians’ democratic demands. Or, in the words of the already earlier quoted NDI employee: “If the only tool they know is protests and street violence, then I do not have high hopes for this country . . . because sooner or later . . . you are going to have a critical mass on the streets and that is it: a new revolution, which is not always bad; but there are better ways to do this transition to democracy.”[7]

Pursuing such “better ways,” democracy promoters try hard to channel public discontent into more easily manageable forms, such as into NDI’s above-described programs. This effectively occurs via an implicit two-step logic that first renders invisible Jordan’s deeply authoritarian system of rule and then locates the cause of a “democracy deficit” in an alleged authoritarian culture of the population. The project of democracy promotion in Jordan is therefore not about challenging authoritarian institutional arrangements, but instead about training Jordanians, who are supposedly too apathetic and/or ignorant about democracy.[8] Eberhard Kienle once noted that “there is no empirical evidence that the dissemination of values and norms actually contributes to democratization.”[9] It would seem that it nevertheless importantly allows for the portrayal of democratization as still requiring a lot of external assistance, training, and “longer-term efforts beyond a five-year program,” as remarked in a recent NDI youth political participation programming guide.

Reproducing Authoritarianism behind a Façade of Democratization


Most Jordanian political activists are highly aware of the ways in which external democracy promoters help reproduce Jordanian authoritarianism behind a façade of democratization. Regime loyalists and sympathizers make constant talk of the alleged danger of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood “hijacking” protests and other mobilizations. Yet it is arguably the case that such a danger very much exists in the case of US democracy-promoting organizations. In fact, some deem not allowing for this latter danger to be a regrettable dynamic. As one staffer lamented during a late-2012 interview: the hirak had made “themselves immune from assistance.”[10]

While the two most recent aid packages announced by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar will help alleviate the immediate fiscal crisis in Jordan, they of course fail to address Jordan’s uneven and unequal integration into the world economy and the regime’s decisions therein as the root cause behind the country’s chronic budget deficit. Somewhat similarly, US democracy promotion in Jordan should be seen as a deliberate attempt at disciplining popular demands for more representation and participation, without however challenging the deeply authoritarian structures of power that shape Jordanian politics. It is for good reasons that whenever large-scale protests against the Jordanian regime take place they are organized by those Jordanian groups, organizations, and institutions that are ignored by US democracy promoters and/or that resist external efforts at democracy promotion. The very purpose of US democracy promotion in Jordan is not to stand up for democratic ideals and confront authoritarian power structures in the country, but instead to discipline popular demands for representation and participation and make them seemingly compatible with authoritarianism.


Endnotes

[1] For an analysis of US and European attempts at parliamentary strengthening see Benjamin Schuetze, “Marketing Parliament: The Constitutive Effects of External Attempts at Parliamentary Strengthening in Jordan,” Cooperation and Conflict 53, no. 2, 237-58.

[2] In 2017, US assistance in the field of “democracy, human rights, and governance” amounted to approximately seventy million US dollars. https://www.foreignassistance.gov/explore

[3] See for instance Curtis Ryan, “Jordan’s Unfinished Journey: Parliamentary Elections and the State of Reform,” POMED policy brief (March 2013).

[4] NDI and USAID, “Ana Usharek–Empowering youth at Jordanian universities to play an informed role in Jordan’s political & decision-making processes,” Newsletter 6 (December 2014), 2.

[5] NDI and USAID, “Ana Usharek–Empowering youth at Jordanian universities to play an informed role in Jordan’s political & decision-making processes,” Newsletter 5 (April 2014), 6-7.

[6] Interview with F, democracy promoter working in Jordan, Amman, 29 January 2013.

[7] Interview with F, democracy promoter working in Jordan, Amman, 29 January 2013.

[8] Daoud Kuttab, “Islamists Boycott Fails in Jordan’s Elections,” Huffington Post, 24 January 2013.

[9] Eberhard Kienle, “Democracy Promotion and the Renewal of Authoritarian Rule,” in Debating Arab Authoritarianism, edited by Oliver Schlumberger, 239.

[10] Interview with T, democracy promoter working in Jordan, Amman, 21 November 2012.
Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]