With continued unrest in the Middle East and North Africa and governments still in flux, the future of the region is uncertain. CEU's Department of International Relations and European Studies (IRES) hosted “The Aftermath of Revolutions: Neoliberal Governmentality and the Future of the State in the Middle East and North Africa” conference on Nov. 15 to discuss revolutions, continuing conflict, and rebuilding.
IRES Assistant Professor Emel Akcali, who herself has spent a good deal of time on the ground conducting research in Tunisia, organized the event, which featured participants from countries including Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Lebanon.
“The idea of this conference came from the growing scholarly interest in the future of the Middle East and North Africa at CEU,” Akcali said. “We want to increase the visibility of the
Middle East and Mediterranean studies at CEU and hope that CEU becomes a leading European center of transregional intellectual exchange and collaborative research. Our location in the East and Central Europe is interesting because, here in this part of the world, there have also been massive state and societal transformations and some are still ongoing.”
Iranian sociologist Farhad Khosrokhovar from EHESS-Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris gave the keynote speech titled “The Arab Societies in Crises: The Aftermath of Arab Revolutions” in which he discussed the revolutions themselves but, perhaps even more importantly, where countries are now and how they are coping with ongoing conflicts and significant changes, or what he calls “the trial of reality [that] was one of the most painful in the Arab world.”
“Whenever we talk about the Arab revolutions, one of the major problems is the future,” Khosrokhovar said. “At beginning of the revolutions, the first period was euphoria and unexpectedness. No one expected the Tunisian regime to be toppled in 28 days; no one expected Mubarak to be overthrown in 18 days. The relative ease with which these revolutions were able to get rid of autocratic governments had a huge effect on the Arab world. There is a kind of cultural unity in spite of the different situations. It spread to all the Arab world and that could not have been imagined a year before.”
In his research, Khosrokhovar has designated two categories for uprisings in MENA: Tahrir Square-type revolutions (that mimic Egypt's revolution) that were intense and very much in the public eye and others, such as those in Tunisia, that have started in small towns and ultimately spread to major cities. Regardless of the type of unrest, after the initial movement, countries are left in the vulnerable state of rebuilding. Khosrokhovar identifies five situations coming to pass in post-revolutionary MENA. In Egypt, a kind of neo-authoritarianism through military coup has come to power, based on a kind of consensus of the inability of the Muslim Brotherhood to govern in a balanced way. As the world has witnessed, the situation in Syria is dire and Khosrokhovar believes “the model of civil war is there.”

Khosrokhovar named Libya and parts of Yemen “failed states,” where local warlords and elites impose their rule on society. In Morocco, despite going through the Arab Spring and drafting a new constitution, there's a return of what might be deemed authoritarianism where journalists are more and more repressed and the semi-open attitude toward society is being questioned. Very wealthy Arab nations with old regimes have managed to prevent revolutions. Money has been pumped into the economies and salaries increased as a way of soothing the populace, Khosrokhovar said, and there is no traction for national movements.
The overall situation is worsening for women and danger is spiking, even outside of the Arab world, due to increasingly active jihadists, Khosrokhovar noted. However, there is also a new kind of social actor who figures into the picture who reminds jihadists that their type of violence has been unsuccessful at toppling regimes for decades. These new, non-violent civil actors' overall message is that people inherently have dignity and rights and that the individual shouldn't be sacrificed for the “good of the Arab Nation.” This very much flies in the face of longstanding conservative tradition that individual dignity was non-existent but for the case of martyrdom, or literally dying for your religion.
“In many respects the Arab revolutions have failed,” Khosrokhovar said. “But there is a new kind of civil sphere building up the centrality of the individual.”
For further information, visit http://www.ceu.hu/event/2013-11-15/aftermath-revolutions-neoliberal-governmentality-and-future-state-middle-east-and.






