World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

· NOT_DEFINED date: THU 22, 2.30-4.30 pm

· NOT_DEFINED institution: Institut de Recherches et d''Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (France)

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: Laurent Bonnefoy

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description: The panel intends to present the results of a collective research project funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR).This research programme, started in June 2007, focuses on issues related to violence in the Arabo-Persian Gulf and seeks to analyse thedifferent links between visible forms of (counter-)violence, often over-ideologised and explained by some sort of pathology or by Islam, and primary forms of social, political and international violence, that are most often overlooked and that all express the incapacity of institutional politics to settle conflicts in the region. The panel seeks to contextualize and discuss different phenomena (social movements, revolutions, 'terrorist' attacks) by confronting them too the processes (institutional violence, segregation, torture, etc.) that are less documented in the Arabo-Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. Amongst other case-studies, the contributors will present studies on youth social movements in Saudi Arabia, Iranian opposition, stateless people in Kuwait, and Salafi groups in Yemen.

Chair: François Burgat (Institut Français du Proche-Orient)

Paper discussant: Yahya Michot (Hartford Seminary)

Paper presenter: Pascal Ménoret (Princeton University), “The Politicization of Leisure in Saudi Arabia”
Leisure and politics seem to relate to distinct – sometimes antagonistic – spheres of activity. Yet both domains have often worked together, profited from each other or inspired each other’s style. Three broad patterns may be spotted in this regard. First, political movements may portray leisure as unworthy of dignified politicians who perceive their function as a vocation. As opposed to this ascetic attitude, second, political movements may see leisure as a useful resource for collective action, and confer political meaning to certain sports, or use them as tools of mobilization. Third, specific forms of leisure may even become venues of political protest and assume the role of a substitute to formal politics. Puritanical critiques of idleness, the politicization of the Boy Scouts movement, expressions of collective emotions around soccer games are but examples of these various attitudes.
The contemporary political history of Saudi Arabia provides fascinating examples of the complex relationship between politics and leisure. This paper will examine how the prohibition of formal politics, through the banning of parties, unions and elections, turns leisure into a public space by proxy and makes it a place of contention between various social groups. The definition of “legitimate forms of leisure” is a first attempt at politicizing leisure. During the last decades, the Saudi state has institutionalized leisure: soccer has notably become the scene on which regional identities and princely allegiances are played, displayed and, ultimately, sublimated. Members of the Islamic establishment, for their part, often perceive leisure as an imported activity, and denounce an attempt at luring youth away from its traditional duties. Leisure has to be “innocent” and “useful” (bari’ wa nafe‘) in order to be accepted.
Moralization, however, is not the only response to the emergence of free time and of leisure in an increasingly complex society of consumption. Various Islamic groups, notably the Saudi Muslim Brothers, have tried to turn leisure and sport into tools of mobilization. Leisure activities figure prominently on the Islamic groups’ daily timetable: soccer tournaments, Islamic theater, cultural competitions and Islamic summer camps are important places of recruitment and venues of politicization. Finally, outside of the gaze of the state and out of reach of Islamic groups, “wild” forms of leisure may also be analyzed as political expressions. The last part of this paper will examine a particularly extreme and dangerous urban activity: drifting (tafhit), which is practiced en masse by idle youth of low social background and may be seen as a form of social and, at times, political resistance.

Paper presenter: Claire Beaugrand (London School of Economics), “Statelessness and Administrative Violence: ‘the Politics of Survival’ of the Bidun in Kuwait”
Statelessness is often portrayed as the negation of the ‘right to have rights’, an expression coined by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. This absence of state affiliation does not imply the sole deprivation of political and socio-economic rights, it also take the symbolic form of a denial of existence. In Kuwait, around 100,000 people are trapped in this situation of legal void. Referred to as Bidun, or ‘without’ -implicitly ‘nationality’, these long-term residents of the emirate have failed until now to be granted citizenship and as a consequence have been treated since 1985 as illegal migrants by the state. Not only are they excluded from the socio-economic benefits of the welfare-state but they are also denied in a clear symbolic way, birth and death certificates.
It is this exclusion from the official and public sphere in all its guises as well as the growing importance taken by administrative papers, licenses, identity cards, forms, whose absence is part and parcel of a process of stigmatization that the notion of ‘administrative violence’ is willing to capture and highlight. It is through this lens that the phenomenon of Bidun will first be analysed, showing how both the quasi-sole human rights treatment of the question and the underpinning principles of the regime of migration contributed to conceal this structural violence and depoliticise it. Yet, if following Arendt again, we recognise that the emergence of statelessness is historically contingent and produced by the convergence of several factors like, in our very case, the state-building and transnational tribalism, it seems that the fragmentation of the public and political sphere and the strength of the traditional private networks and patronage links have contributed to keep alive a potential of resistance to oppressive administrative policies and will continue to do so –defusing any attempt at Bidun modern forms of mobilisation.

Paper presenter: Laurent Bonnefoy (Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman), “Violence in Contemporary Yemen: State, Society and Salafis”
My contribution intends to go beyond a still dominant approach to “jihadi violence” that tends to focus on its alleged ideology, strategy and takes for granted the idea of its centralization and of a certain rationality. This chapter aims to highlight the fact such violence is embedded in its own environment and appears as a way of dealing with the different contingencies, either local, regional and international, faced by Yemenis. In order to do that, a first section will look at the recent history of the links between armed militancy and the state in Yemen. It will specifically focus on the issue of repression. A second section will highlight the continuums of jihadi violence, particularly that of salafism, and of the armed conflicts. These continuums illustrate how “jihadi” militants or even al-Qaeda affiliates cannot easily be singled out and how the grievances they express are not self-excluding.