“Conclusion” in “A Global Idea”
CONCLUSION
This book has traced the formation, dissemination, and adaptation of discourses of youth and development through the cities of Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai during a period of time that stretches from the late 1990s to the present day. It has argued that the spread of these discourses of youth in the Middle East region through the construction of a youth development complex, comprised of state, private sector, civil society, and international development and aid organizations, was directly linked to a broader political agenda of “developing” the region by (re)integrating it more fully into the global capitalist economy. In particular, this agenda sought to liberalize Arab societies and economies by embedding neoliberal ideas, identities, policies, and practices in Arab individuals and institutions, with an emphasis on doing this with the region’s youngest citizens—children and youth—as they came up through schools, colleges, universities, and nonformal community and youth centers, before entering into adulthood and taking up productive employment in the labor market.
Discourses of youth and development played a pivotal role in this liberalization agenda; but they were not, of course, the only discourses at play. Rather, the dissemination and adaptation of youth discourses through the cities of Washington, Amman, and Dubai was closely paralleled by and interlinked with the spread of other ideas central to contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalism, as well. These include discourses of democracy promotion, human rights, women’s empowerment, children’s rights, good governance, the rule of law, intellectual property, civil society, poverty reduction, entrepreneurship, micro-finance, and so forth. While the exact processes and pathways through which this related set of discourses spread through the Arab world from the end of the twentieth century and into the new millennium has not been studied in the same way this book has done with discourses of youth, other scholars have documented the growing presence and influence of these discourses in the region at a greater level of spatial abstraction (Abu-Lughod 2009; Sukarieh 2007).
Julia Elyachar (2005), for example, analyses the spread of discourses and technologies of poverty reduction and microcredit, along with the concept of social capital, in Egypt during the late 1990s, tracing how this was supported by a network of NGOs and state and international financial institution actors. Elyachar’s central argument is that this process served directly to extend neoliberal market mechanisms throughout the country. Similarly, Maha Abdelrahman (2005) has studied how the promotion of NGOs, discourses of civil society, and democratization in Egypt during this same period by a network of business associations, Islamic groups, and international aid and development organizations, likewise, worked to promote neoliberal forms of development. Lila Abu-Lughod (2015) criticizes the global project of saving Muslim women in the name of human rights and gender equality, and traces the construction of the discourses of oppressed Muslim women by human rights groups and the media. The book traces employment of this discourse in the justification of foreign interference, including military invasion, in the name of saving the brown women from the brown men. In Iraq, Ugo Mattei and Laura Nader (2008) trace how the promotion of the rule of law as a fundamental principle of modern, liberal society was used by the American occupation as a vehicle for rapidly privatizing and deregulating extensive arenas of Iraqi society and economy. In many of these cases, the networks assembled for promoting and extending these discourses were closely similar to those used for spreading the discourse of youth and development throughout the Arab region. Together, the spread of these discourses during this time helped lay the foundation for what many talk of as the neoliberalization (or “neoliberal globalization”) of the Arab region at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Bogaert 2013; Guazzone and Pioppi 2009; Roy-Mukherjee 2015).
The Arab Spring and the Youth Development Complex
On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire in protest against ongoing harassment by local authorities in Sidi Bouzid, a small town in central Tunisia, who were preventing him from being able to earn a living. The incident inspired widespread protests in Tunisia that led to the downfall of the autocratic president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled over the country for close to a quarter-century. This was followed by an outbreak of mass protests in Egypt in January 2011 and subsequently in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and a dozen other countries across the Middle East and North Africa region. In what became dubbed Arab Spring, long-serving authoritarian rulers were overthrown in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, while a protracted civil war erupted in Syria (Achcar 2020; Achcar 2021; Munif 2013; Noueihed 2018; Salem 2018).
At the time, it seemed to many that the Arab Spring represented a major turning point in the political and economic development of the Arab region and a fundamental break with the recent past. For Hamid Dabashi (2012, 33), for example, the Arab Spring uprisings signaled the “end of postcolonialism” in the region, the creation of “a new geography of liberation,” and “reconfigured geopolitics of hope.” Given that the Arab Spring uprisings were initially portrayed by many media, academic commentators, and policymakers in both the Arab world and the West as being a “youth uprising” or “youth revolt,” led by a “youth vanguard” (e.g., Anderson 2013; Herrera 2012; Herrera and Mayo 2012; Honwana 2019; Mason 2013; Mohamed and Douai 2022; Sayre and Yousef 2016), and given that a central focus of many of the protests were the neoliberal economic reforms that had swept across the region over the previous two decades, it also seemed, at first, as if the Arab Spring represented a massive failure of the liberalization agenda and construction of a youth development complex as these have been described in this book (Achcar 2013; Hanieh 2013; Joya 2017). After all, far from being “docile subjects,” dutifully incorporated into new technologies of neoliberal citizenship, large numbers of Arab youth were clearly participating in mass protests throughout the region against the entire neoliberal project (Brouwer and Bartels 2014; Herrera 2012). Finally, as the Arab Spring uprisings were primarily an urban phenomenon—widely described as a “revolt of the square”—it appeared as if the major cities in the region had suddenly shifted their role from being gateways for the dissemination of hegemonic discourses and policies of neoliberalism to becoming key centers of rebellion against the phenomenon of neoliberal globalization (Al Sayyad and Guvenc 2015; Beier 2018; Galián 2019). Indeed, many of the leading figures in the Arab youth development complex profiled in this book were acutely worried about possible consequences of the Arab Spring uprisings when these erupted. “We are scared … we are hiding because we are viewed negatively,” one Young Global Leader and Injaz Al Arab advisory board member said in an interview that took place immediately after the Arab Spring. “Instead of being at the forefront of change … [and] development in the Arab world … we [Arab business leaders] are stepping back and worrying that this attack on government institutions … is affecting us” (personal interview, September 2011).
However, despite the sense of euphoria—among some, at least—that greeted the initial uprisings of the Arab Spring, processes of counterrevolution soon set in across the region (Al-Rasheed 2011; De Smet 2016; Kamrava 2012; Noueihed and Warren 2012). A military government was reinstalled in Egypt; Yemen and Syria descended into civil war; and there was little sign of any lasting progressive political or economic transformations anywhere in the region (Kamrava 2012; Munif 2020; Dahi and Munif 2012; Wiarda 2012). Rather than a failure or end to the liberalization agenda in the Arab region, the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings saw a re-intensification and extension of this project. Adam Hanieh (2015, 132), for example, found “little change in the essential logic of World Bank and IMF involvement in North Africa” before and after the Arab Spring uprisings, in his study of Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. “All of the major World Bank/IMF strategic documents and local agreements” in these countries during this period, writes Hanieh, continued “to be underpinned by a prioritization of private-sector growth, fiscal austerity focusing particularly on subsidy and pension reform, and the liberalisation of financial and labour markets” (132). As the Arab Spring turned into what many called an Arab Winter, there has been a proliferation of academic and popular accounts that seek to explain the failure of the Middle East and North African uprisings of 2010 to achieve their goals of radical change in the region (Al-Rasheed 2011; Challand 2013; Falk 2016; Kamrava 2012).
With hindsight, the Arab Spring, thus, may be seen as not actually representing a massive failure of or challenge to the youth development complex that had been carefully constructed in the region over the preceding decades that it might have initially seemed to be. In one sense, it is true the Arab Spring uprisings showed the limitations of the effectiveness of the youth development complex. Recent academic research has shown that initial claims of the Arab Spring uprisings as being a youth-led or youth-run or youth-dominated revolt were either exaggerated or inaccurate (Saidin 2018; Sofi 2019). Many other groups and actors from across Arab civil society played central and leading roles in the uprisings, including trade unions, peasant movements, poor people’s organizations, women’s groups, political parties, and Islamist and other faith-based movements (Ahmed 2021; Ahmed and Saad 2011; Dahi 2012; Joya et al. 2011; Korany and El-Mahdi 2012; Soliman 2011). However, large numbers of Arab youth did participate in direct protests against neoliberal reforms throughout the region, and did play an important role in the Arab Spring protests, particularly in the cultural production central to the uprisings (through the creation of slogans, songs, images, comics, etc.) (Abaza 2013; Abaza 2016; El-Zein 2016; Hassan 2014; Ibrahim 2017; Jamshidi 2013; Kimbal 2013; Lennon 2014; McDonald 2019; Miladi 2015). As this book has suggested, many of the young participants in programs run by the global youth development complex in the Arab region were not true believers in the ideas being promoted by the complex—and, indeed, often could be strong critics of these ideas. These youth chose to participate in the programs, in part, out of a vain hope that participation could lead to material and economic gains for themselves and their families at some point in the future. Researchers have shown that severe economic crisis was a major triggering point for the Arab Spring revolt (Bogaert 2013; Hanieh 2013; Hanieh 2015; Heydarian 2014). In this moment of economic crisis, when it became increasingly clear that there were no material or economic gains available to them, then the ideas central to the youth development complex were openly and widely rejected by young (and old) participants in the Arab Spring moment.
However, despite such limitations, the Arab Spring did not exactly represent a clear break with the work of the youth development complex, either. It is significant that youth was very quickly adopted as a dominant framework for representing and making sense of the Arab Spring uprisings by media, academic, and political commentators. This includes commentators in both the Arab as well as the Western world, as discussed above. Youth had become a central social category and identity for articulating and understanding social action and change in the Arab world in a way that it had not been previously. It was an immediate and self-evident conceptual framework to turn to, which often seemed to need no further introduction or explanation. As I and others have argued elsewhere (e.g., Murphy 2012), the initial and widespread framing of the Arab Spring uprisings as a youth revolt in many ways helped limit their power and constrain their interpretation:
While the youth frame for talking about the [Arab Spring] can be inspiring and has been embraced both by young protesters themselves and their supporters, it needs to be recognized that this frame has also been actively promoted and embraced by global elites as a way to promote their own interests and obscure broader divisions of class, race, ethnic, regional, and ideological struggle that lie at the heart of these uprisings.… Framing the [Arab Spring] protests as being fundamentally youth protests can work to dismiss or minimize their larger social and political significance.… For so long as the focus is on youth, responses to the [Arab Spring] protests can be more easily contained and limited to narrowly reformist measures—replacing an older generation of political leaders with younger and newer ones, tying education systems more closely to the interests of employers, whittling away the welfare state entitlements and expectations of older workers and citizens, and so on—that do little to challenge the fundamental inequalities of wealth and power [in the region], and indeed … can even work to maintain and extend elite agendas (Sukarieh and Tannock 2015, 108).
Furthermore, as a direct consequence of this framing, it was both easy and natural for political and economic leaders across the Arab region to turn to the discourses, programs, and technologies of the youth development complex as a way to respond to and contain the Arab Spring uprisings. If these uprisings were portrayed as expressions of the frustration of youth suffering from political and economic exclusion, then, of course, the solution would be to provide more youth programming, more job training, more financial and entrepreneurship education—exactly what the youth development complex had been promoting in the decade before.
In the years following the Arab Spring, therefore, we can see a massive expansion of the youth development complex across the Arab region. In fact, national governments, international financial institutions (FIs), and bilateral aid agencies put in place many policies tailored to youth unemployment seen as “driving” the Arab Spring. (Prince, Halasa-Rappel, and Khan 2018). These policies include national strategies on youth, entrepreneurship, and youth councils. It is interesting to mention, that Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco invited Injaz to develop the entrepreneurship’ training (Prince, Halasa-Rappel, and Khan 2018). EFE, for example, opened a new office in Tunisia in 2011; the chair of EFE-Tunisia was Said Aïdi, who served as the minister of employment in the transitional government formed after the ouster of Ben Ali. “We had the right idea at the right time,” said EFE’s Ronald Bruder (2015): “Our programs are growing more rapidly than we would ever have imagined.” “We’re opening in Tunisia because the Tunisians get it,” Bruder explained. “They understand what we’re trying to do.” Soraya el Salti, director of Injaz Al-Arab, likewise, has described how Arab governments approached Injaz for help in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprisings, as they recognized that working on youth unemployment was key to ensuring social and political stability (Milligan 2011; Milligan 2013). Other observers called for a “massive ramping up of scale” of “employability courses such as those offered by EFE and Injaz” throughout the Arab region, in order for “today’s Bouazizis … to have hope” (Balch 2013).
Finally, there is another respect in which the Arab Spring could be said to be evidence of the success and effectiveness of the youth development complex. One of the arguments made by a number of critics explaining the failure of the uprisings is that many of the leading actors in these protests and demonstrations—including but not limited to just youth—failed to articulate any genuinely transformative political ideologies and remained trapped in neoliberal identities and projects. In Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring, Asaf Bayat (2017, 25), for example, talks of the “deradicalizing effect” of the “two decades” preceding the Arab Spring uprisings, in which “elements of neoliberalism” spread among “Arab elites, professional groups, and the political class,” as well as large groups of Arab youth. As a consequence, Bayat argues: “The political class, both Islamist and secular activists, took free market and neoliberal rationality for granted; their concerns, if any, became limited to some of its policy outcomes, such as unemployment. Any radical vision about redistribution, change in property relations, expropriation, or popular control was instinctively discarded. Thus, class politics and concern for the poor, workers, or farmers were largely sidelined in favor of the politics that centered on human rights, corruption, fair elections, and legal reform” (25).
Similarly, Bayat observes that youth activism during the Arab Spring uprisings “centered largely on NGOs engaged in charity, development, poverty reduction, or self-help, often in conjunction with international donors or corporate funding,” and “was preoccupied with amending the existing order instead of … envisioning, strategizing, and working toward a different social order” (25). In other words, while discourses of democracy, civil rights, youth development, youth leadership, and youth empowerment may have been taken up by Arab Spring participants in their call for rebellion and overthrow of old political and economic regimes, these same discourses also fundamentally limited the transformative agency and imagination of these would-be rebels and facilitated the return to and further acceleration of liberalization agendas throughout the Arab world in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Global Cities and Global Ideas in the History of the Arab Region
Though there is reason to argue that cities such as Amman and Dubai have come to play an ever-greater role in the spread of global ideas throughout the Arab region due to the rapid expansion of urbanization and the increasingly important role cities play in the accumulation of global and regional capital, it is likely that cities always have played a pivotal role in the spread of ideas in the region. As such, the role of Amman and Dubai in facilitating and organizing the dissemination and adaptation of youth and development discourse in the Middle East and North Africa at the end of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries is but one example of a recurring phenomenon that has taken place through regional and global city networks in the Arab world over the past decades and, indeed, centuries. Moreover, while the ideas that are the focus of this book are central to the organization and legitimation of global (and regional) capitalism, there is evidence that cities play a central role in the dissemination of counter-hegemonic ideas, as well.
Perhaps the most similar study to this book of the close relationship between cities and ideas in the Arab region is Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s (2013) The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914. Khuri-Makdisi focuses on the dissemination and adaptation of radical, socialist, and anarchist ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean region during the nineteenth century, and argues that the cities of Alexandria, Cairo, and Beirut played a major role in this process. In particular, dense social and intellectual networks that linked key segments of the population in these cities together were pivotal in facilitating both the spread of these ideas and the ways in which they were reworked, reinterpreted, and adapted to local and regional contexts. As Khuri-Makdisi observes: “Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria (especially the latter two) served as nodal points, harboring and bringing together local radicals and political exiles and militants from different parts of the Mediterranean and beyond, guaranteeing the circulation of printed material and providing the necessary conditions, spaces, and institutions for the exchange and synthesis of ideas and practices. Such encounters and exchanges took place in coffeehouses, clubs, associations, salons, and study circles, as well as on quays, on construction sites, and in workshops. They led to the forging of links and occasionally lifelong connections between radicals, workers, and intellectuals from various continents” (167).
Though focusing on a different time period and on the spread of counter-hegemonic rather than hegemonic ideas, Khoury’s work is similar to the argument developed in this book, in the sense that it traces the regional networks and spaces of individuals and organizations who played a central role in importing but also adapting discourses of Western origin, in ways that made these discourses intelligible and useful for local populations and, at the same time, worked to integrate the region as a key part of a broader global community. “Appropriation is … not the only way to think of these processes by which socialism and anarchism were indigenized,” writes Khuri-Makdisi (2013, 168), for Arab “radicals actively and increasingly envisioned their societies as an intrinsic part of a larger entity: the colonized world, the Muslim world … the working classes of the world, or the world writ large.”
Other scholars have studied the spread of global ideas through the Arab region over different points in history, where it is clear that regional cities have played a key role, even if this role is not the central focus of their studies. Ozlem Altan’s (2006) Ph.D. dissertation, for example, analyzes the social formation and production of cultural and political capital of transnational elites in Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey in the early twenty-first century. Her specific focus is on elite graduates in the region from American universities located in three cities in these countries: American University of Cairo, American University of Beirut, and Bogazici University in Istanbul. In a chapter titled “Navigating the City,” Altan shows the close interdependence between the social formation of these elites and the spatial transformations of the cities in which they live, study, and work. The graduates studied by Altan laid claim to “exclusive spaces” within Cairo, Beirut, and Istanbul, as “their socioeconomic privileges enabled them to live in certain neighborhoods, work in high end jobs, and entertain in spaces closed to the majority of the city” (318). Sherene Seikaly’s (2015, 1, 124) Men of Capital focuses on the intellectual projects of local economic elites in British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, who “understood their economic interests as part of a broader Arab horizon” and sought to promote a capitalist “pan-Arab utopia of free trade, private property, and self-responsibility.” They did this through direct collaboration with and travel to local chambers of commerce based in cities in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, but also through extensive engagement in publishing and disseminating books and periodicals that promoted their vision in cities throughout the region (124). As Seikaly writes: “From the late nineteenth century on, journals, books, and newspapers as well as printing shops, publishing companies, bookstores, literary societies and reading rooms marked the cultural life of Beirut and Cairo. The excitement and energy of the nahda [the vision of a pan-Arab capitalist renaissance] was not limited to these two centers, but included Aleppo, Alexandria, Damascus, Tripoli, Haifa, Jerusalem, Jadda, and beyond” (30).
Other examples could, no doubt, be found. We know the Arab region has seen an influx of influential discourses, belief systems, and ideologies from different parts of the broader world system at different points in history. The Silk Road trade routes that linked the Arab World with East Asia for hundreds of years facilitated the spread not just of goods from the rest of Asia but cultural practices and ideas, as well. The dominant presence of the Soviet bloc in the region during the Cold War created a dense network of political, economic, and cultural ties between socialist regimes in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, and the former Soviet Union. The construction of the Third World Non-Aligned Movement produced a different set of links between the Arab region and countries throughout Africa and Asia. It is likely that, if we were to look closely at each of these different systems, we could trace, as well, a close relationship between actors located in key cities, the spaces that shape and connect these cities, and the dissemination, reinterpretation, and local adaptation of pivotal global ideas in the Arab World.
Global Cities and Global Ideas beyond the Arab Region
The larger question that frames this book asks how dominant ideas are able to spread around the world and, in particular, ordinary, common-sense ideas that are central to the workings and continued reproduction of global capitalism. This study took one set of ideas concerning youth and development as an example of a much broader range of ideas currently important to the everyday operations of global capitalism and examined how this set of ideas has been spread and adapted in one particular region of the world, the Middle East. The context within which a global youth development complex was constructed in the Middle East over the past quarter-century, as has been pointed out throughout the book, is, of course, unique. Among other things, this work took place directly as part of an ongoing US war on terror in the region. But the claim of this book is that the kinds of structures, processes, and practices that can be seen in operation in this one setting are more generalizable phenomena. It is likely that discourses of youth and development have spread to other regions of the world in broadly similar ways, as have many other kinds of ideas central to contemporary global capitalism.
In particular, this study argues that cities play a central role in this process of the global spread and adaptation of dominant ideas, both through their internal spatial organization and through the networks that link different types or tiers of cities together in a global economy and society. Spatiality is central to understanding how dominant ideas spread globally and are adapted locally; this process cannot just be left hanging in some kind of mysterious, globalized free-floating ether. Through empirical research, we can start to trace the grounded, spatially located links that actually enable and drive the dissemination and adaptation of ideas: from informal coffee shop meetings held off K Street in Washington, DC, to gala events hosted at international hotels in west Amman to carefully planned training sessions launched out of Dubai’s Knowledge Park.
As the geographical literature on policy mobility has pointed out, it is space at both the micro and macro level that is essential in the global and local spread of ideas. Further, just as global cities literature has shown how global cities and a second tier of gateway cities play a pivotal role in the global organization of financial capital and commodity production, so, too, do we find that it is the dense networks that link global cities with regional gateway cities that is central for managing the spread of dominant ideas around the world. Washington, DC, which was a key focus in this study, is likely to play a similarly outsize role in the global spread of ideas important for global capitalism elsewhere in the world, as well, due to the city’s unique structural location in the organization and management of world capitalism (Panitch and Gindin 2012). But other global cities are likely to play a key role in this process, too; and, of course, in other regions of the world, other cities are likely to take on the gateway, pilot, hub, and pivot city roles we can see Amman and Dubai playing in this study.
One key advantage of bringing in a focus on cities to the analysis of the global spread of dominant ideas is that it can help overcome some of the divisions that have long afflicted the literature, between cultural imperialism and cultural diplomacy on the one hand and policy mobility and cultural globalization on the other. In particular, we can focus both on the role dominant centers of state and capital power play in actively seeking to promote ideas that serve their own interests and agendas but also on the essential role played by local settings, actors, and networks, in spreading, transforming, and adapting dominant ideas as these move across the globe. We can make visible the key actors within these city networks, and identify the close links that exist between state, capital, and civil society. Contrary to the claims of the literature on cultural imperialism, these are not all controlled by or working directly for the interests of imperial states; neither are they fully autonomous. Rather, what we see going on is the operation and intersection of multiple sets of agendas and varying bases of power.
Indeed, temporality appears to be as important to the global spread of dominant ideas as spatiality. The relationships between different constellations of cities are constantly shifting and dynamic and are never fixed. Different actors, networks, and cities play different roles at different points in time, and different cities may take on varying degrees of importance in relation to the spread and adaptation of different sets of ideas. For example, while the US government played a dominant role in the construction of a global youth development complex in the Middle East at certain moments, at other times, as US foreign policy priorities shifted elsewhere, it was the interests of other actors—NGOs, the private sector, local states—that took on a driving role.
We can focus, too, on the central role of material resources in driving and supporting the global spread of ideas. Ideas do not spread on their own, no matter how internally appealing and compelling they may be. Spreading ideas takes enormous amounts of material and institutional investment. Importantly, while ideas matter, they are not all that matters. Geostrategic considerations may drive the promotion of certain ideas in particular global spaces, less than the ideas themselves. And, as seen in the case of Amman, it may not always matter if there is extensive local resistance to dominant discourses. The presence of material incentives and lack of real material alternatives can themselves be compelling forces for the continued local engagement with these discourses, projects, and agendas.
The framework of global ideas working their way through global cities and global city networks that this book has adopted foregrounds the importance of what is, essentially, a comparative relational perspective. To understand the continuing transformations in politics, economies, societies, and human geographies in the Middle East, as in all other regions of the world, we need to attend to the central role played by the spread of dominant ideas and discourses that tie this region to the rest of the world system. But, equally, to understand the ways in which these dominant ideas and discourses have spread and been adapted locally in the Middle East, we need to attend to the central importance of spatiality, temporality, and materiality, as these structures and forces work through the dense networks that link global and gateway cities in the Middle East and the rest of the world together.
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