Thank you for addressing this. As it happens, many in the nations that have found themselves beamed into the West by international media tend to agree. I will admit, as an Egyptian (exiled, of course) I couldn't draw myself away from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya long enough to even pretend to care what was going on in Tunisia or Gabon (for instance). When I did, it was because my friends and family in Egypt asked me to. They very much understood what they were doing in their country would impact the rest of Africa and Asia and had been influenced very much by protests throughout the continents already. For instance, the refusal of Gbagbo to relinquish his presidency in Côte d'Ivoire and the immediate response by Ivoirian citizens caught the attention of ordinary Egyptians, who had for 30 years struggled against the Mubarak regime to no avail. Knowing they were not alone, seeing Tunisians take to the streets for their freedom, the devastating sand and winter storms that destroyed homes in Alexandria, Port Said and Cairo as well as the increasingly overt organization against the police soldiers who terrorized Egyptians propelled many into action.

I have a suspicion, and I don't think I'm alone in this, is that the focus on Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain by international media (Oman, Yemen, Jordan and Saudi Arabia I find rarely pop up on most news sites and shows in the past couple weeks) is the perception that these populations are somehow middle class, internet savvy and thus 'more desirable' as media subjects. They have been media darlings, in some ways, although coverage of Egypt and Tunisia's continuing battles is not easy to find in the mainstream. Libya had the benefit of being lead by one truly batshit crazy dictator and a red-faced United States quickly attempting to find itself on the right side of history after two screw-ups re:Tunisia and Egypt.

More thorough and accurate coverage of the rest of Asia and Africa is absolutely necessary right now. And it needs to be addressed by those of us with the resources to do as much as we can and more nuanced understandings of the particular histories, politics, economies and identities of region-specific revolts. Essentially, let's make sure we're doing the opposite of whatever this guy is saying: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/libya-getting-it-right-revolutionary-pan-african-perspective

(An interesting piece on Jadaliyya regarding the Orientalizing of certain peoples-in-revolt: http://africasacountry.com/2011/04/15/the-new-arab-narrative/)

Agreed. Re: the Black Agenda Report article you reference -- conspiracy theories can sometimes illuminate, but not that one. When keepin' it real goes oh so very wrong (smh. tsk, tsk) ... There are plenty of questions to ask about the decision to invade Libya under the pretext of erecting a "No Fly Zone" which turns out to offer provisions for air strikes (and even, in some circumstances, ground troops), and yet Qaddafi is, as you suggested, an unlikely candidate to foment Pan-African Revolution. Meanwhile, your attention to media emphasis on internet-savvy, middle-class, respectable, non-violent Arabs at the heart of a translocal revolution is spot-on...One related and crucial, yet underexamined, aspect of the protest movement in Libya is the role of self-defense/violence: that which seemed central to liberation struggles and de-colonization efforts in the 1960s and 1970s has scarcely been mentioned as part of revolutionary politics since that time. Conservatives have sponsored legislation that is pending in some states (and which has successfully passed in others) which makes it legal to carry arms on college campuses; meanwhile, the left generally has little to say about the stakes of an armed populace except to suggest that it's a bad idea. It's something worth thinking about further even if it's not likely to be a topic of the day on Democracy Now! or in any left forum any time soon ...

Evidence of the structural background of media inequality informing the west's appetite for a mirrored idealism in the Arab middle class. http://cammackellar.tumblr.com/post/4491578651/this-from-the-good-people-at-hum-via-hamish

Let's not forget the new U.S. state laws allowing guns in churches as well... (http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/07/gov_bobby_jindal_signs_bills_a.html)

Thanks for your post, Michael. Though I have seen programs like Democracy Now covering the greater African protest movements, even those news stories have been brief and with little context. It seems like this is indicative of the tendency for the left to wait for the right to foment a totalizing narrative (of pan-arab islamic fundamentalist revolution, etc) before we work to build a broad and complex view that counters.

@Michael and Elizabeth: The role of self-defense and violence is indeed something that needs to be discussed more openly. I think especially that the myth that Egyptians and Tunisians did not protest using violent tactics needs to be shattered at once. My uncle was one of thousands of Egyptians who patrolled the streets of his neighborhood, armed to the teeth, in order to confront and protect against Mubarak's thugs and any other person taking advantage of the chaos on the streets.

Yes, people in Tunisia and Egypt succeeded in their immediate aims - ousting their respective dictators - but they did not do so peacefully (and they will not continue fighting peacefully either). The media casting Tunisians and Egyptians (as opposed to Libyans, Ivoirians, etc.) as "peaceful protesters" allows observers in the West to convince themselves that these revolutionaries:

1. Do not have explicitly anti-colonial aims
2. Desire and will conform to Western standards of "democracy"
3. Will not continue to struggle against the powers that have assumed control (and do not represent the goals of the revolutions)
4. Are struggling for civil rights, not human rights

Certainly, these fantasies about North Africa and Southwest Asia (although not in their entirety - Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Palestine are rarely in the news for a reason) also allow the media and the West to characterize insurrections throughout the rest of Africa and Asia as "bad" protests, totally unwarranted and barbaric.

Of course, Hillary Clinton first said of the January 25th uprising in Egypt that, “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” We might have the opportunity to witness another about-face from Western powers in the near future. At least, I hope so.

@Sophia: your brilliant insights makes me wonder if we can anticipate a "Guerilla Warfare 2.0" to accompany "Revolution 2.0." I am interested in what a left theory of revolutionary militarism, fit for the 21st century, might look like...it's something I think Slavoj Zizek has been after in re-introducing Lenin, Mao and others to a new generation...

Thanks Michael for getting this party started. I spend most of my time trying to retrace the connections between the “Arab world” and its neighbors to the northern (Balkanistan) and east (Desiland), so the parallels in this discussion with Africa are very illuminating for me. I recently attended a panel at which Horace Campbell argued that the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were African as much as they were Arab. This was to me an exciting proposition but unfortunately one he didn’t follow through on. I see the discussion here has already begun answering his call, so the excitement returns!

A few observations, in no particular order:

1. With Libya’s concurrent U.S. bombing and referral to the International Criminal Court, Brother Leader Q has in a funny way finally achieved his greatest wish: to simultaneously be an African leader and an Arab one, just not in the way he wanted. By which I mean the terms “African” and “Arab” have since the Cold War become metonymic in the “west” with two distinct framings, both antipolitical: “African” states have been cast as largely “failing” but only peripheral to great power interests, so instead international institutions take on much of the management of populations (see esp. Mark Duffield’s “Global Governance and the New Wars”). In contrast, “Arab” states benefited from enormous U.S./European strategic attention and investment, but in support of strong repressive regimes. We can see this in the ICC: “Africa” gets too much (i.e. all) of its attention, whereas the “Middle East” gets too little due to the relatively low ratification rate. See also liberal attitudes towards U.S. militarism (pull the troops out of Iraq, send them to Darfur instead!).

The possibility of meaningful democratic politics is foreclosed in both framings, but the WAY the impossibility is staged/framed differs, as captured nicely by the Palestinian politician and commentator ‘Azmi Bishara:

“On the one hand we have the victim par excellence, who can arouse only pity, who can be easily sold to the millions who need a cause to which they can rhythmically snap their fingers [reference to Live 8 concerts]. On the other we have the cult of terrorism and murder (and we all know who that stands for, regardless of Blair's insistence that ordinary Muslims are not to blame) barging into the middle of this harmonious gathering of the "real United Nations" which in its peace-loving rationality would do the right thing if only pointed in the right direction” (“Beyond Good and Evil,” 2005, http://bit.ly/ek9bs7)

The Libya case and the confusions around it represent a convergence, as well as a tension, between these two modes of hegemonic management: “humanitarianism” and “security.”

2. Sophia’s point about violence is crucial. The liberal attempt to bracket and redistribute rights to it is of course hugely problematic, but thinking clearly about political violence is also a blind spot much of the “left(s)” which either, IMHO, uncritically celebrates nonviolence (in the process doing serious violence to the historiography of India, South Africa, and other places) or supports/excuses violence as nothing more than inevitable reaction to hegemonic violence.

Thinking about revolutionary violence, of course, needs to be part of the broader project of studying how the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions reorganized POWER, period, in which both violent and non-violent tactics were combined and calibrated to amazing effect (see Mona El-Ghobashy’s recent MERIP piece on how Egypt’s police lost the battle for the streets http://t.co/aSG4iQ8 ). In contrast, the Libyan uprising’s bottom-up nature was relatively quickly stifled by regime defectors and returning exiles (sorry to keep plugging MERIP, but see Nicholas Pelham’s writeup of the Benghazi rebels http://t.co/bnG8BoX ). The contrasts are much more interesting than simply positing (incorrectly) that Egypt/Tunisia were “nonviolent” whereas Libya was “violent.”

It’s only once that analytical context is figured out that we can meaningfully evaluate the use of violence. The typical questions about NATO intervention – will it achieve its goals, what ARE the goals, will it kill more people than it saves – don’t get at this. More important are questions like: what kinds of violence or reorganization of the implements of violence empower are more likely to enable a political emancipatory movement, and what kinds will reduce it to a supplicant?

3. Bit of shameless self-promotion: I tried to link the two topics above – the relationships between “regions” and the necessity to think about seriously about revolutionary violence – in a recent piece: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/876/shades-of-solidarity_notes-on-race-talk-interventi. It also tries to get at two themes I didn’t get to address above: race and solidarity. I know it raises more questions than it answers, but hopefully you guys can help come up with some of those answers, or at least better questions…

PS: Right on cue, Mahmood Mamdani attempts to connect Egypt and Tunisia to the current "Walk to Work" campaign in Uganda, with the help of Soweto:
http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/-/688334/1149498/-/c2moiiz/-/index.html

Dig this analysis of some distinctions in the protest movements that make up this "season of revolt" ... you be the judge:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/Africa-Monitor/2011/0419/Do-protests-in-Nigeria-Uganda-and-Burkina-Faso-have-anything-in-common