Migrant and Refugee Uprisings in Lebanon and Tunisia: A Comparative Study of Failed south Solidarity | ||
| Cairo Studies in English | ||
| Article 4, Volume 2024, Issue 2, December 2024, Pages 28-43 PDF (330.98 K) | ||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/cse.2024.321249.1191 | ||
| Author | ||
| Roula Seghaier* | ||
| Global Urban Studies, Rutgers State University - Newark, NJ | ||
| Abstract | ||
| Postcolonial and anti-imperial organizing has imagined a world order where solidarity extends beyond the nation-state: Peoples’ solidarities were elaborated in the Colombo conference of 1954 and in Bandung, leading to the establishment of the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL) in 1966, and the Tricontinental Movement. Japanese fighters joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Frenchmen fought with the Algerian Front of National Liberation (AFNL) against their own government. Transnational projects such as Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, and Third-Worldism contributed profoundly to South solidarity (Laleh Khalili 2012; Elisabeth Armstrong 2016; Samir Amin 2017; Anup Dhar and Anjan Chakrabarti 2019). They imagined a “horizontal comradeship” (Mohanty 2003) that disrupts the world order. Yet, today, despite the spectacular 2019 uprisings worldwide, this tradition is on the decline. Instead of South Solidarities and networks of militancy, we saw a rise of global/humanitarian NGOized activism (Khalili 2012), with postcolonial states adopting racial hierarchies of empire.This paper studies the delegitimization of migrant/refugee and non-national/non-citizen presence in contemporary uprisings not only a preposition of biopolitical states but as a it is reproduced in our own Leftist movements through two cases of complicity: the 2023 witch hunt against Sub-Saharan migrants in Tunisia, and the moral panics against the Palestinian demand for civil rights in Lebanon, in the 2019 Camps Movement. The study aims to expose the understanding of bodies trespassing borders as aggressive/temporal/backward is not a phenomenon limited to the Global North or authoritarian states, but a modern phenomenon in transnational organizing. challenging citizenship as a premise for organizing local revolts which creates moral panics, systemic and figurative exclusions of ‘infiltrators,’ their erasure from history, and, consequentially, their delegitimization as actors of liberation, as in the cases of Lebanon and Tunisia. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Sub-Saharan Migrants; Tunisia; Palestinian Refugees; Lebanon; Racialization; Eugenics | ||
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