Social movements, activism and social development in the middle east

Abstract

"The arrival of liberalization and marketization in the Middle East during the 1980s brought about important socioeconomic changes. The free market economy has made consumer commodities available and enriched society s upper strata, while it has also increased income disparity. State provisions have been undermined and poor people must rely chiefly on themselves for survival. Meanwhile, the globalized notions of human rights and political participation have placed economic rights and citizen participation on the political agenda, opening up new areas for social mobilization. Collective responses to these new conditions have varied. The use of coping strategies and massive urban cost-of-living protests were early reactions to aspects of neoliberal policies during the 1980s, as in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia. The urban uprisings, however, seem to have given way in the 1990s to institutional methods of dealing with austerity. While trade unions are continuing to push for living standard adjustments opposing aspects of structural adjustment policies they nevertheless represent only a fraction of the total workforce in the region. The vast majority of the labouring classes remains dispersed in the informal urban economy. In general, trade unions have failed to link community concerns to those of the workplace. For this reason, urban grassroots movements may find a space for collective action in the community or neighbourhood, rather than the workplace. People are, for the most part, facing the same challenges of day-to-day living: finding secure housing, being able to pay rent, acquiring urban amenities, and having adequate schools, clinics, cultural centres and the like. Community-based struggles for such collective consumption through institutional settings characterize, in some sense, urban social movements ."(pg iii)