A73 - Ce que les crises politiques font aux trajectoires individuelles

Michel Dobry defines 'political crises' as social processes leading, or likely to lead, to ruptures in the functioning of the political institutions (not necessarily legitimate) specific to a social system. Works on this constituent object of the social sciences have highlighted certain characteristics of these moments: the loss of the state's capacity to exercise its legitimate monopolies of physical and symbolic violence, the plasticity of structures, the de-objectification of social relations, the reconfiguration of the roles of actors and their identities, the conversion of different types of capital, or else the redefinition of intergenerational and gender relations. Attention is therefore usually focused on the most visible aspects of change, and the meso and macro levels concentrate most studies, whether in the political, economic, social or cultural fields.

This panel proposes to shift the analysis to reflect, following a multidisciplinary approach, on the impact of crisis situations on individual trajectories. Based on a series of case studies, combining Syria, Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt and Algeria, and focusing on the case of activists and intellectuals, it will study the link between what a "crisis" is, what it does to individuals and how, in return, the latter come to make the crisis. Indeed, we cannot understand the way in which societies are (re)composed following 'fluid' conjunctures without analyzing how these alter individual paths, sometimes fork professional and activist trajectories, redefine universes of meaning, and affect emotional and affective states.

Responsables : Matthieu Rey, Institut Français du Proche Orient (IFPO) ; Laura Ruiz de Elvira, IRD, Ceped, France 

What happens to individuals who have long been involved in organized forms of protest when the protests take a revolutionary turn? In February 2019 in Algiers, activists were - like everyone else - surprised by the unprecedented uprising of citizens who took to the streets of the country against the fifth mandate to which President Abdelaziz Bouteflika pretended. Overcoming the usual protest practices, the absence of leaders and rejection of existing structures also characterized this uprising. Based on interviews conducted between 2019 and 2021 with activists already involved, this paper questions how they lived and experienced individually the upheavals observable since February 2019. By studying closely and over the long term individual protest trajectories, I explore more precisely how the political crisis - and the uncertainty that accompanies it - shakes up beliefs, practices and activist commitments. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of the political sequence that opens in February 2019 and the history of protests in Algeria.

On September 28th 2000, Ariel Sharon, who was then the right-wing Israeli opposition leader, visited the Al Aqsa Mosque Compound. This visit is considered to be the triggering event of the Palestinian uprising, albeit not the only reason for the outbreak of the so-called second Intifada, or al-Aqsa Intifada. The latter also reflects Palestinian frustration and a popular anger, fuelled by the absence of the political results promised by the Oslo negotiation process. 

The Intifada opened a new sequence in the Oslo process. Its dynamics structurally modified the traditional political divisions between supporters of and opponents to Oslo and the Palestinian leadership. Thus, the Palestinian factions were also forced to change their means of struggle and resistance. 

This presentation seeks to interrogate the partisan trajectories within the Palestinian national movement during this period. It will focus on the trajectory of the members of the PLO factions by showing how the political crisis reshaped the political landscape or, on the contrary, freezed certain political dynamics.

The revolutionary activists who left Syria after 2011 tried to continue defending their cause at a distance, in their countries of exile. Despite the adversity of exile, the continuity of their activism is undeniable. However, in order to nuance this assumption of continuity, we can consider the extent to which exile contributes to a progressive distancing of these revolutionaries from the cause of the revolution. This paper proposes to address the theme of militant disengagement, which has become a classic in the sociology of mobilizations, based on the case of Syrian revolutionaries exiled in Lebanon and France. Between the extremes of total commitment and disengagement, we can observe an infinite number of nuances of commitment. I will question the way in which the differentiated conditions of exile can influence the evolution of activism at a distance by closely studying the biographical paths of activists. 

The different analyses of the 2011 Egyptian events and their developments have often used globalizing approaches to identify the prominent causes of this upheaval and its political consequences. Indeed, different studies have looked into confirming or negating the revolutionary qualification of such events. However, this presentation applies a micro and subjective approach to understanding how these events have represented both moments of rupture and continuity in the trajectories of individuals and shaped their everyday lives during an important time span (2011-2014). 

Based on the life trajectory of two activists, one who has been committed to politics since the mid-2000s, while the other got into politics during the revolutionary moment of 2011, this presentation seeks to show how individuals describe, live, and question such a moment. Furthermore, it pinpoints the individual insertion in different historical sequences: the revolutionary moment and its aftermaths. These moments witness the interplay between individuals, the ordinary, and the crisis. What do they do when a pacifist situation moves into violence? How do they justify, legitimate, and explain their turn to violence? How do these moments shape their everyday life? How do they identify their protagonists? How do they position themselves when revolution becomes a moment of political transition? How are the intergenerational relations between the different cohorts of activists shaped according to their understanding of the revolutionary events?

1979 is a well-known milestone in Middle Eastern history, as the Iranian Revolution broke out during this year. However, this moment echoed other critical episodes in the area. In Syria, after the attack of the military academy in Aleppo, something changed. The current presentation will focus on the narrative around this summer in different memoirs, to understand what this milestone meant for activists. It will shed light on personal path rather than institutional or partisan histories. 

From 1976 onwards, several groups started to contest the Hafez al-Assad regime. The Muslim Bortherhood was one of them and it joined others such as the Fighting Vangard, in order to undermine the Assad regime. They used several means such as demonstrating or targetting authorities. Aleppo and Hama quickly became the main hub of the protests. Adnan Saad al-Din, representative of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, and close ally to the Fighting Vangard, became the leaders of those who refused any kind of negotiation, and pushed towards armed actions. 

The current presentation will explore how Adnan Saad al-Din scrutinized these events in his memoirs. He wrote a massive monument of five volumes, discussing other souvenirs. He aimed to precise Muslim Brotherhood legitimacy and correct misunderstandings around their involvement in the late 1970s. It is a unique piece of evidence of how crise reshaped personal parth but also, how memory affected the narrative after the crise. 

While the Syrian "revolutionary crisis" of 2011, and the ensuing war, have been studied by many researchers from the perspective of collective mobilisations, the destruction of infrastructures, or the migratory dynamics that they generated, few studies have examined how they affected and shaped individual trajectories. However, the life paths of Syrian citizens, whether they refer to militant careers or more "ordinary" paths, seem to us to be particularly heuristic for exploring what large-scale "political crises" do to individuals: reconfiguration of interpersonal networks, family and friendship social ties, processes of politicization and radicalisation, new forms of commitment and disengagement, multiple migratory logics, an abundance of emotions and ambivalent feelings, the weight of uncertainty in decision-making, etc. Based on the case study of a singular trajectory - that of Abu Joud, a young Syrian who was doing his military service when the protest movement started - we propose to study how "crises" transform the lives of individuals. Following a micro-sociological and career perspective, we propose to focus particularly on issues of family ties, militant logics and "affective states". 

Since the Arab Spring, many authors have emphasized the emergence of a new political subjectivity in the region, while others point to a new understanding of one's own role as a citizen, in the context of a "crisis of citizenship". Classically, the analysis of these types of issues would fall within the field of political socialization research. But this term has hardly been used in research on social movements and youth in the Maghreb/Middle East since 2011. In order to further explore the idea of the "politicized individual in plurality," this intervention proposes to revisit discussions of political socialization from a biographical perspective. Based on life stories with activists in Morocco and in the diaspora in Europe, this intervention discusses the conceptual range of biographical processes and the respective concepts of "crisis".