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This chapter launches the contemporary section of the book. The overarching argument is that despite the binaries leveraged by leaders and analysts alike, political contestation in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth and twentieth, is not reducible to an “Islamist vs. secularist” cleavage. Instead, contestation and key outcomes are driven by shifting coalitions for and against pluralism, notably, an Islamo-liberal/secular liberal coalition that marked the sixth major, pluralizing alignment since the Tanzimat reforms. It would transform state and society, even though the coalition itself proved short-lived as democratization stalled against a backdrop of debates over Islamophobia, the headscarf, minority rights, freedom of expression, media freedoms, and sweeping show trials.
In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.
This chapter introduces an original and timely theoretical toolkit. The purpose: to challenge misleading readings of (Turkey’s) politics as driven by binary contests between “Islamists” vs. “secularists” or “Kurds vs. Turks.” Instead, it introduces an alternative “key”[1] to politics in and beyond Turkey that reads contestation as driven by shifting coalitions of pluralizers and anti-pluralists. This timely contribution to conversations in political science (e.g., comparative politics; political theory) is supplemented by an original analytical-descriptive framework inspired by complex systems thinking in the natural and management sciences. The approach offers a novel methodological framework for capturing causal complexity, in Turkey and other Muslim-majority settings, but also in any political system that is roiled by contending religious and secular nationalisms as well as actors who seek greater pluralism.
How were post-Arab Spring constitutions drafted? What are the most significant elements of continuity and change within the new constitutional texts? What purposes are these texts designed to serve? To what extent have constitutional provisions been enforced? Have the principles of constitutionalism been strengthened compared to the past? These are some of the key questions Francesco Biagi addresses. Constitution Building After the Arab Spring. A Comparative Perspective examines seven national experiences of constitution building in the Arab world following the 2011 uprisings, namely those of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. This interdisciplinary book, based largely on the author's own work and research in the region, compares these seven national experiences through four analytical frameworks: constitution-drafting and constitutional reform processes; separation of powers and forms of government; constitutional justice; and religion, women and non-Muslims within the framework of citizenship.
Contesting Pluralism(s) challenges a widespread tendency to limit studies of Turkish – and Muslim – politics to 'Islamist vs. secularist' or 'Islam vs. democracy' debates. Instead, Nora Fisher-Onar's innovative argument centers on coalitions for and against pluralism. Retelling Turkey's story from the late Ottoman Empire to the present as a tale of pluralizing vs. anti-pluralist coalitions, this book offers an alternative explanation for major outcomes from elections and coup d'etats to revolutions. Here, cross-camp alliances pit those who are willing to coexist with 'Other(s)' against those who champion a unitary, national project in which everyone speaks, believes, looks, and loves as they do. Drawing on a rich array of primary and secondary data, Fisher-Onar introduces an analytical framework for capturing causal complexity in political contestation. This study rejects Orientalist exceptionalism, rereading the relationship between political religion, pluralism, and populism via a framework that travels across and beyond the Muslim-majority world.
This book describes the politically charged afterlife of Israeli electronics gathered by and processed in a cluster of rural Palestinian villages that has emerged as an informal regional e-waste hub. As with many such hubs throughout the global South, rudimentary recycling practices represent a remarkable entrepreneurial means of livelihood amidst poverty and constraint, that generates staggering damage to local health and the environment, with tensions between these reaching a breaking point. John-Michael Davis and Yaakov Garb draw on a decade of community-based action research with and within these villages to contextualise the emergence, realities and future options of the Palestinian hub within both the geo-political realities of Israel's occupation of the West Bank as well as shifting understandings of e-waste and recycling dynamics and policies globally. Their stories and analysis are a poignant window into this troubled region and a key sustainability challenge in polarized globalized world.
We describe the minute details of cable copper extraction through burning, and the persistence of the phenomenon despite local harms and frustrations, and our development of a sustainable and economically viable alternative to burning, in the form of a mechanical cable grinding facility. We describe the successful piloting of this facility, through initial subsidy for free grinding in tandem with a community policing mechanism, in which community volunteers would report burns as they occurred, and a response team would rapidly approach the burners to interview them and offer them vouchers for free grinding of their materials. Alongside the indicators of the success of this pilot intervention, we also report on the political barriers we encountered in institutionalising and expanding it for the longer term.
This chapter opens with a community meeting in the West Line about the e-waste issue as an example of how multiple social locations and perspectives of different community actors can be selectively narrowed in public forums and community interfaces with outside actors. In this case, the meeting foregrounded e-waste’s pollution harms and dumping narratives while eclipsing its economic/livelihood dimension. This episode leads us to a review of the complexity, challenges, and importance of representative community engagement in development projects, and how shortcuts to “participatory” development can overlook social heterogeneity, bolstering the visibility and power of certain segments within a diverse and at times contentious community. We describe the social and political divisions within the West Line villages, and our effort to generate a broadly endorsed development proposal with this community through a novel Delphi-like method. We describe the iterative procedure we adopted and how it enabled convergence on a development trajectory that proved broadly consensual, namely a social and environmental upgrading of the e-waste industry that would preserve livelihoods while reducing its harms. We reflect on the irony of the apparent success of this outside intervention in broadening and facilitating a community participation process.
We review the emergence of the West Line hub that has processed most of Israel’s e-waste for over two decades against the background of the global phenomena of e-waste policies and hubs often characterised as simply dumping grounds at the receiving end of flows of contaminating processes and materials to less regulated settings (the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, PHH). Its emergence was facilitated by factors common to the occupied West Bank as a whole (de-development, lower labor costs, dominance of the informal sector, a porous border and spatial fragmentation), and others especially important in the West Line area. These include the disruption of work opportunities in Israel alongside a rise in the amounts and value of e-waste; proximity to Israeli urban centers and distance from Palestinian ones; the historical presence of a scrap trade; a population comprised of a handful of extended families facilitating trust-based economies, on the one hand, while overcoming stigma and opposition on the other; and availability of areas of governance vacuum allowing dumping and burning. The PHH’s crudely global account of e-waste hub emergence must be refined to include the context-specific presence and operation of hubs as forceful economic agents, not simply passive recipients of waste dumping.
Our focus in this chapter is the burn sites themselves. We describe the toxic substances released, the massive environmental and health problems these present, the importance of including remediation of these sites as an integral part of e-waste policies, and our piloting of such remediation. While such toxic sites figure centrally in the scientific literature on e-waste and iconic portrayals of e-waste hubs, figuring implicitly or explicitly as a key motivator for EPR policies that would redirect waste away from e-waste hubs, they figure very little in e-waste policies themselves. Thus, such policies risk giving e-waste hubs the worst of two worlds: relocating the sources of their livelihood away to central capital-heavy recycling facilities without removing the contamination that would continue to harm their landscapes and health for decades to come. We describe the details of our pilot cleanup of one such site, our development of a framework for scaling this up to remediate the most serious sites in the West Line, and how this scaleup fell afoul of disputes of principle regarding national sovereignty and more mundane tensions between central and local authorities within the Palestinian Authority.
This chapter describes the global and local ramifications of the emergence, dominance, and policy derivatives of an e-waste dumping paradigm focused on the transfer of contaminants from the Global North to helpless “digital dumpsites”: peripheral locations suffering grievous environmental and health impacts. Though derived with only a thin linkage to realities in these locations, these caricatured portrayals resonate strongly in the Global North, and undergird key platforms of e-waste regulation, the Ban Amendment to the Basel Convention and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies now a hegemonic model for e-waste collection and recycling. Ironically, this paradigm bypasses the informal sector, its vital livelihood contributions to these places and central role within the scrap value chain, and redirects resources, attention, and agency away from dynamics and actors key to systemic reform and local sustainability. Thus, EPR’s forwarding-looking and formalizing agenda can leave the places it aspires to save with the worst of both worlds: deprived of livelihoods and saddled with the legacy of past contamination. We describe this global paradigm’s local resonances in the ironically convergent thrusts of emerging Israeli EPR legislation, local and national NGO voices in Israel and Palestine, and the sovereignty aspirations of a distant Palestinian Authority.