34 Introduction
and (traditional) “Muslim” identity and are thus reflexive. Which raises the
question of which “public” is therefore the more modern one?
augbolle’s description of the complex set of publics in Lebanon H
and the ways in which they are differentiated along ideological, gender
and sectarian axes illustrates the difficulties of treating certain publics
as hegemonic and national and others as counter-hegemonic and sub-
altern. The fluidity and open-endedness in the narratives about the self
and the collective in the case of conflict and post-conflict situations marks
publics as fragile and contested but also capable of extreme violence. Le
Ray’s description of post-conflict reconstruction marks both Turkish
and Kurdish publics as contested and the public sphere as transient and
changeable, at times manifested only through fleeting encounters in buses
and checkpoints. Amir-Ebrahimi’s discussion of the “Weblogistan” in
Iran also highlights the changeable and fluid quality of the Iranian public
sphere as well as the intangible qualities of both physical and virtual pub-
lic spaces. Complicating the issue are the ways in which discourses from
within and outside societies and region often collude to dichotomize forms
of discourses and actions. In addition to the emergent, fluid and changing
realities of public spheres within societies, the role of transnational actors,
as in diaspora groups, migrant communities and international interven-
tion, also are in play in constructing the nation and its publics.
Political participation and its institutions
Another way of posing the relationship between the nation and its pub-
lics is to examine the ways in which public spheres produce citizenship.
Investigating the sociology of emergent publics is important in order to
focus upon the construction of subjectivities, the agency of the people
constituting these publics and the nature and quality of their participation
in public life. If the issue at the heart of the matter is to examine public
participation that produces, as well as enables the practice of, citizenship
and the construction of imagined political communities, then such par-
ticipation can take a multiplicity of forms.
s Nancy Fraser points out, one of the promises of the notion of the A
public sphere is its importance for critical social theory as well as for dem-
ocratic political practice through its identification of an “institutionalized