Traboulsi 61the “bread riots” that rocked the major Moroccan cities. The same could
be said of Jordan where the revolts of Salt and Ma‘an had a great bear-
ing on bringing about the liberalization measures of King Hussein in his
last years. Paradoxically, those contestation movements were primarily
socially motivated (not only the bread riots in Cairo and Morocco, but
also the poverty and unemployment motives behind the youth rebellion
in Algeria, and the regional economic and social marginalization in the
Jordanian case). Yet their main achievements were in the political field.
Here is a further correlation to meditate upon between the socioeconomic
and the political.
ose movements come quite close to the civil disobedience that Th
Habermas suggests as a last resort. Of course, they degenerated into more
violent encounters due to the reaction of the existing regimes.
It is worthwhile to compare those social movements with the short-
lived public sphere during the Damascus Spring of 2000–2001 mainly
represented by a proliferation of autonomous associations and cultural
clubs all over the country and the intense activity of human rights orga-
nizations animated mainly by merchants and ex-Leftist intellectuals. That
movement—which unfortunately has not yet been the subject of thorough
academic research—was easily repressed and quickly recuperated by the
regime because it was deprived of a popular dimension.
ally, the overthrow of the Iraqi regime is a crucial case for Fin
research into the modalities of the transition to democracy in the Arab
world. The tragedy of the popular insurrections of March 1991, the climax
of the opposition by large segments of the Iraqi people to the Ba‘th regime
over two long decades, raised the question of the relative weakness of
large-scale armed popular insurrections even facing an army that had just
been defeated in an external war. While this problematic does not in any
way justify the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, it does raise seri-
ous questions concerning the question of the dismantling of authoritarian
regimes in the Arab World. The least that can be said is that it requires the
application of stronger popular power in which violence is unfortunately
not to be excluded. Or, to use Habermas’s own terminology, the interven-
tion of popular power is required in order to move the process of democ-
ratization from the “discursive” level to the “strategic” level.