Shami 15public appears in scholarly and media representations of the region only
as the passive and pacified mass or the angry mob (incomprehensibly the
former turns into the latter).
s volume begs to differ. It seeks the mutual advancement of the Thi
literature on public spheres and the literature on the Middle East and
North Africa and uses the concept to make the region, and its publics, vis-
ible in ways that do not focus exclusively on violence and exceptionalism
from democratic ideals. However, this collection also goes beyond expli-
cating processes particular to geo-politically or culturally or civilization-
ally defined entities. The point of this volume is not simply to demonstrate
that a public sphere exists or has historically existed in these societies or
to find Muslim public spheres as a counterpart to western (Christian?)
public spheres. Rather, the essays, through their different topics, begin the
work of methodically conceptualizing the construction and dismantling
of public spaces and places in relation to particular political entities and
processes (nations, states, political movements, cities, identity politics,
elections, wars). In such times and spaces, people coalesce to constitute
publics and engage in public communication, and political participation
takes on the qualities of intermediacy that hold promise for democratic
development. This perspective follows the notion that democratization is
to be understood and measured as the advancement of reasoned collec-
tive choice through public communication.^3
e collection of chapters in the volume represent a five-year project Th
(2000–2005) organized by the Social Science Research Council entitled
“Reconceptualizing Public Spheres in the Middle East and North Africa.”
The impetus behind deploying the public sphere as a conceptual frame-
work for the SSRC project and this volume was not so much to carve out a
delimited space of social science inquiry that emphasizes specific and dis-
tinct social and political processes, as much as to integrate, within a new
analytical field, research endeavors that are currently fragmented and var-
iously labeled as civil society, private/public domains, urban social move-
ments, gender identities, youth cultures, the welfare state, new media and
cultural production. It is the integrative promise in the notion of public
spheres that enables new perspectives on the region, its societies and poli-
tics. As Hoexter stresses, “The importance of this concept ... lies largely in
that it goes beyond appeals to the formal institutions of the Western civil