28 Introduction
the border in Iran, the “blogosphere” is an active weapon in the hands
of those Iraqis who have only their ideas and words to deploy against the
violence they witness in their everyday lives.
e last two chapters by Joseph Alagha and Marie Le Ray examine Th
a different kind of resistance, one where state and minority come face to
face to contest the meanings of governance, society, identity and memory.
Le Ray examines a particular local context, in this case, a Kurdish Alevi
province in Turkey. This locality has long represented an “overregulated
space of surveillance” filled with check-points, fences, curfews and strict
security that governed all aspects of life. This included access to and dis-
semination of information, thus controlling “any means of meaning-mak-
ing.” However, in the relative peace prevailing at the time of the research,
social practices, pilgrimages, festivals and commemorations created
“breathing spaces” that may have a transformative effect and, over time,
contest state definitions of the “public grammar.” Le Ray shows how an
encounter between passengers on a bus and checkpoint policemen and
soldiers turns into a public discussion of state tactics and public percep-
tions. The construction of heterodox religious spaces complicates the
identities of the inhabitants of Tunceli to highlight both their Kurdishness
and their Alevi-ness. Even more publicly and collectively, protests against
a state project to construct dams in the region takes up the discourses of
environmentalism. Thus the inhabitants of Tunceli complicate and mul-
tiply their identities, which in itself contests state definitions of them as
“terrorists” or “heretics.”
nother thread of the Tunceli story is those of migrant workers A
from Europe who come home to participate in festivals, to fund devel-
opment projects and to participate in collective action. Once again the
production of the subaltern public sphere is simultaneously local, national
and transnational.
n the final chapter of the volume, Joseph Alagha presents us I
with a highly detailed account of the evolution, over a mere 30 years, of
Hizbullah from a marginal sectarian Shiite protest movement in Lebanon
to an organized subaltern social movement, to a fully fledged political
party that participates in and attempts to dominate national politics and
the national public discourse. The author’s attentiveness to large and small
shifts in Hizbullah’s political strategies and discourses shows the dramatic