What is dignity ? Descriptions of Karama in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt
(2016)
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- Abstract
- Dignity or “karama” in Arabic is a nebulous concept that challenges one to reflect about various issues such as identity or faith, and the perceptions of others on one’s identity or one’s faith. This research was prompted by this challenge at a time in which the region of North Africa and the Middle East was drifting in the socio-political event of the “Arab Spring”. The main motivation in this research is to investigate understandings of “karama” in the specific context of Egypt during the 2011 protests and to attempt refuting the uniformity of politicized popular demands such as “karama” to be intricately linked to human rights demands particularly in the context of increasing institutionalization of those human rights. To do so, this research focuses on interviews with participants in the 2011 protests and art forms that emerged in relation to the protests and in which there was an expression of dissatisfaction in general and of lack of dignity in particular. The results from this research show that human rights and economic issues are of course important concerns for those protesters, but that they seemed less appropriated than the feelings and emotions regarding an identity problem. This revelation on an Arab identity concern came out as quite a surprise given the apparent obsolescence of pan-Arabism in the region since the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel.
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El Bernoussi, Z. (2016). What is dignity ? Descriptions of Karama in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/88572