R.I.P. Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised- Gil Scott... by larsen42

Abidjan welcomes "Democracy", after France's bloody coup against Laurent Gbagbo

Russian analysis on France & UN war on Ivory Coast

Russia to inquire into Cote d’Ivoire crisis

Source : The Voice of Russia Yelizaveta Isakova

Apr 5, 2011 20:53 Moscow Time

Sergei Lavrov. Photo: EPA

Russia intends to see into the legitimacy of the use of force by UN peacekeepers in Cote d’Ivoire, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said following the talks with his Gabonese counterpart Paul Toungui. Moscow’s stand remains unchanged - any foreign interference will only lead to increasing violence in African countries.

According to Sergei Lavrov, the legal aspect of implementing Resolution 1975 required an emergency briefing in the UN Security Council. In practice, this briefing did not provide Moscow with any accurate answers to its questions.

In all circumstances, we urged those using force in areas where civilians are concentrated to prevent any actions that could lead to new victims. There are several Russian citizens staying there; we are deeply concerned about their fate and will collect information and decide by what means we can ensure their safety, including the possible evacuation. I very much hope that the situation will be switched onto a political track, since the current developments’ harmful effect will become tangible if the use of force is being applied for a long time, Sergei Lavrov stressed.

On the night of April 4th, the French military mission “Unicorn”, along with the UN peacekeeping mission, delivered several air strikes on positions of the country’s former president Laurent Gbagbo, who has been refusing to shed power to Alassane Ouattara for half a year already. Thus, the Blue Helmets, who had to stay unbiased pursuant to a UN Security Council’s mandate, virtually lost their neutral status. The consequences of such a step can prove irretrievable both for Cote d’Ivoire and the UN, whose peaceful intentions have become doubtful.

In the meantime, news concerning the current situation in the Ivory Coast is more than inconsistent. According to Cote d’Ivoire’s Ambassador in Paris Ally Coulibaly, Laurent Gbagbo, who still refuses to recognize his defeat at presidential elections and keeps offering armed resistance to the new government and the UN, is negotiating his possible surrender. At the same time, Gbagbo’s advisor in Paris Toussaint Alain said that the president “is alive, has not been captured and has no intention to surrender.” Followers of president-elect Alassane Ouattara claim that they have occupied Gbagbo’s residence in Abidjan, even though the ex-president was not there, according to media reports. With military operations still under way in Cote d’Ivoire, Alassane Ouattara’s commanders are sure that with the assistance of the UN mission and France, it will take them a few days to regain complete control over the capital city.

Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms represents a bold examination of previous feminist criticisms of Fanon and argues that Fanon's writings on women and resistance provide the formative kernels of a liberating praxis for women existing under colonial and neocolonial oppression. Fanon's analyses of the Negro and Language, his critique of the novelist Mayotte Capecia, and his views on the condition of Algerian women figure prominently in this study. Sharpley-Whiting skillfully brings together approaches from a broad range of academic fields, including critical race theory, literary and cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis as she assesses the relevance of Fanon's theories of oppression to a feminist politics of resistance.

• Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (December 29, 1997)

ISBN: 9780847686391 

Fanon's Dialectic of Experience, by Ato. Sekyi-Otu

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth.

But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative.Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt.

Ato Sekyi-Otu is Associate Professor in the Division of Social Science and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University, Ontario.

Harvard University Press (June 2009)

Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, by Nigel Gibson

"Caricatured as a mindless apostle of violence, Fanon emerges in Nigel Gibson's rigorous and subtle analysis as a major humanistic thinker about injustice, a serious critic of nationalism and, for the first time, as an impressively profound philosopher of modern post-colonial politics and culture." Edward W. Said, Columbia University"This definitive interpretation of Fanon brilliantly touches the heart. Gibson presents a compelling and engaging analysis of Fanon's original theory of the racial gaze, of revolution, and of Fanon's complex theory of violence. All the perennial themes of political theory are masterfully presented in this major book. Readers will feel morally civilized after they read it." Teodros Kiros, Harvard University 
"Gibson's prose is elegant and clear and this book is, by far, the best introduction to Fanon's life and work. But it does more than this....The key idea that runs throughout the book is that of the dialectic. Gibson argues that there is an unstable, critical and creative element in the heart of FAnon's thought that seeks to move through apparently irreconcilable contradictions. This kind of analysis is what we would expect from any responsible engagement with Fanon's work and Gibson develops it very well. But he goes further and makes an original and significant contribution by showing that for Fanon this kind of progress requires the development of a fighting culture." Richard Pithouse, Sunday Independent

Frantz Fanon was a French psychiatrist turned Algerian revolutionary of Martinican origin, and one of the most important and controversial thinkers of the postwar period. A veritable "intellect on fire," Fanon was a radical thinker with original theories on race, revolution, violence, identity and agency.

This book is an excellent introduction to the ideas and legacy of Fanon. Gibson explores him as a truly complex character in the context of his time and beyond. He argues that for Fanon, theory has a practical task to help change the world. Thus Fanon's "untidy dialectic," Gibson contends, is a philosophy of liberation that includes cultural and historical issues and visions of a future society. In a profoundly political sense, Gibson asks us to reevaluate Fanon's contribution as a critic of modernity and reassess in a new light notions of consciousness, humanism, and social change.

This is a fascinating study that will interest undergraduates and above in postcolonial studies, literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, politics, and social and political theory, as well as general readers.

Nigel C. Gibson is Director of the Honors Program at Emerson College, Boston, and a research associate in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University and the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University.

Polity (July 7, 2003)

Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, by Lewis R. Gordon

As the first book to analyze the work of Fanon as an existential-phenomenological of human sciences and liberation philosopher, Gordon deploys Fanon's work to illuminate how the "bad faith" of European science and civilization have philosophically stymied the project of liberation. Fanon's body of work serves as a critique of European science and society, and shows the ways in which the project of "truth" is compromised by Eurocentric artificially narrowed scope of humanity—a circumstance to which he refers as the crisis of European Man. In his examination of the roots of this crisis, Gordon explores the problems of historical salvation and the dynamics of oppression, the motivation behind contemporary European obstruction of the advancement of a racially just world, the forms of anonymity that pervade racist theorizing and contribute to "seen invisibility," and the reasons behind the impossibility of a nonviolent transition from colonialism and neocolonialism to postcolonialism.

Lewis R. Gordon teaches Africana philosophy and contemporary religious thought at Brown University. He is author of Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Humanities),Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Routledge), and Her Majesty's Other Children: Philosophical Sketches from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman & Littlefield). He is also co-editor ofFanon: A Critical Reader (Blackwell) and Black Texts and Textuality: Constructing and De-Constructing Blackness (Rowman & Littlefield).

Taylor & Francis, Inc. (April 1997)

ISBN: 0415914159

Frantz Fanon in Malaysia : Reconfiguring the ideological landscape of Negritude in Sepet, by Adeline Koh & Frieda Ekotto

The purpose of this paper therefore is to go back to and reconsider some of Frantz Fanon’s key ideas in order to explore how different parts of the formerly colonized world are dealing with and understand their encounter with European imperialism through looking at the example of how Fanon has been applied in Malaysia, in the Malaysian film by director Yasmin Ahmad, Sepet [Chinese Eyes] (2004). Malaysia offers a very interesting choice to explore the impact of Fanon’s work precisely because of its different geographical and colonial history: colonized by the British and set in Southeast Asia, Malaysia–or “Malaya” under British colonial rule–provides an interesting background from which one can see how the tensions of colonialism play out through an interaction of the Francophone world with the Anglophone world. Sepet is a love story about an unlikely couple–a middle-class Malay girl and a poor Chinese boy (who shuns his Chinese name Lee Siao Long for Jason, and who, (Fanon may have smiled), has dyed his hair blond). We will show through a reading of this film and the impact of Fanon on the film how Malaysia represents a very similar yet different world from the Francophone world of which Fanon spoke. Malaysia is also an interesting case study particularly because unlike most “typical” postcolonial countries, the country has managed to successfully industrialize since independence–allowing one also to question the problematic notion of postcolonial economic dependency. Yet, it will also be shown that Fanon’s words will still manage to reveal the atypical and difficult condition of postcolonial alienation in contemporary Malaysia through Sepet.

Full article on www.adelinekoh.org

Rethinking Fanon : The Continuing Dialogue, edited by Nigel Gibson

French West Indian psychoanalyst & social philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) rejected his French citizenship & became a strong advocate of the Algerian liberation movement in the 1950s. A brilliant scholar who developed the theory that some neuroses are socially generated, Fanon's revolutionary works The Wretched of the Earth, Toward the African Revolution, & Black Skin White Masks founded an African intellectual awakening. The rebirth of Fanonism today in universities & the English speaking world is a testament to his relevance.

Edited by political theorist and African studies professor Nigel C. Gibson, Rethinking Fanon opens with an authoritative biography correcting fallacious assertions about Fanon's life, situating him in Marxism, negritude, Pan-Africanism, and the historical context of postwar decolonization, specifically the Algerian revolution. Section one is highlighted by extended discussions of Marx, Fanon's theories on sophisticated forms of cultural racism, and "true liberation, " as well as his influence on radical movements in the United States and Africa.

Homi Bhabha's "Remembering Fanon" opens section 2, which also contains discussions of the importance of the cultural and literary debates on Fanon by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward Said, and Benita Parry. Then Hussein Bulhan's investigation of Fanon's revolutionary psychiatric approaches provides another focal point, as do Bhabha's and Diana Fuss's psychoanalytical discussions of Fanon.

The third section dramatically highlights debates concerning gender and status of women in movements of national liberation and their aftermath. These range from Helie-Lucas's notion of Fanon as one of those who contributed to the "myth of the Algerian woman liberated along with her country" to Sharpley-Whiting'svindication of Fanon as "pro-feminist, " as well as articles by Fuss and Anne McClintock.

The book concludes with essays by Nigel Gibson and Lou Turner that examine new aspects of Fanon's politics and philosophy.

Nigel Gibson is assistant director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University.

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

* Frantz Fanon: Portrait of a Revolutionary Intellectual Emmanuel Hansen 

* Rescuing Fanon from the Critics Tony Martin 

* Frantz Fanon, World Revolutionary Lou Turner & John Alan 

* Fanon as a Democratic Theorist Hussein M. Adam 

* Revolutionary Psychiatry of Fanon Hussein A. Bulhan 

* Remembering Fanon Homi Bhabha 

* Travelling Theory Reconsidered Edward W. Said 

* Resistance Theory Benita Parry 

* Critical Fanonism Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 

* Women, Nationalism & Religion in the Algerian Liberation Struggle Marie-Aimee Helie-Lucas 

* Fanon & Gender Agency Anne McClintock 

* Interior Colonies Diana Fuss 

* Fanon's Feminist Consciousness & Algerian Women's Liberation T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting 

* Fanon & the FLN Lou Turner 

* Inside the Structure of the People Nigel C. Gibson

Prometheus Books, Publishers (1999)

From Tunisia to Lybia...

Egypt and the revolution in our minds, by Nigel Gibson

Extract :

"THE MILITARY INTERREGNUM

In 1956, four years after the 1952 Egyptian revolution and one year into the Algerian revolution, Algeria’s liberation movement met in the Soummam Valley to discuss the organisation and programme of its revolution. An important principle adopted there was that rather than militarising politics, the military and any military decision had to be subservient to, and under the control of, the political struggle. It is a principle that continues to haunt Algeria and Egypt where militarised states of emergency have been in place for decades, abrogating political rights and suppressing spaces for public discourse.

In 1959 Fanon presented his ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ (which would become a central chapter of The Wretched of the Earth) as lectures to the Algerian liberation army camped on the Tunisian border. Looking forward to decolonisation, he goes further than the Soummam platform, arguing that the army too often becomes the pillar of a nation, which despite independence, does not undergo any fundamental reorganisation. The military enforces systematic pauperisation and ‘the strength of the police force and the power of the army are [simply] proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk.’[3] Where there is no parliament, he continues, the army takes over – as it has done in Egypt. But this changes nothing unless the army is truly nationalised and the development of the officer class is curtailed as it becomes a school of ‘civic and political education.’ Rather than a professional army, he adds, the military should become a political organisation which, as a servant of the people, needs to take the step from ‘national consciousness to political and social consciousness’ and become part of a genuine humanist and social national programme.[4] Too often, however, as we have seen in the fifty years since Fanon’s death, the army, as he feared, takes the place of a corrupt political party, and becomes the organizer of the profiteers.[5] This certainly was the situation under Mubarak.

In Egypt the army – intimately connected to the economy and self-interested in the maintenance of the status quo – is repeating the same calls it made during the last days of Mubarak under the slogans to ‘return to order’ and ‘return to normalcy.’ Yet the people are not naïve. During the commune days of Tahrir Square they understood that the tanks not only protected them but threatened them. People slept in the tank’s tracks not only to stop the tanks from moving but let everyone know that they were ready if the tanks did move; they marched around the tanks by candlelight at night to keep them in their place; and they continued to embrace the soldiers as their ‘brothers,’ but announced further demonstrations and encouraged the soldiers to join them. Thus after Mubarak’s departure and despite the army’s clearing of Tahrir Square and its threat to ban strikes and end street demonstrations, the question is can the military put the lid back on the multidimensional revolt? How reliable are the army’s young and badly paid conscripts ?"

Full article on Bolekaja - Radical Africa

Frantz Fanon : A Biography, by David Macey

Born in Martinique, then as now a departement of France, Frantz Fanon (l925-61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyons before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a soldier in the Free French Army, for which he had volunteered and in whose ranks he saw combat during the liberation of France. In Algeria, he came into contact with the Front de Liberation National whose ruthless struggle for an independent Algeria was met with quite exceptional violence by the French Army. Fanon identified completely with the FLN and soon became a marked man. Forced to flee Algeria when he resigned his post, Fanon subsequently worked with the FLN as a propagandist and ambassador.

Based on extensive and original research, this is the most compete and objective biography of Fanon yet written. It sweeps away the myths that have grown up around him and reveals Fanon to be a complex figure, infinitely more interesting than the theorist of anti-colonial violence celebrated by the left in the 60s. Macey shows Fanon to have been a man formed in the context of the French Caribbean, with its history of slavery and racism, and traces Fanon's intellectual career as a political thinker and psychiatrist with great care, setting it against the background of post-war French culture.

David Macey has done justice for the first time to the extraordinary life of a complex figure, flawed in some respects but fundamentally a humanist committed to the eradication of colonialism, a man whose angry and eloquent writings are still of fierce relevance today.


David Macey has translated some twenty books from the French. He is the author of Lacan in Context, the acclaimed The Lives of Michel Foucault, and The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. He lives in Leeds, England.


Picador, June 2002
ISBN: 978-0-312-30042-5, ISBN10: 0-312-30042-5, 
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 656 pages, Includes 8 maps,

Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, by Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan

Few human encounters are exempt from oppression of one kind or another. Whether this oppression is based on race, national origin, class, gender, age, religious belief, political stance, or physical handicap, each of us, depending on circumstance, becomes either victim or perpetrator of this condition.
Illuminating and reinterpreting the work of the revolutionary black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, Bulhan focuses on the psychology of racism from historical and contemporary perspectives. In accordance with the Fanonian outlook, the author's writing is neither dispassionate nor neutral; rather, he comes to close grips with the subject, bringing new life to Fanon's work and suggesting alternative priorities and orientations to establishment psychology. In addition, Bulhan offers new directions for social reconstruction and self-reconstitution.


Plenum Publishing corporation, New York
ISBN 0-306-41950-5
1985

La clameur du peuple du Nil...

Heroes: A tribute to exceptional human beings whose lives are inspiring

Where did we go wrong?

By Busani Ngcaweni and Dumisani Hlophe

It is a severe nervous condition when Africans living on the most southern tip of the African continent debate “what is an African?” – even more so in a newspaper that prides itself as being “Distinctly African”.

Frantz Fanon predicted that in a post-colonial society, Africans would voluntarily entrench colonial identity pathologies.

Given the current debate of ­Africanness in South Africa, one could swear that Fanon was writing about post-apartheid South Africa.Sixteen years into a liberated South Africa, and about 10 years since former president Thabo Mbeki committed this country to an African Renaissance, a debate is raging about who/what is African.

Perhaps the question posed by Afro-rock pop group Stimela is re-levant: “Where did we go wrong?” 

The debate symptomises the ­following aspects of our history and trajectory:



» First, the black educated elite are alienated from their cultural and traditional bases.It is a soul-searching exercise for an African identity by people who suddenly realise there is a widening gap between them and their ­cultural roots.

What is the likelihood that a Chauke in Bhungeni, a Mabhengu in Nkandla, a Gebashe in Ndwedwe and a Kgoroeadira in Taung would pontificate about what/who is an African? 

This is a preoccupation of those who have rapidly climbed the economic ladder in post-colonial South Africa.



» Second, within the broader elite across races, there is fear of exclusion from gains associated with an African identity. In the past, ­Africanness was politically associated with socioeconomic exclusion.

However, in post-apartheid South Africa, Africanness helps you ­access socioeconomic benefits.

It is for this reason that many companies use phrases such as “100% black owned” or “black women-owned company” in their profiles. 

Once a definition of ­African is based on skin colour, those who fall outside feel the need to broaden the definition so that they are not sidelined from the gains associated with the windfall of post-apartheid Africanness.

Anecdotally, there is now a trend for Africans to replace their European surnames with their original African surnames. 

After all, one wouldn’t want to be seen as anything other than African.



» Third, the “African” debate symptomises the ugly fact that for centuries, the African identity was crafted by people other than Africans. 

Thus, when Africans begin to define – not just describe – themselves in the manner that affirms who they are, they disturb the original manipulative agenda of the external codification of Africans and Africanness.

There is no identity debate where Africans have crafted their identities and, for centuries, practised their defined cultural traits, languages and forms of interaction.

In fact, most of the black educated elite who debate Africanness do not debate their own ethnic belonging. 

They enthusiastically find comfort in asserting being Venda, Tswana or Xhosa. They find these forms of identities self-affirming rather than debatable.

Hence, we offer the following working definition of an African: An African is one who has no alternative to be anything else but African. 

Africans are a people who do not have the option of being English, French, Portuguese and so on. Therefore, those who have the ­option to choose to be African or not at any given time are just identity opportunists!

»

The authors are public servants writing in their personal capacities. They blog at: www.kunjalo.co.za

Source

Seminar on "Frantz Fanon and the Post-Colonial"

University of Manitoba, Canada

Date:	Thursday, February 10, 2011
Time:	12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location:	409 Tier
A Seminar  on: "Frantz Fanon and the Post-Colonial" led by Prof. John Mowitt (University of Minnesota), in discussion with Prof. Ravi Vaitheespara(University of Manitoba) Open to upper-year undergraduate and graduate students  Thursday, February 10 12pm-2pm 409 Tier    Readings:  Frantz Fanon, "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness" in The Wretched of the Earth  Partha Chatterjee,  "Nationalism as a Problem," in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1993)   Readings will be available at 346 University College   Lunch will be served. Please confirm attendance via email to Tina Chen (chentm@ms.umanitoba.ca)

Source

Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited by Lewis Gordon

The wide range of disciplines represented here enables the volume to stand as a contextualizing work in Fanon studies. It contains new original essays on Africana philosophy, the human sciences, dialectical humanism, women of color studies, neocolonial and postcolonial studies, violence, and tragedy.

About the Author

Lewis R. Gordon teaches philosophy and African American studies at Purdue University. He is author of Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995) and Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), as well as editor of Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (1996) and co-editor of Black Texts and Black Textuality: Constructing and de-constructing Blackness.

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting teaches French and African American Studies at Purdue University. She is co-editor of Spoils of War: Women, Cultures, Revolutions and author ofBlack Female Bodies, White Male Imaginations: Nineteenth-Century French Narratives on Black Femininity.

Renée T. White teaches sociology and African American Studies at Purdue University. She is co-editor of Black Texts and Black Textuality and Spoils of War. She is also completing her first book, New Sexual Identities: Black Teenage Women and Sex in the AIDS Era.

Wiley-Blackwell (September 9, 1996)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1557868964

ISBN-13: 978-1557868961

In Egypt and Tunisia the will of the people is not a hollow cliche

by Peter Hallward, The Guardian, Monday 31rst January 2011

From revolutionary France and America to modern north Africa, this is a concept that can topple governments

Extract :

"Around the same time, one of north Africa's most influential writers and activists, Frantz Fanon, conceived of political practice along comparable lines. The whole of Fanon's contribution to Algeria's liberation struggle (1954-1962) is oriented by a popular "will to independence", the "national will of the oppressed peoples", their "will to break with exploitation and contempt". The outcome of the Algerian revolution would be decided, he argued, by "the will of 12 million people; that is the only reality".

Rejecting all distraction through "negotiation" or "development", Fanon insisted on decisive action here and now – the goal was not to reform an intolerable colonial situation over an interminable series of steps, but to abolish it. The "fundamental characteristic of the struggle of the Algerian people", Fanon maintained, is suggested by their "refusal of progressive solutions, their contempt for the 'stages' that might break the revolutionary torrent, and induce them to abandon the unshakable will to take everything into their hands at once". The fate of their revolution depends on the people's "co-ordinated and conscious" participation in their ongoing self-emancipation.

In today's Tunisia and Egypt, as in 1950s Algeria, to affirm the will of the people is not to invoke an empty phrase. Will and people: rejecting the merely "formal" conceptions of democracy that disguise our status quo, an actively democratic politics will think one term through the other. A will of the people, on the one hand, must involve association and collective action, and will depend on a capacity to invent and preserve forms of inclusive assembly (through demonstrations, meetings, unions, parties, websites, networks). If an action is prescribed by popular will, on the other hand, then what's at stake is a free or voluntary course of action, decided on the basis of informed and reasoned deliberation. Determination of the people's will is a matter of popular participation and empowerment before it is a matter of representation, sanctioned authority or stability. Unlike mere "wish", if it is to persist and prevail then a popular will must remain united in the face of its opponents, and find ways of overcoming their resistance to its aims.

Whether it takes place in Tunis or Cairo, Caracas or Port-au-Prince, Athens or London, to ground political action in the will of the people is to reassert a collective capacity for deliberate and revolutionary transformation. As the people who are defying the governments of north Africa demonstrate, there are circumstances in which collective courage and enthusiasm can be more than a match for coercive state power. The cliche remains hollow until adopted in practice: "Where there's a will there's a way."