Model, Event, Context: Globalization, Arab Social Movements, and the Modeling of Global Order

In this article I scrutinize a particular discursive strategy that attempts to straightjacket the new social movements in the Arab uprisings. Rather than being open to new forms of polities and alternative modes of economic and social organization, an emerging governmental and scholarly discourse calls for a model of development for the Arab world. I argue that this model limits political imagination; and that it is the effect of a late modern logic that seeks to impose a particular form of politics in global political life. In, and through, the language of an archetype, these social movements, and the emerging polities, are being tamed to inherit the tensions and fragilities of a certain form of political and economic globalization.