From the Haitian revolution to the spectre of Tahrir: is a global revolution possible? Koenraad Bogaert Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (4 - march 24, 1802). Original illustration by Auguste Raffet, engraving by Hébert. | Public Domain. 2019 has been a year of increasing revolutionary fervour. Literally millions of people took to the streets in Algeria, Sudan, Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Hong Kong, Ecuador, Haiti, Guinea, Bolivia, Spain, France, Brazil, Iran, Czech Republic, Columbia, India and counting... The mere scale and geographical reach of these protests evoke memories of a previous wave of global uprisings set off by the Tunisian revolution and the subsequent occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011. When those uprisings also reached Mahmood Mamdani’s home country, Uganda, he was the first to speak of a “ spectre of Tahrir” haunting rulers across the world. His statement soon proved prophetic as the tide of protests spilled over from the African continent into the rest of the world. Spanish indignados took over the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, soon followed by other cities around the world. Later that year, media organization Adbusters asked its audience whether they were ready “ for a Tahrir moment?”, calling on American citizens to occupy Wall Street. After this year’s mass resistance, it is clear that the spectre of Tahrir never disappeared. From the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the millions of protesters in the streets of Brazil, the Hirak movement in Morocco to #NuitDebout and the Gilets Jaunes in France, to name just a few – they all seemed harbingers leading up to a new culmination in 2019. The question is how to make sense of these uprisings? Are we witnessing a global revolution? Or merely dozens of coinciding national revolts, scattered around the globe, ignited by each other’s indignation and perseverance? In the stream of accounts grappling with the uprisings, two important elements are often overlooked. That is, first, the discrepancy between our globalized world and the nation-state as the dominant imagined political community. While explanations often get stuck in a perception of the nation-state as the sole container for political confrontation and popular demand, the crux of the problem is precisely that there are no national solutions for a global systemic crisis producing social inequality, climate change and migration. Despite the obvious observation that protesters around the world are denouncing the same kinds of problems at the same time, this form of “ methodological nationalism” continues to see these different uprisings primarily as the result of endogenous crises. What if our imagination of the nation-state actually prevents us from seeing what is really going on here? As Susan Buck-Morss argues in her new book, Revolution Today: “[t]he nation state as an epistemological form captured certain realities but obscured others.” Therefore, “[i]t could not recognize the existence of non-state From the Haitian revolution to the spectre of Tahrir: is a global revolutio... https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/haitian-revolut... 1 of 8 2/14/2020, 1:41 PM