Dangerous Alliances: Civil Society, the Media and Democratic Transition in North Africa
* Acknowledgements * Preface by Clovis Demers * Introduction * Part 1: The Public Arena in the Maghreb: Convergences and Divergences * Setting the Stage * 1. Tunisia: The Domination of Plato's Cave * The Tunisian Transition to Democracy Did Not Take Place * 'I am the State' * A Police State * A Legal System in Captivity * Alternation in Office Impossible * 2. Tunisia: The Submission to Plato's Cave * Tunisian Civil Society before Its Collapse * The Fatal Alliance * The Destruction of Al-Nahdha * The Undermining of the Tunisian League for Human Rights * 3. Tunisia: Locking Up Plato's Cave * Disadvantaged Media * How the Tunisian Media Were Neutralized * Survival Strategies * The Happy Agenda * Relations with the Foreign Press * Banning International Human Rights Monitoring * 4. Algeria: The Children of Jocasta * The Birth of Civil Society * The Oedipus Temptation * The Unfinished Business of Remaking the Public Arena * The Press and Its Role in Political Developments * Between Open Dissidence and 'Moderate' Opposition: Prospects for a Rebirth * 5. Morocco: The Slow Ascent of Sisyphus * The Amaoui Affair * A Long Pluralistic Tradition * A Moroccan Model for the Construction of a Civil Society * Facilitating Factors and Obstacles * 6. Conclusion: The Public Political Arena in the Maghreb * Part 2: The Aftermath of Dangerous Alliances: Transformations and Continuities in the Political Arena * Between Cries and Whispers * 7. Happy Tunisia: The Authorized Account * A Dream for Tourists and Foreign Investors * The Security Mania * The Show Democracy: Arguments and Techniques of Stage-Setting * The Quest for International Approval * Propaganda Achievements * 8. The International Press and the Algerian Guardians of Democracy * The Rhetoric of Objectivity * How the International Press Took Sides in the Algerian Conflict * The Rebuilding of a Pluralistic Public Forum by the International Press * 9. Tunisian Dissident Information Networks * Unarmed Prophets * In European Circles * Internal Dissidence * Discrediting Dissidents * The State of Tunisian Dissidence * 10. Islam: Dismantling a Clich' * Propositions: * 1. Religion is a Marginal Theme in the Press * 2. Islam is not the Explanation for Everything * 3. Culturally, Islam is also a Product of Maghreb's Political Systems * 11. Freedom or Tyranny? Perspectives in the Maghreb * Algeria * Tunisia * 12. Toward a Sociology of Citizenship in a Globalizing World * A Political Systems Model * The Classical Democratic Model * A Dynamic Conflictual Model of Democracy * Democratic Transitions are Reversible * The International Media's Connivance with Dictatorships * Reversing the Spiral of Silence * Bibliography * Index
Foreign Language Teachers' Beliefs about School in Algeria within a Context of Curriculum Reforms
This paper reports on a qualitative study which explored the beliefs of a sample of foreign language teachers about school in Algeria within a context of curriculum reforms. It was found that the participants believed that the Algerian school was generally a site of power and domination; that there was a drastic lack of resources; that students were unmotivated; that parents were disengaged; and that school administration was bureaucratic. The paper concludes that curriculum reforms in Algeria were not paralleled with social, economic and political reforms of educational institutions. It is suggested that there is an urgent need to equip schools with resources to make them adequately prepared for the effective implementation of the new curriculum. However, in the long term, it is suggested that policy-makers should promote a culture of active participation of all those involved in education, mainly the teachers and parents, towards improving the current situation of schools in Algeria, and ultimately, of the educational system.
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
I n this fascinating but sometimes baffling book, the reader engages with a series of conditionals like the following: "If [the psychiatrist] Clerimbault manifests a delirium, it is because he discovers the tiny hallucinatory perceptions of ether addicts in the folds of clothing" (p.38). "If Leibniz's principles [of identity and sufficient reason] appear to us as cries, it is because each one signals the presence of a class of beings that are themselves crying and draw attention to themselves by these cries ..... (p. 44). Deleuze's study is concerned with Leibniz and with leibnizianism; with the Baroque considered as a historical period and with the baroque considered as a persistent impulse in architecture, decoration, and in human thinking and system construction. Baroque and baroque are explorations, in his view, of curvilinearity, and Deleuze explores Leibniz's use of mathematical analogies from topology, projective geometry and the calculus. But his attention in the book is mainly fixed on two Leibnizian images. The first image is that of the two-storied house, typically represented in baroque painting by an angelic realm in the upper half of the picture hovering above the human realm. In Leibniz' s writings, this translates into the world of matter (a seething, frothing, turbulent, unconscious mass of tiny beings) and the world of intelligent, self-conscious spirits on the upper level. The second image is that of the fold, which appears in the pleats and draperies of Baroque costume, sculpture, and interior decoration, and which reappears in Leibniz's mind-as-folded curtain, in his enveloped organisms, preformed under folds, and in the continuum, from whose recesses ever more numbers or particles can be pulled out. In clothing, waves, the brain, pleats of all sorts, surface disappears into interior. Deconstruction! But is it philosophy? Yes! Though Deleuze pulls his comparison-objects out of every comer of contemporary French culture, they are never arbitrary, and the book is focused clearly on its subject. Here are three reasons to buy it and read it in addition to its charm: (1) It contains several valuable discussions of traditional problems in new terms: e.g., Leibniz's elusive notion offreedom, which Deleuze tries to explain in terms of the notion of "amplitude"; and the problem of why there are bodies at all-why a "separate" monadology is needed together with a theory of animated matter.