A travel through one of the most innovative social debate platforms in Egypt
15 gennaio 2014
Dustur al-Shaab's final Homepage design, showing a poll asking what people are planning to vote in the referendum
What has been happening in Egypt in the last months is not only interesting in order to understand how the political future of the country will be shaped. It is important also in order to figure out how the events of the last three years have been influencing and changing the rules of the social and political life and of the public debate in a country that witnessed in few years developments that in other parts of the world occurred along decades.
On the 14th and the 15th of January the Egyptian people voted for the referendum, the second in one year, that will (or won’t) approve the constitution drafted in the aftermath of the oust of Mohammed Morsi as president of Egypt on July 3rd 2013. Along these months the Egyptian society has witnessed an increasing polarization, which lead to numerous deadly clashes and the death of thousands of people, especially last August, when the Muslim Brotherhood’s sit-in in Cairo’s Rabaa square was stormed by the security forces.
Traditional media have not helped so far in reducing this polarization, standing firmly on the government side and supporting the stigmatization of the Brotherhood.
On the internet and on the new media, however, something has been moving against the flow. Some platforms have been created where people could discuss and confront peacefully, trying to overcome violence speeches. One of these is “Dustur al-Shaab” (“The people’s constitution”), founded in the aftermath of July 3rd, which have been providing a free space of information, debate and expression around the Constitution that was being re-drafted in those months. It was created by a team of young Egyptian political activists and journalists. Among them there is also a foreigner, Moritz Mihatsch; a young German scholar and information activist who is finishing his PhD at the University of Oxford: .
In the following interview we asked him about the Dustur al-Shaab’s experience and his opinion – as foreigner who lived for many years in the country – about the developments occurred along the last three years in the Egyptian new media sphere.
What is Dustur al-Shaab? What is the idea behind it?
Surprisingly, this question is a bit more complicated than you would think, because although Dustur al-Shaab was conceptualised as one thing, it was quickly overtaken by events and step-by-step became different things. Originally, Dustur al-Shaab was inspired by the announcement of the so-called roadmap in Egypt this summer, in which the interim President Adly Mansour explained how politics in Egypt would move forward. When we saw the roadmap, which posited that a constitution should be written in three months, with a referendum in early December, we realised that once again a constitution would be written without any popular input. There were good reasons to keep this period short, most importantly the interim government would only have some sort of rational-legal legitimacy in a Weberian sense after the referendum. We decided, that if we could try to do something, to improve that form of public debate and public input in any way, any kind of progress would be a good thing. In late July we spoke with IMS Denmark who quickly confirmed they would fund the project and after that within about a week the first version of Dustur al-Shaab was designed, coded and ready to go live. As you can imagine, with such a launch schedule, we were flying by sight. We did not first make elaborate conceptual studies how this could be done best. We just started and tried what could work.
We were still collecting initial content, hoping to go live in the middle of August, when the government decided to clear Rabaa square. After that we delayed the launch for a week and slowly our focus changed. While before Rabaa we had believed that we could actually impact the constitutional writing, after Rabaa we hoped to contribute to a more peaceful debate between different citizens. We thought that, by supplying a platform where people could discuss technical issues, they would slowly find ways to talk to each other again. The biggest challenge in this regard was though, that many people simply did not want to talk about the constitution at all, because they did not care, especially with all the chaos in the country and the curfew etc. Alas, we ran the site with the dual mission of raising awareness that the constitution is actually important, no matter where you stand politically, and that it is good to discuss it with others, especially if you disagree with them. This was the main focus of the site until late November, when a number of activists were arrested in the connection to the new law prohibiting protests. At this point, we felt that there was no space to discuss the process of the constitution being written and therefore paused the site temporarily. We re-launched after the constitution was handed to the interim president and a referendum was announced. The reason for the re-launch was primarily that there seemed to be an exclusive and massive yes campaign, with no space for any other opinions or actual debate on good and bad things in the new constitution. The whole new design focussed on the referendum and kept this focus until the day before the referendum.
Infographic briefly describing the consitutional process through the commissions towards the referendum
Who are the people following you? How has the community following Dustur al-Shaab being changing along these months?
It is very hard to say who actually follows a site, and if the comments you get are in any way representative or not. What we could see however was a slight shift in the type of discussions. While the constitution was being written, we had a lot of comments of sympathisers of the former president who were attacking the Council of Fifty (the body writing the constitution) as illegitimate, or in more crude cases they would just exclaim that this new constitution is “Bangu” (Egyptian for Marijuana). After the constitution was actually finished there was a short period when supporters and opponents of the new constitution were actually exchanging arguments, and some people wrote relatively long comments detailing their ideas and opinions. The closer we moved to the referendum, the more comments were only “La la la” (Arabic for No no no) or “Na3am na3am na3am” (Arabic for Yes yes yes). This overlapped to a certain degree with the level of polarisation in the country, but could also have been a result of the specific steps within the process.
As a foreigner who lived in Egypt many years being engaged in its social and political life, how has the relationship between the people – the youth in particular – and new media changed after 2011? Has a proper system of information and political debate developed on the internet that can reach and influence deeply the Egyptian society?
At the moment we are still in a revolutionary transition and accordingly things are changing quickly day to day. Media, both offline and online is being challenged by this, and in many cases do not do a very good job. For now media influence people by being part of a grander propaganda machine, which serves certain social classes whose interests at the moment overlap with that of the military leadership. It will take time for people to gain the necessary experience to deal in a differentiated fashion with media, both online and offline. For now people consume and share mostly what they like and accordingly you will find that articles on Dustur al-Shaab arguing against the constitution will be shared by one group of people and those in favour will be shared by another group of people. And to make things worse –and this is generally a phenomenon on the internet– people prefer easy consumable content like graphs and short videos. This however is not the format to have a truly informed political debate.
But I believe globally we still stand at the beginning of reimagining participative society in time of the internet. Even in Europe we are still wondering how a future democracy could look like which uses the tools of the digital revolution. Different parties around the world experiment on local, regional and national levels with things such as “Liquid Democracy”. Obama’s use of web technologies during his first election was a step in this direction, but he failed to build on that during his presidency. E-Petition systems seem to succeed mostly at getting fringe opinions heard, like islamophobic propaganda, or the demand to legalise Marijuana. I am convinced that in this space of e-government, participation and transparency great things are still to come, but we have not found the perfect solutions so far.
Nevertheless, coming back to Egypt, I think you can see that the internet has supplied an interesting space for debate, which has not existed before. Especially with cartoons, which people often make themselves as a reaction to things which just happened, you can see that people are now able to react to politics. Before this was a one-way street in Egypt. The government spoke and due to their control of the media channels, everyone was forced to listen, but there was no way to talk back. This might not yet be a system of information or even a real debate, but it might prove to be the starting point for such a development.
As a final remark, another element, which is definitely fascinating, is the “debate of profile pictures”. Whenever you have important events in the last 3 years people created dedicated profile pictures. This is how the Rabaa sign (the hand with four fingers on yellow background) became big and well known so quickly. But directly after that, you could see others who would for example use a victory sign in the same design on green background. In a way this might be similar to the Christian / Atheist car stickers in the US, but if one keeps in mind that the January 25 profile picture was an important tool of the original mobilisation, one can see that profile pictures might be much more powerful.
The "Rabaa" profile picture, commonly used by the Muslim Brotherhood's supporters
A profile picture used by the pro-army supporters ("Long life to Egypt: the people, the army, the police, al-Azhar, the Church")