Lessons from the South Iain Chambers When mass protests and regime changes swept across North Africa in the Spring of 2011, and subsequently triggered turbulence in Bahrain and a bloody civil war presently being waged in Syria, Occidental journalism and political commentary was initially taken by surprise. The status quo – and not only for Arab dictators – had seemingly crumbled overnight. The situation was eventually brought into perspective and under Western eyes through a series of explanatory frames – educated unemployed youth, the new social media, state oppression and the lack of democracy – that responded to Occidental criteria of analysis. Of course, in the contemporary conditions of planetary modernity all is somehow connected, nothing takes place in a vacuum, and the languages, technologies and ideologies of the West clearly played a significant role. However, rather than measure such events – their perceived achievements and failures – against a presumed Occidental template it is perhaps politically and historically more significant to register the emergence of a series of interrogations that invest both the protagonists and those of us observing from afar. It is also important at this point to register that the processes and procedures under discussion are still very much in progress: the question of rights and liberties – social, political, human – remain open, the subject of discussion, debate and continuing struggle. A previous political landscape, which had been thoroughly endorsed by Western powers and diplomacy, is clearly in ruins. The assumption that only the Occidental ‘we’ has the right to define ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ has clearly been rendered vulnerable to unsuspected historical operations and cultural forces. What emerge from this picture are critical prospects that criss-cross the Mediterranean, rendering proximate its northern and southern shores, shredding the confines between Occident and Orient. When the terms of political, historical and cultural freedom are exposed – for whom, where, when and how? – a whole critical lexicon comes under review. The assumed temporality of political and historical progress, the accumulative power of its linear development, is skewed into another space in which modernity is neither mono-dimensional nor homogeneous. The downfall of Mubarak, the daily protests in Tahrir Square, were not simply Egyptian matters. Their resonance was not restricted merely to the Arab world. A political lexicon that many consider to be complete and fully achieved in the governing bodies and institutional authorities of the West has been reopened and newly researched, traversed and translated. Understandings of the individual, the public sphere, political agency, religion, secularism and the state, suddenly become vulnerable to renegotiation in events that rudely punctuate flawless abstractions. As we, too, are learning, nothing is guaranteed. Rights and freedoms can be rolled back. In the name of security, driven by the imperatives of governance, there can always occur a turn in the screw. In a world that increasingly does not recognise human beings, only citizens and subjects, the categories that supposedly secure the polis are always open to unsuspected interpretation, redefinition, contestation and ideological spin. Our conceptual securities become the agonistic sites of historical processes and cultural struggle that do not necessarily mirror the critical and political imperatives of the West. What is presently occurring in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean – in Egypt, Israel or Syria – throws an interrogating light across the West that in multiple ways is responsible for the powers and possibilities in play. Not