‘Gaza in Oslo’: Social imaginaries in the political engagement of Norwegian minority youth

Abstract

In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Young people of visible minority and Muslim background were central actors in these demonstrations. The public expression of Muslim identities and symbols during the demonstrations along with clashes between some of the young demonstrators and the police fuelled the already polarized debate concerning the integration of immigrant youth and Islamic radicalism existing in the Norwegian public realm. Using data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork and web-ethnography we follow the engagement of youth from a multi-ethnic Oslo mosque both online and offline. In critical dialogue with perspectives on political contention and transnational political activism, we analyse this transnational mobilization in terms of the ‘social imaginaries’ that mediated engagement with the Gaza question: ‘the global Muslim imaginary’, ‘secular leftist internationalism’ and ‘integration nations’.

Keywords

Gaza integration nations minority youth Muslims political contention social imaginaries transnational social movements secular leftism

Introduction

When I heard there was going to be a demonstration, I thought, ‘Yes, I can do something!’ I was really glad to get the chance to express my feelings. And there I was, in front of the Israeli embassy, shouting slogans, ‘Boycott Israel! Israel is Terrorist!’ Suddenly, people start throwing stones at the police. They tear down the fence and jump on the police car. I’m in shock. I can’t move. I’m standing there screaming, ‘Stop, don’t throw things!’ And then all of a sudden, I sense my eyes and lungs burning. The police fire tear gas at us.

In December 2008 and January 2009, the above-quoted 20-year-old Norwegian Muslim woman, along with thousands of other Norwegian citizens, took part in a series of demonstrations against Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Two days after Israel launched its air raid, several hundred people demonstrated in Oslo, which resulted in some disturbances in front of the Israeli embassy. In January 2009, the demonstrations continued and brought thousands of people to the streets. On 8 January 2009 at a pro-Israeli demonstration staged by a group of Christian associations,¹ the leader of the populist right-wing Progress Party appealed for Israel’s right to defend itself against Palestinian attacks. A counter-demonstration was mobilized through Facebook and other social media. In clashes between counter-demonstrators and police, stones and other objects were thrown at the police, and the police used dogs and fired tear gas to control the demonstrators. The disturbances continued into the afternoon when some young people broke shop windows and set fire to rubbish bins downtown.² The same evening, a torchlight procession for peace, supported by a broad alliance of humanitarian organizations, sports organizations, religious organizations, the trade union movement and civil society organizations, gathered tens of thousands of people throughout Norway’s main cities. The following day, the newspapers were dominated by reports of the disturbances at the pro-Israeli demonstration. Despite the precautions taken by the police and the organizers, there were disturbances once again in front of the Israeli embassy the following Saturday. In the evening, several McDonald’s restaurants in Oslo were attacked in response to a widely distributed SMS text message that accused McDonald’s of providing financial support to Israel.³ The last mass demonstration that was arranged a week later gathered several hundred people in front of the Parliament and proceeded peacefully. After Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the mass demonstrations came to a halt, although other forms of engagement continued, including fundraising, candle vigils and stands. The mobilization against the Israeli attacks on Gaza also caused intense and diversified public debates that, although most vigorous in early 2009, had continued repercussions.

The focus of this article is twofold. First, the article examines the involvement of Muslim youth as street activists and debate participants, and looks at how this can be interpreted as transnational political activism. Second, the article addresses how the public interpreted this activism and how Muslim youth came to occupy the role of public villains. In order to explore these questions we draw on existing research and theoretical perspectives on transnational political contention in multi-ethnic nation states along with theories of social imaginaries. Based on a thorough empirical analysis of various data sources accessing different levels of public debate, we argue that debates in political institutions, national newspapers and different social media following the demonstrations can best be explained as the coming together and modification of three distinct but interrelated social imaginaries. We recognize the overlaps of our analysis with the frame-analysis approach in social movement studies (e.g. Benford and Snow, 2000; Olesen, 2005; Snow and Benford, 2005), but choose here to pursue our analysis through the prism of social imaginaries. The concept of social imaginaries, in our opinion, points to broader, historically embedded ways of imagining the social than the more specific frames constructed in distinct social movements.

The article builds on data that was gathered during a three-year research project on the political engagement of minority youth in Norway.⁴ Fieldwork was conducted in a newly founded youth organization in an Oslo mosque from September 2008 until March 2009.⁵ This included participating in educational, organizational and ritual activities inside and outside the mosque, as well as social events such as sleepovers in the mosque. To get a fuller grasp of personal and organizational histories, 11 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of this group (five women and six men) in the same time period. As the Gaza crisis developed, the mobilization of this particular youth organization was followed through participant observation at demonstrations, meetings and other events and through follow-up interviews. In addition, youth engagement was tracked online by closely following two internet debate forums and Gaza-related Facebook groups from January 2009 to April 2009.⁶ Many of the young people who were followed through participant observation were active at these forums, so there was the possibility to observe them and talk to them about their political engagement online as well as offline. The Norwegian media coverage of youth engagement in the Gaza crisis as well as minority youth’s participation in the media debates in the same time period were gathered and systematized by using a media retriever tool (Atekst) to gather relevant coverage from the major newspapers (including VG, Dagbladet, Aftenposten, NTB, Dagsavisen, Klassekampen and BT) (Retriever Norge, n.d.). Lastly, the debates on the Gaza demonstrations were closely followed during question time in Parliament during January 2009 and February 2009. These varied data allow us to identify some broadly shared ways of imagining the social that were carried for instance in modes of address, clothing practices, symbols, slogans, repertoires of contention, techniques for collective action, claims making, media coverage and political debate.

After a theoretical perspective is presented, the empirical section describes and provides examples of central debates that delimit the boundaries of the three social imaginaries. This part offers examples of protest forms, debates and interventions that actualized the three social imaginaries that were energized during and after the Gaza demonstrations. Of particular concern is how young Muslims were constructed as ‘public villains’ and how such constructions point to the boundaries of the three imaginaries. The first imaginary that is examined is that of a global community of Muslims (umma). Palestine as a symbolic ‘heart’ of the umma, epitomizing the global striving of Muslims and their resistance against American capitalism and American support of Israel, is central to this imaginary. The second is the secular social imaginary of a leftist tradition marked by long-term solidarity work directed at the Palestinian people. The third and final imaginary discussed here is that of integration nations where national integration regimes and the everyday experiences of subtle exclusion from the national category among ethnic minority youths testifies to the ambivalent status of the nation as one of the central modern social imaginaries in Europe.

Transnational political mobilization and social imaginaries

What type of political activism were the Gaza demonstrations and how can they – and the public debates they caused – be theorized? In Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Tarrow (1998) characterizes mass demonstrations as a conventional form of contentious politics, a term that also covers a range of other disruptive techniques of collective action and claims making. As defined by McAdam et al. (2001: 5), contentious politics are episodic, public, collective interactions among makers of claims and their objects. Central to this definition of contention is that at least one government is a claimant, an object of the claims, or a party to the claims being made. The main claim raised by the demonstrators in Oslo was directed at the Israeli government to ‘Stop the war on Gaza’, as the slogans said. Claims were also made with respect to the Norwegian government, which was asked to intervene to stop the war, withdraw its financial investments in Israel and initiate a boycott. While conventional in their form, the demonstrations as well as other collective actions that were initiated also exemplified what Tarrow (2005: xiii) identifies as ‘a trend toward new forms and new levels of transnational contention’.

Diaspora and migration studies have largely examined transnational politics in terms of linkages between migrants ‘at home’ and in the ‘new country’. On the other hand, within the social movement literature, studies of transnational contentious politics have, as Olesen (2009) also argues, typically focused on secular leftist mobilization such as that of Attac, the environmentalist movement, and the broader alter-globalization or social justice movement (Della Porta 2007; Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005; Della Porta et al., 2006; Pleyers, 2010).⁷ In a special issue of Ethnicities (2009, 9(3)), the editors elaborate on the concept of ‘contentious politics’ to also account for ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ aspects of such politics. They suggest interpreting the Muhammad Cartoons Controversy as a special case of a subcategory of ‘contentious politics’ – what they label ‘multicultural crises’ or ‘ethnocultural dilemmas’ (the Rushdie affair and les affaires du foulard are among the examples they mention for this subcategory):

What is common to these kinds of public debates is that one or more of the claimants in the debate are ethnocultural minorities, and that the issue of the conflict revolves around ethnocultural differences, which are made visible by the development of multicultural societies through processes of immigration. (Lindekilde et al., 2009: 296)

The editors suggest that, within the broader ‘multicultural crisis’ group of political controversies, the cartoons controversy belongs to a subcategory of instances in which Muslims somehow challenge specific divisions between public and private and politics and religion. Given the similarities (but also differences) between the Gaza demonstrations and the transnational events pertaining to ‘multicultural crises’, it is relevant to ask whether the Gaza demonstrations in Oslo could be seen as an example of this subcategory of contentious politics.

Lindekilde et al.’s (2009) suggestion to focus on the ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ dimension of contentious politics importantly adds to the dominant focus of transnational social movement studies on secular leftist activism. However, while critically engaging with the perspective they suggest, we want to develop our argument along somewhat different lines. The literature on contentious politics tends to underplay the importance of identities, values and emotions, which are crucial to understanding the participation of young people in street activism and the public debates such activism energizes (cf. McDonald, 2006). We believe that the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ is helpful in bringing forth the constructed and contested nature of identities, values and emotions. It further draws attention to how the social terrain is mapped in different social imaginaries, offering particular modes and repertoires of contention. The concept of social imaginaries also allows us to grasp overlaps and disjunctures between various forms of political contention in relation to more historically grounded and institutionalized ways of imagining the social, for instance, through national and religious imaginaries.

The concept of the social imaginary is often traced to Castoriadis (1975), but various authors have elaborated on it in various ways (e.g. Gaonkar, 2002; Strauss, 2006). Our use of the concept of the social imaginary (cf. Andersson, 2010; Jacobsen, 2011) owes a lot to Anderson’s (1991) concept of ‘imagined communities’, and is also inspired by the elaborations of social imaginaries found in a special issue of Public Culture (2002, 14(1)).⁸ In his introduction, Gaonkar sums up the group’s understanding of social imaginaries:

Social imaginaries are ways of understanding the social that become social entities themselves, mediating collective life … They are first-person subjectivities that build upon implicit understandings that underlie and make possible common practices. They are embedded in the habitus of a population or are carried in modes of address, stories, symbols and the like. They are imaginary in a double sense: they exist by virtue of representation or implicit understandings, even when they acquire immense institutional force; and they are means by which individuals understand their identities and their place in the world. (2002: 4)

The understanding of social imaginaries that was developed by the Public Culture authors stresses the symbolic and constructed nature of social life and the constitutive nature of imagining from the actor’s point of view. These authors simultaneously seek to avoid an idealist conceptualization of social imaginaries (of which Castoriadis has frequently been accused) and stress how imaginaries are firmly located in everyday practice and how they are often institutionalized in powerful social institutions.

First, as is the case with the concept of ‘imagined communities’, the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ implies a focus on mediation and the need to imagine a community that is larger than any of those that can be interacted with face to face. Second, power is central to both concepts, especially concerning the boundaries of imaginaries and the forms of inclusion and exclusion that such boundaries entail. Third, the institutionalization and the historical embeddedness of social imaginaries are both central defining criteria. Furthermore, the crucial point is not simply that communities are imagined, but that different imaginaries predicate, and are predicated on, particular solidarities, identities and values. Some social imaginaries are marked by affiliation with particular communities such as nations or ethnic groups, while others (such as liberal versions of anti-racism and human rights) are marked by active distance from the definitional power of the same communities. These again bring other powerful definitions and boundaries.

While the concept of social imaginaries points to relatively stable and historically embedded configurations, it also allows for an exploration of how the imaginary works in contemporary globalized and transnational politics. Appadurai (1996: 156) used the term implosion to capture the way in which pressures and ripples from increasingly wider political arenas are folded into local politics and the ways in which the local political imagination is increasingly subject to the flow of large events over time. These events influence the interpretation of mundane occurrences and gradually create a repertoire of adversarial sentiment (ethnic or otherwise). On the other hand, contemporary mediascapes also enable people to imagine themselves beyond the limits of the local in ways that may engender new social imaginaries and new forms of political contention. In this way, the concept of social imaginaries directs attention to not only transnationalism in the sense of the geographical scope of contentious politics (i.e. Danish Muslims taking cartoons to the Middle East), but also to how, over time, a flow of events solidifies particular social imaginaries that influence the local political imagination and the constitution of political subjects (for example, as Muslims or ‘immigrant youth’). This energizes what Lindekilde et al. refer to as multicultural crises.

Hayat

When we first met Hayat during the ethnographic fieldwork with the mosque youth group, she had just set up a network of young activists to work for the Gaza cause. Although her initiative was a direct response to the Israeli aggressions against Gaza in 2008/09, Hayat also traced her strongly affective reaction to her upbringing in an Arab-Muslim family. Largely as a result of the continuing presence of news from Palestine mediated through Al Jazeera and other Arabic TV channels, Hayat explained that ‘The Palestine question has grown with me’, pointing to the hopes generated by the Oslo accord when she was six years old and the frustration over the ‘apartheid wall’ that was later built. Hayat inscribed her own activism as a wish ‘to do something for the umma’. Although her background is North African and she was raised in Norway, Hayat attributes particular importance to Palestine and the fate and courage of the Palestinian people:

I might have Norway and Morocco in my blood but Palestine is in my heart. And it is the heart that beats and spurts the blood. Palestine is very holy to me, not only because of the mosque [the Dome of the Rock], but because of the people. The Palestinians have been occupied for 60 years but they don’t give in. I feel that those people are born with something extra. When Egypt temporarily opened the border, the Palestinians brought food and things and then went back to their country. Right! Who does that? I admire those people so much; they have something special. (Interview conducted in Oslo, January 2009)

As calls for demonstrations, solidarity groups and debate forums popped up on internet forums and social networking websites, Hayat started posting pictures of victims to show people ‘what was really happening in Gaza’. She engaged in heated online debates with people who called themselves friends of Israel. With a Palestinian scarf in the place of her regular hijab, Hayat attended every demonstration she could, together with others from the Muslim youth group she actively took part in. In the mosque, she attended debates and workshops on Gaza and helped to raise money and awareness. To Hayat, it was also important to envisage a form of protest that could counter the images of Muslims that were circulated in the media during the demonstrations:

The clashes took the focus away from what is happening in Gaza and now the focus is on Oslo and in particular on Muslim youth who are all seen as … What irritated me the most was that when throwing stones at windows, they [those who caused the disturbances] used the word of God, ‘God is great.’ All the time, ‘God is great, God is great.’ No wonder people think Muslims are behind it all. But God does not approve of such actions and many don’t know that. Many don’t want to know either. Many like the thought of Muslims being the bad guys. (Interview conducted in Oslo, January 2009)

To fight for Gaza in a way that did not reinforce the stereotypical portrayals of Muslims in Norwegian public debate, Hayat initiated a support committee for Palestine, inviting online and offline friends to organize a protest that was inspired by Gandhi’s non-violence and peaceful resistance. She thought, together, young Muslims could stand stronger in defence of the Palestinian cause and in resistance to ‘attacks against Islam’. Hayat also started orienting herself within the landscape of existing political and voluntary organizations and contemplated joining various youth branches of parties on the left. One of the options she considered was to gain membership in the Palestine Committee, a committee with a long tradition on the secular radical left.

The global Muslim imaginary

The social imaginary of the ‘global Muslim community’, the umma that Hayat invokes, has been significantly energized by globalizing processes (e.g. Eickelman and Piscatori, 1996; Mandaville, 2004; Turner, 1991). Historically, the idea of a universal or global umma is central to the Islamic tradition, but new communication technologies offer new resources for Muslims around the world to imagine their social existence as such a community. The ways in which the global Muslim community is currently imagined also relate to broader developments in the political economy of the world order. The concept of the umma took on a particular resonance in the discourse of 19th- and early 20th-century anti-colonial reformers because the vast majority of the Muslim world was subject to the same western hegemony. This resonance has continued to be reinforced by what is seen as the ‘West’s’ continuing socioeconomic and cultural dominance of ‘the rest,’ as well as the military aggressiveness of the West (particularly the USA and Israel) towards the Muslim world (Jacobsen, 2011). A variety of social and political issues have come to be constituted as the problems and causes of Muslims globally (Werbner, 2002), while the Israeli–Palestinian war has come to represent a particularly salient focus for a social imaginary connected to ‘the global Muslim community’.

The ways in which our young Muslim interlocutors spoke about their Gaza engagement and the actions they took as a result of this engagement manifested an orientation towards a global Muslim community. One main form of contention initiated by the mosque was mobilization in the form of mass demonstrations. While the mosque and its youth branch were active in co-organizing several large demonstrations together with other mainly leftist secular organizations, they also staged their own demonstrations. Although adopting the general repertoire of contention associated with mass demonstrations, the temporality of the demonstrations that were organized by the mosques alone indicated a break from secular homogeneous time, as the demonstrations were held after the Friday afternoon prayer and thus in temporal continuity with the act of collective worship. This also inscribed the demonstrations in the horizon of a broader Muslim community, as the first of these demonstrations was held on what prominent Muslim scholars and several Muslim countries had declared an international day of support for Gaza, a declaration that remained unnoticed among most non-Muslim pro-Palestinian activists.

The demonstrations drew on standardized repertoires of contention associated with mass demonstrations, such as slogans and appeals, but also on a religious repertoire. ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is Great) was heard along with, ‘Boycott Israel’ and many young women covered their heads with Palestinian scarves instead of their regular hijabs. The motivation for the demonstrations was also partly expressed in terms of a religious imaginary. Some of our interlocutors spoke about doing something for Gaza, such as demonstrating, as a ‘religious duty’ for Muslims or as a kind of ‘personal jihad’ (struggle for the sake of Islam). Some discussed whether praying or demonstrating was the most appropriate way to ‘do something’ for Gaza. Many also placed the Gaza question within a temporal and spatial context that consisted of a larger series of violations against Muslims in different parts of the world. Sarah Selaihi, a young woman from a mosque youth group who actively helped organize demonstrations and contributed to the media, pointed out in a newspaper interview how other conflicts involving violations against Muslims, such as those in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan, also created strong emotions among young Muslims in Norway.⁹ She also related these conflicts abroad to what will be discussed in a later section in terms of ‘integration nations’, ‘What happens abroad only strengthens what many feel here at home: that we grow up in a society in which we are unwelcome’.

This framing of Gaza as a cause for the global Muslim community has a reverse image in the associations that were made in the aftermath of the demonstrations. The media and some researchers linked the disturbances to a fear of ‘Islamic radicalization’ among minority youth, with parallels drawn to similar radicalization processes in other European countries.¹⁰ Local police stations held interviews with the youth who were involved, extraordinary meetings were held among the police leadership, and in interviews, researchers from the research institute at the Ministry of Defence (FFI) expressed fear that militant Islamist groups would use the occasion to recruit frustrated minority youth.¹¹ In parts of the blogosphere and internet debate forums where anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views thrive, many invoked the Gaza demonstrations as proof, not only of a growing radicalization, but also of Muslims’ inherent propensity to violence and Islam’s incompatibility with ‘Norwegian values’. Awareness of such fears was reflected in the debate forums created by minority youth. For instance, in the debates about the riots at www.islam.no (thread: ‘Demonstrations in Oslo’), one young Muslim claimed that 99 percent of Norwegians now wondered whether Muslim immigrants were inherently violent. As Hayat said in the interview above, ‘No wonder people think Muslims are behind it all’.

The theme of how the violent demonstrators contributed to existing negative representations of Muslims and Islam was made central to how the mosque (where the fieldwork was conducted) worked to direct the engagement of Muslim youth. After the turbulent demonstrations, the mosque invited youth to attend a series of open meetings, some of which were also attended by representatives from the police and local authorities. One of the young men we interviewed some time after the demonstrations was of the opinion that these meetings had been vital in ‘calming the youth’, himself included. ‘I was one of those who went totally mad during the demonstrations. But when I came to the dialogue meeting in the mosque, I met people who were of a different opinion. If it wasn’t for the meetings in the mosque youth organization, I would have continued to attend the demonstrations just to go mad.’ In addition to being reproached by the mosque youth leaders and their Muslim peers for damaging the image of Muslims, the young ‘troublemakers’ also voiced their grievances about their experiences as Muslim and minority youth within Norwegian society.¹² The meetings created a space to discuss not only the violence inflicted by the young, but also the symbolic and physical forms of violence they experienced; for example, in the job market and in relations with the police. The mosque leaders also tried to tackle what appeared to be widespread feelings and experiences of marginalization.¹³

As mentioned earlier, social imaginaries are carried in symbols, slogans and modes of address, among other things. Leaders in the mosque invoked the imaginary of a global community of Muslims when they called upon the young to take responsibility for how the majority population comes to perceive Islam and Muslims. At the end of one meeting, one of the leaders made a strong appeal to the young people who were in attendance, ‘There is an embassy we all represent. Which embassy?’ The youth shouted out, ‘Islam’ and the leader confirmed this, ‘You are all ambassadors of Islam.’ Addressing the demonstrators as (Muslim) ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers’ and calling upon them to see themselves as ‘ambassadors of Islam’ was also central to how appointed demonstration guards who were chosen from the youth interacted with the demonstrators. For the young women and men who tried to prevent the demonstrators from causing harm, the appeal to a shared community of Muslims became a tool when interacting with other youths with a Muslim background. They also appealed to shared Islamic values and the authority of the Islamic tradition, by claiming that the recourse to violent protest in Oslo was not legitimate from an Islamic point of view.

In the immediate aftermath of the heated demonstrations, the well-known Oxford professor and Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan was invited to talk to young Muslims at a seminar in an Oslo mosque. Situating his speech on ‘How to be a European Muslim’ within the immediate context of the unrest that had occurred, Ramadan challenged what he referred to as the ‘minority mentality’ and urged young people to ‘get out of their ghettos’ and to act as ‘Norwegian citizens’. The Gaza question should not be made into an issue of religious conflict or of solidarity with fellow Muslims; instead, it should be seen as a question of universal values opposing all forms of injustice and oppression, be it a violation of the rights of Muslims or others, he argued. This way of conceiving Islamic values as ‘universal’ and congruent with the values promoted through other vehicles by non-Muslims was also the basis for the cooperation that was initiated by a group of young Muslims with the Socialist Youth Party in Oslo. Around 30 young people attended a meeting with the Socialist Youth Party representatives in the mosque and several signed up as members of the party’s youth section. Despite the fact that the mosque youth group had a religious basis for its engagement and that the Socialist Youth Party identified with a (mainly) secular political tradition, the youth present at the meeting agreed that their fundamental values and interests were in accordance not only on Gaza, but also on other issues of justice, equality and non-discrimination.

Secular leftist internationalism

In Norway, as in other western European countries, the left has a long tradition of political mobilization with regard to the Palestinian cause. Within the broader tradition of leftist internationalist engagement, the Palestinian cause has a symbolic status that is similar to earlier mobilizations against invasions in Vietnam and Afghanistan and against apartheid in South Africa. It’s symbolic status relates to histories of imperialism and capitalism, mapping the world into first, second and third, and to the positioning of Palestine and Israel in the political economy of this world order. Solidarity organizations such as the Norwegian Palestine Committee (1970), the Palestine Front (1976), later called the Palestine Group of Norway (PgN), and the Joint Committee on Palestine (FUP) have long traditions in Norway (Vågstøl, 2007). From the mid-1980s, the Palestinian cause has become more central to the political establishment (Norwegian Labour Party), this being expressed most clearly in the work behind the Oslo Accords of 1993. More recently, artist-initiated solidarity initiatives with artists in Ramallah and many other labour union and voluntary organization initiatives and demonstrations have contributed to putting Palestine firmly on the Norwegian public agenda. Radical leftist parties have been the most visible parties in street demonstrations against Israeli attacks on Palestine since the early 1970s, and they have also been involved in the various solidarity organizations working for the Palestinian cause.

A central point of reference in January 2009 was provided by the two Norwegian medical doctors, Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, who, as aid workers for the Norwegian Palestine Committee (through the organization NORWAC),¹⁴ were among the few westerners reporting on the war from inside Gaza. A text message that Gilbert sent in Norwegian calling for people to take action against the Israeli invasion was widely distributed as a chain message among politicians, academics, civil society organizations and other actors associated with wider leftist sympathies. While Gilbert and Fosse became heroes to many demonstrators (including the young Muslims we followed who invited them to talk about Gaza in the mosque), their reporting also spurred controversy at the national, as well as international level, as they were accused of sympathizing with Hamas.

Leftist activists had cooperated with ethnic minority activists and with minority-based organizations in previous solidarity demonstrations (notably during demonstrations protesting the Israeli attack on Jenin in 2002). However, the 2009 demonstrations were different because of the massive participation of both the organized and non-organized ethnic minority and Muslim youth in the protest marches and the central role that Muslim organizations and mosques played in organizing and carrying out the demonstrations alongside leftist activists. The multi-ethnic composition of the demonstrators was highlighted by the media¹⁵ and came through in photos, videos and live TV by means of different signifiers. These included the non-white colour of many demonstrators, religious clothing such as the hijab, the frequent use of religious expressions as slogans such as ‘Allahu Akbar’, slogans written and proclaimed in Arabic and the adoption of symbols of pain and death (such as children wearing T-shirts that were painted red to symbolize blood) that are not part of standard repertoires of political contention on the secularist left.

To some extent, the interaction between claims makers during the demonstrations also included Blitz, a group associated with punk culture and anarchism. The Blitz group has been active at leftist internationalist demonstrations since the 1980s and they have been associated with a willingness to use violence and provoke the police. In the accounts of the young Muslims we interviewed, the Blitz group appeared as ‘troublemakers’ (among those who instigated the disturbances) and as ‘expert activists’ who offered advice to the young on how, for instance, to avoid the worst effects of tear gas. The later media coverage stressed how the earlier clashes in Oslo in the 1980s between the police and radical youth led by the Blitz group closely resembled the present disturbances. However, it was pointed out that the difference between then and now was that now some of those most active did not belong to the Blitz group.¹⁶ In interviews, spokespersons for the police security forces nevertheless argued that they feared that the ‘villains’ going crazy at the first demonstrations would be supported by activists from the Blitz group and radical activists from Sweden and Denmark in later demonstrations.¹⁷

During and after the demonstrations of January 2009, ethnic minority youth and young Muslim men in particular, came in part to replace the Blitz group in the role of dominant troublemakers, thus problematizing the boundaries of the secular leftist social imaginary. The question of who these new troublemakers were and how they should be interpreted with respect to the familiar secular leftist tradition of political contention, was strongly debated in the internet debate forums and Facebook groups that we followed.¹⁸ Whereas secular leftist internationalists had long discussed whether or not the Blitz group’s use of violent protest during demonstrations drew attention away from political claims, the debate was now transferred to new groups and audiences. Most commentators on the websites we followed agreed that in taking attention away from the unfolding events in Gaza, violent disruptive collective action obstructed rather than furthered the opposition against Israeli politics. Such action was also seen as fuelling anti-immigration sentiment and support for the right-wing populist Progress Party; a party that typically uses unrest caused by people of minority background to argue that integration is failing and that it is therefore necessary to have a stricter immigration policy. The dominant tendency was also to refuse the troublemakers’ legitimacy as political actors. In the Facebook group ‘Stop damaging the Gaza cause’ (discussion theme: ‘Why do they do it?’), pictures of demonstrators covering their faces with Palestinian scarves were accompanied by ironic comments on the ‘villains’’ ignorance of the Middle East, and the disturbances were characterized as ‘bullying dressed up as political persuasion.’ However, some ethnic majority participants questioned the postulated apolitical nature of the troublemakers. One participant argued: ‘They [the villains] too have an agenda. It is not necessarily negative that 16-year-olds show lacking respect for the law. Sign of soundness, criticism.’ Another stated: ‘I have long waited for the youth waking up and getting a new agenda.’ Such efforts to understand the troublemakers within a legitimate political space were usually accompanied by scrutiny of their motivations. Along these lines, some stressed the importance of mediascapes (such as Al Jazeera’s coverage of the killing of women and children) in generating deep emotional reactions. Others pointed to the ‘rage’ that was created by the lack of western political action against Israel. Differing views were voiced on the role of the police in provoking or preventing violence, a common theme debated in relation to mass demonstrations, more generally with the radical left suggesting that the use of force by the police energized the youth’s violent behaviour.

When interviewed by the newspapers political youth party leaders on the left¹⁹ pointed out that the first mass demonstration that led to turmoil was non-organized, with no leadership or demonstration guards present. To them, the central question was how to channel the ‘frustration’ of non-organized minority youth into conventional channels for political contention; in other words, the existing party political structure and legal organized demonstrations. As shown above, this wish to engage youth in party politics was also on the agenda of the Muslim youth group we followed. However, in a group interview (Oslo, March 2010) that was conducted a year after the demonstrations, the young Muslims seemed somewhat disappointed that this alliance with the political left had not extended much beyond the Gaza question, ‘We did cooperate with the radical and socialist left about Gaza. But we Muslims cannot go to them and ask them to join us in combating Islamophobia. It has to come from them – and it doesn’t.’ In retrospect, the cooperation around Gaza does not seem to have resulted in more permanent political alliances between the left and minority youth in addressing issues of oppression and injustice also within the nation state.

Integration nations

The third social imaginary actualized by the demonstrations is what we, borrowing from Adrian Favell (2003), call the imaginary of ‘integration nations’. This western European social imaginary started developing in the 1950s and is related to the management of multiethnic nation-states and integration policies for immigrants and their children. While there are different historical bases for nationalism in Europe and differences in integration and citizenship regimes, all nation states try to devise and implement ‘integration policies’. A specific concern in these policies is with minority youth – a concern that has become more urgent following the clashes between youth and police in many European cities over the last decade. The focus on the integration of migrant youth has been at the center of attention for Norwegian authorities since a white paper was issued on the theme in 1985 (Andersson, 2005). The political concern has been most clearly expressed with regard to important parameters of structural integration such as education and inclusion in the labour market and with regard to perceived negative aspects of immigrant cultures. It has also been highly gendered, associating such practices as forced marriages and circumcision with minority young women and the so-called immigrant gang problem in Oslo with minority young men.

Among the perceived characteristics of the events that occurred during the demonstrations, were that the troublemakers were of foreign background, that their actions were ‘un-Norwegian’²⁰ and that they broke the tradition of Norwegian ‘peaceful demonstrations’.²¹ During the weekly question time at Parliament (14 January 2009),²² a politician from the populist right-wing Progress Party drew parallels between the clashes and the revolts in France, speaking of ‘French conditions’. He also stressed how the troublemakers were ‘persons of non-Western immigrant background’ and how the disturbances must be seen in terms of (the failure of) the Norwegian government’s ‘immigration and integration politics’. The Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion, refused to see the issue as a question of failed integration and insisted that it was ‘criminal behaviour and mob behaviour and nothing else’ and that, as such, it required ‘firm responses’ in the form of criminal prosecution as well as prevention work. A high-profile politician from the liberal left-leaning party²³ supported this view, arguing that both the French revolts and the disturbances during the Gaza demonstrations in Oslo should be seen as a youth problem rather than an immigrant problem.

The national and international media coverage²⁴ mentioned Oslo alongside Parisian banlieues and other hotbeds for ethnic minority youth riots, in headlines such as ‘He sees similarities between revolts in Paris, the Middle East and Oslo’²⁵ and ‘Like Paris and Athens’.²⁶ Many of the people interviewed in the press who themselves had experience of working with immigrant youth or who were representatives of minority-based organizations also stressed the similarities between the revolts in Oslo and those in other European cities.²⁷ Unlike those who focused on the ‘foreignness’ of the youth, they pointed to everyday experiences of discrimination and the feeling of being treated as second-class citizens as well as to a dominantly negative media focus on immigrants’ supposed lack of integration in Norway as explanations for some of the youth’s violent behaviour during the demonstrations. As previously shown, this position was also reflected in our interviews of young people who stressed a sense of feeling ‘unwelcome’ in Norwegian society, and who feared that the clashes would lead to an increasing polarization between ‘Norwegians’ and ‘Muslims’.

Previous research has documented that some immigrant youths find it difficult to identify themselves as Norwegian, given how ‘Norwegianness’ is generally associated with particular social and cultural signifiers such as whiteness and Christianity (Andersson, 2005; Gullestad, 2006; Jacobsen, 2011; Vestel and Øia, 2007). An identification with ‘Norwegianness’ was also negotiated by youth in the mosque in relation to the ways in which the debates after the Gaza demonstrations constructed Norwegianness as opposed to the ‘foreign’ villains and their ‘un-Norwegian acts’. At one of the dialogue meetings in the mosque, one of the speakers denounced the violent protests, telling the youth who were present, ‘We must remember that we are also Norwegians!’ He asked, ‘How many of you do not feel Norwegian?’ and more than one-third of the youth raised their hands. ‘You are Norwegian whether you like it or not!’ the leader insisted. At the same meeting, the youth were told that while their rage over what was happening in Gaza was justified, they, as Muslims, were obliged to ‘respect Norwegian law.’

In one of the many Facebook groups distancing themselves from the clashes,²⁸ a lively discussion addressed the question of whether those causing the clashes were ‘ethnic Norwegians’ or ‘immigrants’; whether they were protesting about what was happening in Gaza or just looking for trouble; and whether they had reason to be frustrated and angry. In this and other debates, the social was imagined through an opposition between ‘the rebels’ and ‘the integration nation’. As one young woman put it, ‘Norway never hurt Palestine. It has always been on Palestine’s side. So the mob throwing stones and behaving violently towards the police are idiots.’²⁹ Attacks on the police and property were thus perceived as an attack against ‘Norway’. The same young women argued, ‘They are just villains looking for trouble and I bet they don’t even care what is going on in Gaza.’ The fact that the protesters were not mainly of Palestinian background, as many expected them to be, served to identify the violent protesters as ‘villains looking for trouble’ rather than as ‘informed’ political actors with legitimate grievances.

Speculation about who the young troublemakers were also included references to the so-called ‘immigrant gangs’ that were at the centre of worries over failing integration in the 1990s. An article in Dagbladet³⁰ pointed out that many members of ‘Young Guns’ and ‘the B-gang’ were present during the ‘street fights’. The article quoted a central gang member from Young Guns who stated that he and his friends wanted to express support for Palestine and were angry with the violent demonstrators. ‘There will never be peace that way. We know from the life we live in Oslo, with all the violence, it never ends. We actually tried to calm people down.’ The voices of youths who had been throwing stones, firing rockets and breaking windows were also broadly mediated giving mixed explanations for their violent behaviour. Some accounts appeared to confirm the image of non-organized ‘villains’ looking for trouble, while others confirmed the picture of anger and frustration arising as they followed the situation unfolding in Gaza. A 15-year-old boy who was interviewed by the state-sponsored TV channel NRK said he had taken part in order to create chaos and that he did not regret his actions or feel sorry about the shops that had been destroyed during the clashes in the city centre.³¹ Others interviewed by newspapers and TV stations stated that their anger about the inhumane situation in Gaza was the central reason why they had acted as they did. One of them referred to Norwegian history and Hitler’s deeds in Norway, pointing out how his and his friends’ feelings towards Israel were similar to the feelings that Norwegians had with regard to the Nazi occupation – thus explaining his grievances in terms of symbols central to the Norwegian national imaginary.³² While several said that they regretted being violent, some also pointed out how the disturbances had given them, and Gaza, attention in the media.³³ They said that their rage about Gaza led to the vandalism and aggression; this consequently gave them a voice in the Norwegian public realm. As one young man said at a mosque meeting, ‘We get more attention when we break windows than when we write opinion pieces in the papers. That’s why all the disturbances happened. We wanted to wake Norway up’.

Social imaginaries and multicultural crisis

According to W. Lance Bennet (2005: 205), who draws on Tarrow and McAdam’s concept of contentious politics, recent transnational demonstrations, such as those against the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, attested to a trend toward relaxing the ideological framing commitments for common participation in many transnational protest activities. In an era in which progressive politics increasingly emphasizes diversity and subjectivity over ideology and conformity, people with diverse positions join impressively large public actions, often bringing multiple issues into one protest event. In the initial phase of the Oslo demonstrations, alliances were similarly built and forged between civil society actors, non-organized activists and youth, including a ‘multiplicity of reference bases in terms of class, gender, generation, race, and religion’ (Della Porta, 2005: 186–7). The co-existence of a global Muslim imaginary and secular leftist imaginary – inspiring various groups of activists – did not prevent the articulation of a common claim to stop the atrocities in Gaza. The Gaza demonstrations similarly reflected diversity and subjectivity, gathering people who had widely different views for instance on Hamas and on a one-versus-two-state solution to the Palestine question under the same meta-frame of opposition to the ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

When the unrest erupted and the mass media reported that most of the perpetrators were non-organized ethnic and mostly male minority youth, the social imaginary referred to here as the ‘integration nation’ became more dominant. Speculations as to who the ‘villains’ were reconfigured the mapping of the social terrain and reinstituted the hegemonic nation-state-society imaginary as the basis for identification and demarcation. The social imaginary that, in the end came to have the definitional power, was that of the integration nation, operating through the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion of the nation state. As shown, one way in which the disturbances were interpreted within this social imaginary was through the explicit distinction between ‘Norway’, ‘Norwegians’ and ‘Norwegian behaviour’ on the one hand, and the ‘villains’ as ‘Others’ (in ethnic, religious or other terms) on the other. Another and more implicit way of invoking the integration nation imaginary was through the liberal insistence on individual responsibility to Norwegian law, exemplified in expressions such as ‘troublemakers are troublemakers anywhere.’³⁴ A third approach, which is more common on the left and among minority organizations, was to insist on the exclusionary effects of national integration regimes and narrow definitions of Norwegianness. Across these positions, the demonstrations were increasingly addressed as a question of the ‘integration’ of ‘Muslim immigrants’ in Norwegian society.

The reinstatement of the integration nation imaginary as the dominant way of thinking about and demarcating identities coloured the political activism of the young Muslims because emphasis came to be put on how Islam and Muslims were represented in Norwegian society and on majority–minority relations within the nation state. The start of a series of well-publicized ‘dialogue meetings’ that were held at the Literature House in Oslo can be seen as an institutionalization of this imaginary, moving the public debate into the familiar terrain of integration. This shift did not obliterate transnational references though; instead, it was remarkable how youth uprisings in other European cities came to constitute a central comparative reference in the debates. However, these transnational references also relied on the nation-state imaginary in using particular national contexts as the basis for comparison (cf. Favell, 2003). Media images of youth uprisings in other European countries influenced the local political imagination and the interpretation of what took place during the Gaza demonstrations in Oslo. With reference to Appadurai, the folding in of such comparative transnational imaginaries to the debates following the Gaza demonstrations in Norway may be seen as contributing to the solidifying of adversarial sentiment and constructions of minority youth (and in particular, young Muslim men) as ‘dangerous villains’.

As described earlier, Lindekilde et al. (2009) put forward the concept of ‘multicultural crises’ in order to analyse a form of political contention in which the defining elements are that one or more of the claimants is made up of ethnocultural minorities and that the issue of the conflict revolves around ethnocultural differences. While this seems to fit what we have described as the dominant tendency that framed the public debate on Gaza demonstrations where ‘immigrants’ and ‘Muslims’ were opposed to an ethnic Norwegian majority, it is difficult to identify in straightforward terms a pre-constituted ethnocultural minority as the claimant in the Gaza demonstrations. The issue of contention in the Oslo demonstrations, just like the group of claimants, was transnational from the very start. In the process of mobilization, what we have identified as three major social imaginaries in different phases made particular identities, reference bases and ways of understanding the social available to the activists themselves and offered particular representation of ‘villains’ in public discourse.

The concept of ‘multicultural crisis’ seems to have certain limitations when it comes to understanding (transnational dimensions of) political activism – akin to the Gaza mobilization that was discussed in this section. First, the focus on the claims making of ethnocultural groups as a subcategory of contentious politics risks overlooking both overlaps and disjunctures between ‘multicultural crisis’ and other forms of transnational political contestation, related to the global anti-war movement, for instance. Second, the concept of ‘multicultural crisis’ seems to take the existence of pre-constituted ‘ethnocultural minorities’, ‘ethnocultural differences’ and the framework of the ‘nation state’ as given points of departure. This objection to using the ‘multicultural crisis’ perspective in connection to the Gaza case also seems to have some bearing on other cases that Lindekilde et al. discuss as examples of ‘multicultural crisis.’ For instance, the claimants in the French hijab affairs involved Muslims from many different ethnocultural backgrounds, including Muslims of French majority background, as well as non-Muslim, anti-racist activists on the secular left, notably organizations such as SOS-Racisme (Koonz, 2010).

Conclusion

This article has aimed to analyse a specific case of transnational political activism and the debates it engendered. The analysis points to important dimensions of minority youths’ political engagement. Political contentions in contemporary European nation states are shaped by their multicultural constitution, the transnational orientations of their inhabitants and of the public debates, and by the coexistence, overlaps and potential antagonism between various social imaginaries. The concept of social imaginaries has been used to stress the historical embeddedness and everyday experiential ground of minority youths’ political contention and the constitution of public debate. Authors who work on the social imaginary often stress the creative and transformative potential of the imaginary. In identifying overlaps between three dominant social imaginaries – those that shaped representations of the Gaza demonstrations in public debate as well as the political activism of minority youth who were engaged in the demonstrations – this article has also indicated the possibility of new imaginaries or activism that does not solidify existing boundaries. The narratives of the young people we interviewed and followed through participant observation point to the possibility of new imaginaries being generated. Social imaginaries, as constitutive of political collective action and contentious politics, are productive forces that may consolidate existing forms of power by instituting hegemonic understandings of the social terrain, but the imaginary as a productive power simultaneously has the potential to engender new social imaginaries and transformative political action.

The Oslo demonstrations also point to the limits of transformative political action and what can and cannot be considered ‘political’. The question of whether vandalism and violent behaviour should be seen as a form of political contention has been controversial with regard to activism within the radical secular left. This question now arises in Norway, as it has in other European contexts, with respect to whether ‘minority youth riots’ should be read as an expression of strongly felt grievances, a means for getting a public voice or as ‘criminal behaviour’. Discussing the French youth riots in the banlieues, Mustafa Dikeç (2007) suggests that, despite their negative stereotypical image as badlands, banlieues are also sites of political mobilization – drawing on a vocabulary of justice, citizenship and equality. The revolts in the banlieues were not ‘just looting and burning’, according to Dicek, but can be seen as an ‘unarticulated justice movement’ that, even though they were marked by elements of violence, connected and spoke to larger dynamics and severe material conditions. The disturbances that occurred during the demonstrations in Oslo can be interpreted in a similar way in that they connected and spoke to a number of more or less clearly articulated grievances and concerns with oppression, war, abuse, American capitalism and imperialism, experiences of misrecognition and discrimination, marginalization and racism.

But is it not only the legitimacy of acts of violence and vandalism as political contention that are called into question in the dominant representations of the Gaza demonstrations. Rather, the legitimacy of claims made by people who are minoritized along ethnic and religious lines seemed to be susceptible to criticism to the extent that ‘the Norwegian government’ or ‘Norwegian society’ were seen as objects of their claims and to the extent that the social imaginaries that potentially disrupted the ‘integration nation imaginary’ dominated the visual and affective expression of the claims. Such claims tend to provoke concerns about integration and loyalty, and thus to limit the space for what is seen as legitimate political contention for minority youth in contemporary Norway.

Footnotes

Notes

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