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Discoursing ‘democratic knowledge’ & knowledge production in North Africa

North Africa (interchangeably used with the term ‘Maghrib’) has historically featured as a contributor to Euro-Med cultures and civilisations. Mesopotamia, Egypt and Phoenicia all at one point in time or another mediated processes of infusion, inclusion and diffusion of ‘learning’. The flow was not one-way. The ‘travel’ of ideas left lasting inscriptions on the region’s cultural map. As North Africa enters its ‘democratic’ and ‘revolutionary’moment, it is apposite to address the question of democratic knowledge and trans-democratic exchange. This question is noted by glaring omission in most accounts of the Maghrib since the eruption of the 2011 uprisings. This moment registers continuity as much as rupture. It is a moment opportune for a break, encouraging the unshackling of the region from postcolonial histories of tutelage from without. Yet, at the same time, it renews the ethos of exchange, concomitantly unmaking North Africa as a space of ‘exile’, ‘exception’ and ‘otherness’ and remaking it as a shared space of democratising ferment, as subalterns seek renewal and self-conception through ‘democratic knowledge’. The essays in this special edition of the Journal of North African Studies engage with the potentiality of ‘democratic knowledge’. The notion of a ‘democratic knowledge turn’may not as yet be in full swing. A hint of it, nonetheless, is heralded by the Arab uprisings of 2011. There is no democracy without a cumulatively attained theoretical and practical ‘toolkit’ of democratic knowledge; and for democratic knowledge to appeal to the arduous, long and complex process of engineering democratisation it must have didactic application and/or potentiality. Neither democratisation nor democratic knowledge is a given. Both are knowable within contexts of history, geography, language, culture and power relations, local and global. Both may lend themselves to fierce contestation. Like democratisation, democratic knowledge is bound to be dynamic, as opposite static. ‘Democratic knowledge’ is a term that involves and revolves around processes of reception as well as transfer of learning. A number of lines of inquiry frame the enterprise in this special issue of the highly esteemed interdisciplinary Journal of North African Studies. One investigation raises questions about challenges of knowledgemaking or production and application. In this moment of ‘in-between-ness’, how does the