Part 2: The Great Arenas of Contention9

Chapter 9: Contention and the Making of the Great Values: Freedom, Justice and Dignity

A tired woman who would not give up her seat on a bus; students in Atbara who marched over the price of bread and raised the banner of freedom; a fifteen-year-old girl who sat alone outside the Swedish parliament. In the civil rights movement the chapter reads two voices within one contention: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It then asks when values are born out of pain, and finds that freedom, justice and dignity are not gifts distributed by politicians but the outcome of long struggle and sacrifice, in which a value passes from one person’s conscience to an established right protected by the community. It ends by asking whether this contention over values ever ends.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

• 25

  Martin Luther King

  When the word moves what weapons cannot

  1955–1968Chapter 9Justice and witness
• 26

  The Sudanese revolution

  When bread raises the banner of freedom

  2018–2019Chapter 9Popular uprisings
• 27

  Greta and Fridays for Future

  When a child moves the climate of the earth

  2018Chapter 9Ideas and values

The Cases