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Revolution without Revolutionaries
Making Sense of the Arab Spring
by Asef Bayat
Published by: Stanford University Press
Series: Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
312 pages, 152.00 x 229.00 mm
The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leaving much of the old political and social order intact. In this book, noted author Asef Bayat—whose Life as Politics anticipated the Arab Spring—uncovers why this occurred, and what made these uprisings so distinct from those that came before.
Revolution without Revolutionaries is both a history of the Arab Spring and a history of revolution writ broadly. Setting the 2011 uprisings side by side with the revolutions of the 1970s, particularly the Iranian Revolution, Bayat reveals a profound global shift in the nature of protest: as acceptance of neoliberal policy has spread, radical revolutionary impulses have diminished. Protestors call for reform rather than fundamental transformation. By tracing the contours and illuminating the meaning of the 2011 uprisings, Bayat gives us the book needed to explain and understand our post–Arab Spring world.
Chapter 1 sets the broad historical and conceptual framework for historically locating the revolutions of the new millennium, including the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, by comparing them to the radical revolutions of the 1970s, notably those in Iran, Yemen, and Nicaragua. It suggests that the Arab uprisings and the Occupy movements came to fruition in a different historical time dominated by neoliberal norms that disparaged the very idea of revolution, collectivist ideals, and distributionist justice. The result was "refolution," or revolutions with a nonradical outcome.
Chapter 2 shows how the revolutions of the 1970s, unlike the Arab Spring, were informed by an intellectual component with socialist ideas as a major element. It focuses on the Iranian revolution of 1979 in which revolutionary ideas were articulated by Marxist and Islamic leftist guerrilla movements, as well as the "ideologue of the revolution," Ali Shariati. The revolution saw radical strategies and repertoires to which revolutionary ideas lent support.
Chapter 3 elaborates on the revolutions' radical repertoires and strategies by examining the widespread shura (council) movements for grassroots democracy and self-rule in the neighborhoods, colleges, farms, and workplaces, focusing on the occupation of factories. With the fragmentation of labor and the end of existing socialism, radical ideas began to lose their clout.
Chapter 4 examines the deradicalization of political Islam, showing how the Islamist opposition evolved from its strong anti-imperialist and social justice propensity to embrace reformist politics and neoliberal economy. By the time the Arab uprisings occurred, most Islamists and secular counterparts had been conditioned by the neoliberal climate. The chapter shows that ISIS somehow represents Islamism of neoliberal times.
Despite the decline in revolutionary projects, popular dissent grew as neoliberalism transformed the Arab economies and shaped an increasingly contentious urbanity.
Chapter 6 examines how dissent found expression in the Arab cities' public spaces, in particular the Arab squares, during the uprisings. It addresses the question of what the urban locus of the uprisings tells us about their origin and dynamics and why certain spaces, such as squares, become the site of popular contention. It focuses on Cairo's Tahrir Square, Tunis's Bourguiba Boulevard, and Istanbul's Taksim Square as sites of street politics, exploring the regimes' "counter-square" strategies.
Although it was not unexpected that the uprisings took place in urban areas, their sudden and fierce eruption surprised both observers and activists. Chapter 7 explores the way in which Arab subaltern groups were involved in discreet everyday struggles to enhance their life chances under the shadow of an authoritarian government and neoliberal economy. They had created their own opaque and illegible realities, "uncivil societies," under the radar of the state and scholars. Their struggles, often in the form of nonmovements, assumed a collective voice once the protests began and merged into what came to be known as the Arab uprisings. Surprise also lay in their ideological makeup and political trajectories.
Chapter 8 examines the particular "refolutionary" character of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Yemen, and Egypt, discussing their promise as well as their serious limitations in transforming into full-fledged revolutions. The chapter argues that what transpired in the Arab world were not revolutions in the sense of their twentieth-century counterparts but a mix of revolutionary mobilizations and reformist trajectories. To illustrate this, the chapter discusses the impact of neoliberal normativity on the thinking of the political class, both Islamists and non-Islamists.
While there was little change in the structure of state power and the old elites, things were different at the societal level. Chapter 9 shows that the extraordinary acts of claim making by the poor, women, lower-class youth, and social minorities in pursuit of equality, inclusion, and recognition radicalized these otherwise nonradical revolutions.
Chapter 10 discusses the contradictions of the postrevolutionary "transition." It demonstrates that the subaltern struggles discussed earlier made, in part, the postrevolutionary transition acutely contentious, reinforcing the painful and paradoxical postrevolutionary moments. The revolutions remained largely defenseless against the domestic and regional counterrevolution, which in turn had a devastating impact on efforts to achieve a just and free social order in Arab societies, feeding into the rising disenchantment with the experience and idea of revolution.
Chapter 11 discusses the question of despair that came to afflict so many activists in postrevolutionary moments and concludes by exploring grounds for hope and the renewal of a revolutionary spirit in the post<->Arab Spring Middle East.
Asef Bayat is the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies and Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, 2009, 2013) and Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, 2007).
"An astute analyst of the Middle East, Asef Bayat is one of the very few researchers equipped to historicize the region's contemporary uprisings. In Revolution without Revolutionaries, he deftly and sympathetically employs his own observations of Iran, immediately before and after the 1979 revolution, to reflect on the epochal shifts that have re-worked the political regimes, economic structures, and revolutionary imaginaries across the region today." ~Arang Keshavarzian, New York University
"Asef Bayat is in the vanguard of a subtle and original theorization of social movements and social change in the Middle East. His attention to the lives of the urban poor, his extensive field work in very different countries within the region, and his ability to see over the horizon of current paradigms make his work essential reading." ~Juan Cole, University of Michigan
"Asef Bayat provocatively questions the Arab Spring's apparent moderation, tracing its softness to decades of neoliberalism that have undermined the national state and discarded old-fashioned forms of revolutionary violence. This groundbreaking book is not an obituary for the Arab Spring but a hopeful glimpse at its future." ~Olivier Roy, author of The Failure of Political Islam
"[T]his is a serious book that compares and explains the differences between previous Middle East and global revolutions and those of the last decade. A good scholarly contribution. Recommended" ~J. P. Dunn, Choice
"Asef Bayat's impressive Revolution Without Revolutionaries tries to explain why nearly all the exhilarating uprisings in the Middle East eventually failed...Bayat is not the first scholar to tackle this issue, the field of Middle East studies having offered up its share of autopsies, but his lucid and readable account does provide the most plausible explanation. In the end, revolutions cannot succeed without leaders who have spent decades in oppositional politics honing their ideology and sharpening their strategy." ~Survival
"Asef Bayat, famed for his Life as Politics (2010, 2013), presents us with a rich theoretical and empirical study of the 2011 revolutions colloquially known as the "Arab Spring" in Revolution without Revolutionaries...Bayat, an Iran-born, US-based sociologist from a working-class background who has a deep observational capacity to see and remember things as they unfolded in his own - first village - and then in the working-class Tehran neighbourhood where he grew up...The book would be of great value to scholars interested in revolutions, social movements, graduate students, and researchers of the Middle East politics." ~Habibul Haque Khondker, Canadian Journal of Sociology
"...[T]his book not only provides a persuasive account of the Arab Spring and its aftermath, but it demonstrates the trajectory of social movements and activism under neoliberal hegemony on a global scale. It is an accessible and engaging read, one that will benefit activists as well as social movement scholars." ~Simin Fadaee, Social Movement Studies
"This is the kind of book that gives you an appetite to read it from cover to cover on a park bench or a beach. Revolutions without Revolutionaries deals with regions of the world that continue to dominate news headlines of major news outlets and which politicians build careers demonizing. The author brings an unprecedented, distinct perspective to elucidate and analyze the misconstrued perceptions and representations of these largely unknown Middle East and North Africa (MENA) states. He is a keen observer of the social and political life in its complexities and dynamism." ~Sam Cherribi, Social Forces
"Drawing upon comparison with the revolutionary movements of the 1970s...the author brings a rich repertoire of concepts and sociological theories to bear on his explanation....[H]is writing is surprisingly accessible and interspersed with sufficient historical context and ethnographic details that it should find a wider audience among those with interest in understanding the contemporary politics of the Arab region and contentious politics beyond the region." ~Michaelle Browers, Middle East Journal
"Revolution without Revolutionaries is compelling, important, accessible to a general readership and is a must-read for those interested in Middle Eastern studies, revolutionary movements, sociology and history, Political Islam, and, above all, for readers considering how neoliberalism affects our world today. Furthermore, there is an honesty and vulnerability that I have rarely seen so openly in academics' works that makes Bayat's latest all the more relatable." ~Pouya Alimagham, Social History
"A laudable book: it deploys a distinctive analytical approach that yields a compelling narrative of the Arab uprisings. The volume will be particularly useful to readers new to Bayat's work, since it offers a cumulative presentation of his signature notions of post-Islamism, nonmovements, and "refolution," in addition to his focus on urban space." ~Marwan M. Kraidy, Current History
"One of the most significant and lasting achievements of the Arab revolutions, as Bayat points out, is the 'change in consciousness' marked by the brutal interruption on the political scene of both conservative and liberal ideas in debates as impassioned as they were unprecedented." ~Alain Gresh, Orient XXI
"What makes Bayat's account different is the connection he makes between revolution and everyday life. He contests the conventional wisdom in the sociology of revolution that tends to tie revolution to a set of extraordinary sociopolitical events. Revolutionary moments are, rather, nested in the ordinary nature of our lives. Bayat's description of the order of events in the period before the Arab Spring demonstrates how a plethora of small-scale incidents of protest gave birth to the spirit of rebellion." ~Ahmad Mohammadpour, Middle East Policy
"Bayat addresses a prevailing tendency in contemporary political thought: celebrations of radical democracy as process without adequate consideration of outcomes....He inventively redirects the anticipated source of political imaginaries from vanguards to ordinary people." ~Arash Davari, Political Thory
"Asef Bayat uses accessible language and style that engages the reader and asks her/him to actively participate and respond to the sensitive inquiries raised. Therefore, this book is highly recommended for students of sociology, anthropology, political science, and history, but also for a wider audience interested in Middle Eastern/Arab contemporary political affairs." ~Mina Ibrahim, KULT_online: Review Journal for the Study of Culture