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A Decade after the Arab Revolutions: Reflections on the Evolution of Questions about the SWANA Region

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A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa. Ed. by Joel Beinin, Bassam Haddad, and Sherene Seikaly. [Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Cultures.] Stanford University Press, Stanford (CA) 2020. 344 pp. $120.00. (Paper: $30.00.)
Mako, Shamiran and Valentine M. Moghadam. After the Arab Uprisings. Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2021. xiii, 288 pp. Maps. £69.00. (Paper: £22.99; E-book: $22.99.)
Global Middle East into the Twenty-First Century. Ed. by Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera. [Global Square.] California University Press, Berkeley (CA) 2021. 360 pp. Ill. $95.00. (Paper, E-book: $29.95.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2024

Leyla Dakhli Open the ORCID record for Leyla Dakhli [Opens in a new window]
Leyla Dakhli*
Affiliation:
Centre d'Histoire Sociale des Mondes Contemporains – history, Aubervilliers, Île-de-France, France
*
Email: [email protected]
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Extract

On 17 December 2010, the self-immolation of a young street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, a town in inland Tunisia, instigated the uprisings that became known as the Arab Spring or the Arab Revolutions – a wording that I will use here as a translation from the Arabic al-thawrât al-`arabiyya. Observers were shocked at the radical protests arising in these regions, where authoritarian regimes had crushed all serious opposition over the decades. Conflicts governed by geopolitics, in particular the ongoing Israeli–Arab and Israeli–Palestinian hostilities, and the focus on political Islam and jihadism as the only globalized locus of political protest, have arrogated any attention for societies, their transformation, and their mobilization.

Type
Review Essay
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , August 2024 , pp. 327 - 337
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

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Footnotes

South West Asia and North Africa.

References

2 Beinin, Joel and Vairel, Frédéric (eds), Social Movements, Mobilization and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford, CA, 2013)Google Scholar.

3 On this debate, see Leyla Dakhli, “Quelle exception tunisienne ?”, La Vie des idées, 7 June 2018. Available at: https://laviedesidees.fr/Quelle-exception-tunisienne; last accessed 21 February 2024.

4 Bayat, Asef, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA, [2010] 2013), p. 5Google Scholar; idem, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford, CA, 2017); idem, Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring (Cambridge, MA, 2021).

5 Beinin and Vairel, “The Middle East and North Africa: Beyond Classical Social Movement Theory”, in Social Movements, Mobilization and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford CA, 2013), p. 2.

6 Abu-Rish, Ziad M., “Lebanon beyond Exceptionalism”, in Beinin, Joel, Haddad, Bassam, and Seikaly, Sherene (eds), A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (Stanford CA, 2020), pp. 179–195Google Scholar.

7 Gervasio, Gennaro and Teti, Andrea, “Prelude to the Revolution: Independent Civic Activists in Mubarak's Egypt and the Quest for Hegemony”, The Journal of North African Studies, 26:6 (2021), pp. 1099–1121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Gramsci's ‘Southern Question’ and Egypt's Authoritarian Retrenchment: Subalternity and the Disruption of Activist Agency”, Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE), 50 (2023), p. 175.

8 Extensive literature has been produced on the NGO-ization of political life in the region. This is particularly the case for feminist and LGBTQI+ movements, specifically in Palestine; see Abu-Assab, Nour, Nasser-Eddin, Nof, and Seghaier, Roula, “Activism and the Economy of Victimhood: A Close Look into NGO-ization in Arabic-Speaking Countries”, Interventions, 22:4 (2020), pp. 481–497CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Islah Jad, “L'ONGisation des mouvements de femmes arabes”, in Christine Verschuur (ed.), Genre, postcolonialisme et diversité de mouvements de femmes (Geneva, Paris, 2010), pp. 419–433.

9 Muriam Haleh Davis, “Colonial Capitalism and Imperial Myth in French North Africa”, in Beinin, Haddad, and Seikaly (eds), A Critical Political Economy, pp. 161–178.

10 Samia Al-Botmeh, “Repercussions of Colonialism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, in Beinin, Haddad, and Seikaly (eds), A Critical Political Economy, pp. 215–236.

11 Singerman, Diane and Amar, Paul, Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (Cairo, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hanley, Will, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies”, History Compass, 6:5 (2008), pp. 1346–1367CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Timothy Mitchell, “Ten Propositions on Oil”, in Beinin, Haddad, and Seikaly (eds), A Critical Political Economy, pp. 68–84; idem, “Cycle of Oil and Arms”, in Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera (eds), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley, CA, 2021), pp. 186–194.

13 Fahmy, Khaled, “Gamal Abdel Nasser”, in Bayat and Herrera (eds), Global Middle East, pp. 103–116.

14 For an applied legal science critique of Talal al-Asad and his school of thought, see David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Berkeley, CA, 2006); Khaled Fahmy, In Quest of Justice: Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt (Berkeley, CA, 2018).

15 Among others, Samuli Schielke, Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (Cairo, 2020).

16 Among many others and with a focus on the international solidarity with the Palestinians, see Di-Capua, Yoav, “Palestine Comes to Paris: The Global Sixties and the Making of a Universal Cause”, Journal of Palestine Studies, 50:1 (2021), pp. 19–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haugbolle, Sune and Olsen, Pelle Valentin, “Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause, Middle East Critique, 32:1 (2023), pp. 129–148, doi: 10.1080/19436149.2023.2168379CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hajjat, Abdellali, “Les comités Palestine (1970–1972): Aux origines du soutien de la cause palestinienne en France”, Revue d’études palestiniennes, 98:1 (2006), pp. 74–92Google Scholar; Henry, Robert A., “Global Palestine: International Solidarity and the Cuban Connection”, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, 18:2 (2019), pp. 239–262CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 These influences and questions are decisive, for example, in the approach by Fadi Bardawil, Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation (Durham, NC, 2020).

18 Dakhli, Leyla and Bonnecase, Vincent, “Introduction: Interpreting the Global Economy through Local Anger”, International Review of Social History, 66:S29 (2021), pp. 1–21. doi:10.1017/S0020859021000092CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Bilgin Ayata and Cilja Harders, “Midān-Momente. Zur Konzeptionalisierung von Affekt, Emotion und politischer Partizipation auf besetzten Plätzen,” in Simon Koschut (ed.), Emotionen in den Internationalen Beziehungen (Baden-Baden, 2020), pp. 121–144.

20 Among others, Youssef el-Chazli, Devenir révolutionnaire à Alexandrie (Paris, 2020); Soliman, Nayera Abdelrahman, “Remembering the Bread Riots in Suez: Fragments and Ghosts of Resistance”, International Review of Social History, 66:S29 (2021), pp. 23–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.