BOOK FOUR: Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring by Asef Bayat
In our fourth book club meeting, we centered the discussion around the book Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring by Asef Bayat. This booked served us as a vehicle to talk about the War on Iran and its escalation, but it also posed many questions about classic revolutions versus what the author coins 'ref-olutions', that is: revolutionary moments which redirect mobilizations towards reform, without dismantling the state. We discussed Asef Bayat's comparison between the Arab Spring & Iranian Revolution, especially his argument that the latter had a clearer direction ideologically.
Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology, and the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the Department of Sociology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Illinois, Bayat taught at the American University in Cairo for many years, and served as the director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) holding the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. In the meantime, he had visiting positions at the Universality of California, Berkeley, Colombia University, Oxford, and Brown.
This meeting led us into a broader discussion about whether meaningful change can occur without a coherent collective vision, and what happens when mobilization is fueled by anger, or is moving too fast for us to implement the world(s) we wish to see. So, we used the different themes and questions posed in the book to connect to the current moment. We talked about how war, repression, nationalism, and foreign intervention reshape popular movements.